Documentary series O'r Galon (From the Heart) returns to S4C on Tuesday night with a moving programme following a family from Wales to Germany to find out how members of their family suffered there during the Second World War.
In the run-up to World Holocaust Day, O'r Galon: Y Trên i Ravensbrück (The Train to Ravensbrück) portrays the emotional journey of Heini Gruffudd, his daughter Nona Gruffudd-Evans and grand-daughters Gwenllian, 8, and Greta, 7, to Germany to understand more about what happened to the Jews under the Nazis.
They go on a heart-rending trip to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in north east Germany where Heini's grandmother - Käthe Bosse - was murdered 65 years ago. The cameras follow them to the family's home town, Lutherstadt Wittenberg, where a paving slab has been laid in her memory. They also visit some of the Jewish memorials in the capital, Berlin, with their German relatives.
Heini Gruffudd is an author and recognised language consultant and campaigner - but his mother's tragic German story is less well-known.
Heini's late mother, Kate Bosse-Griffiths (1910-1998), came to live in Britain before the Second World War. She aimed to escape persecution in Nazi Germany where she had already lost her position in the Egyptological Museum in Berlin because of her Jewish roots. As an eminent Egyptologist in Oxford she met Welshman J Gwyn Griffiths, fell in love, married and settled in Wales where they raised two children in the Welsh tradition, Heini and Robat, now owner of the Lolfa press.
Back in Germany, life was getting increasingly difficult for her parents, two brothers, Günther and Fritz, and sister Dorothee because their mother, Käthe Bosse, was of Jewish descent. Although the family had made every effort to follow the German law and customs of the day and had been Christians in the Lutheran Church for two generations, following Colonel Stauffenberg's attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, the Nazis targeted Germans with Jewish roots even more fervently.
That year five members of the Bosse family in Wittenberg were arrested and sent to different concentration camps. The story of how her brothers and sister survived would itself be worthy of a film. Her father survived but died a few years after the war had ended, mainly of a broken heart according to Heini.
Heini Gruffudd says, "I've been to Ravensbrück a number of times and no matter how much you try to toughen yourself up, it's always a horrendous experience. Even today, we don't really know what caused my grandmother's death. My mother didn't like to talk about what happened during the war and a number of our relatives silently carried this heavy burden. It's hard to believe in our relatively comfortable, prosperous age that things like this can happen, but there's always a danger when you blindly follow a political leader into war."
Nona, 36, who works as an editor with the WJEC in Cardiff, says that the family's German heritage is becoming more important to her as she gets older.
© 2012 S4C
O Gymru / Made in Wales