Natasha Kaplinsky

 In a deeply personal journey that takes Natasha from the warmth of South Africa to the chill of Belarus, the well known face of BBC News uncovers an ancestry that encompasses 1960s student radicalism, the court of George III and the horrors of the Holocaust.

She begins her exploration of the past with the radicalism of her father Raphael Kaplinsky at the University of Cape Town in  1968, during the apartheid era. In  June 1969, with just 24 hours notice, he went into exile in England. He didn’t return to South Africa for more than two decades.

Natasha then starts exploring the family tree of her mother, Catherine Charlewood. She finds there’s a royal connection, appropriate for a branch of the family that likes to think of itself as “a bit posh”. Benjamin Charlewood, Natasha is delighted to discover, was George III’s apothecary, or GP, in the years prior to the ill-fated monarch’s descent into madness.

A far darker chapter in the family’s history lies waiting in the east. In June 1941, Nazi forces invaded the former Soviet Union. While Natasha’s grandfather, Morris, had left Belarus for South Africa in 1929, other Kaplinskis (Natasha’s surname has been slightly Anglicised) stayed.In the town of Slonim, Natasha, accompanied by her cousin Bennie, discovers the fate of some of these relatives. As Jews, they were herded into ghettoes. Later these ghettoes were cleared in what the Nazis referred to as “actions”. The Nazis, Natasha learns, didn’t use bullets on children, but killed them with their bare hands. Faced with the horror being perpetrated by the Nazis, Natasha’s great-uncle Abraham committed suicide.

But Abraham’s brother (Bennie’s father, Izak), was luckier. Having narrowly escaped the infamous 1942 massacre of 2,500 Jews from the Iwie ghetto, he joined the Bielski brothers, a group of partisan fighters who fought a guerrilla war against the Germans. The Bielskis built underground shelters in the woods and saved more than a thousand Jews from the Nazis.

As Bennie chants his remembrance in Slonim’s ruined synagogue, Natasha is, not for the first time on what’s clearly been an emotional journey, close to tears. Back in Britain, though, she discovers that recounting the family’s story to her father lifts a weight. Natasha refuses to dwell on the horror. The Kaplinskys, she says proudly, are “about survival and hope and contribution, and love”.

 Story and pictures courtesy of BBC