Jerry Springer, host of TV confessions (“transgender woman reveals new breasts,” “woman loses husband to stripper,” “man can’t stop sleeping with wife’s sister”), is now turning to a new subject, his family’s experiences during the Holocaust.

The 71-year-old spoke about his family history at a private dinner last week to support World Jewish Relief, the international development agency that brought his parents to the US before the start of World War II.

Springer was given a copy of his parents’ immigration documents created by the Central British Fund in 1939. The couple, originally from Germany, first settled in London, where Springer was born. Records show that his mother Margot, from Berlin, was 32 when she arrived in the UK, and his father Richard, from Landsberg, was 34.

Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up

Jerry was born five years later in 1944, in the Highgate Tube Station, which then doubled as a bomb shelter. His mother, like many others, slept in the tube station rather than run to the shelter each time there was a siren. The Springers lived in London until 1949 when they moved to New York.

“I was deeply touched when I received the records of my parents’ WWII immigration,” said Springer. “These papers are a piece of family history which I will treasure forever.”

Known then as the Central British Fund for German Jewry, the organization rescued more than 40,000 people in the 1930s and 1940s. It is perhaps best known for the Kindertransport that helped save 10,000 children, primarily Jewish, from Nazi-occupied Austria and Germany.

World Jewish Relief has now digitized hundreds of thousands of document pages in order to ease the process of returning original documents to families who were supported 70 years ago.

The archives, which are free, will be inaugurated this fall and can already be viewed online.