The usually funny and light-hearted Chelsea Handler showed her serious side during an episode of TLC’s Who Do You Think You Are? that aired on Tuesday night.
The Chelsea Lately star, 38, found out a lot about her maternal grandparents and their ties to Nazi Germany in World War II.
"My mother's parents came from Germany," she explained, giving some background, Us Weekly reports. "My grandparents on my mother's side I grew up with my whole life. They just had this fun sense of humor. [My grandfather] was a very, very big strong man with big strong hands."
She also said, "I'm very intrigued to find out how much participation my German grandparents had in the war," explaining her mom “came over to America when she was 19 for the first time” from Germany.
Her parents agreed they would raise their kids Jewish, “so I connect with my Judaism, or the Jewish side of my family, more than anything else,” she said, TLC reports.
She was startled to hear about her grandfather, saying "My grandfather served in the Second World War as a soldier. Whether or not he agreed with Hitler, he was serving in the Germany army. He was taken as a prisoner of war at some point to America, where he stayed for several years . . . When he went back to Germany he was very eager to come and take his family and move them back to the United States."
Handler said her grandfather “never spoke” about the war but her grandmother did. "My German grandma definitely spoke about her life during the war way more than my grandfather did.” She cried when reading a memoir her grandma wrote, saying "I remember my grandmother totally telling us how there was no food. That must've been really hard to be a parent."
Meanwhile, Lindsay Lohan filled in for her as guest co-host on the episode of her show that aired on Monday.
image: Wikimedia Commons
