Fiona Bruce on last week’s Antiques Roadshow. Photos: BBC

PAINFUL, poignant and emotionally tear-provoking in its own right, last Sunday night’s Holocaust Memorial Day edition of the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow was for its presenter Fiona Bruce a “humbling and remarkable and inspiring” experience.

The 52-year-old newsreader, the Roadshow’s host since 2008 who lives in Netherhall Gardens, Hampstead, has described the event as “one of the most extraordinary days in my life”. She recalled in particular her moving encounter with a woman simply named Sybil, whose late husband, Joe, survived years in the German Nazis’ Auschwitz concentration camp, in Poland, where almost a million Jews perished.

“He kept his uniform of blue-striped trousers all his life,” Fiona explained. “He died a number of years ago and Sybil has still got them. I don’t know if you could imagine – I certainly couldn’t until that moment – holding and handling a pair…

“He’d never washed them – they were exactly as they were when he left the camp weighing less than five stone, aged 21.”

Of the moving encounter, Fiona recalled: “I felt a whole array of conflicting emotions – revulsion at what they represented, humbled by what the man who wore them endured and, in a strange way, rather privileged to hold them and see them, and hear the story that Sybil told about her husband.”

The amazing collection of objects from German concentration camps revealed in the programme included family jewellery hidden from the Nazi guards, clothing, letters and sketches by the children’s author Judith Kerr. It was the very first time the programme’s experts didn’t conclude with a valuation.

The Jews Out board game as seen on the programme

“Obviously, it would have been entirely wrong to do so,” Fiona pointed out. “We would never have wanted to do that.”

It was the stories they encapsulated to mark Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27 that was important for Fiona alongside co-presenter Natasha Kaplinsky.

“It’s their zest for life and the stories and the triumph of the human spirit that was so utterly inspiring,” Fiona said.

And although she didn’t explain it in the programme, Fiona and her family – she is married to Nigel Sharrocks and they have two teenage children, Sam and Mia – live in Hampstead, which became a heartland for refugees fortunate to escape Germany and Poland before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Round the corner from her in Maresfield Gardens is the former home of Sigmund Freud, now the Freud Museum, where the father of psychanalysis lived – and died – after escaping to England when the Germans invaded his native Austria.

In Finchley Road itself was the Cosmo Cafe, closed in 1998, which was the meeting place for refugees, among them the Nobel Prizewinning author Elias Canetti and the novelist and poet Emanuel Litvinoff. And slightly further afield is the thriving Belsize Square Synagogue, founded in 1939 mainly by refugees from Germany, which is holding a Holocaust Memorial Day concert on Sunday. There was another item that Fiona found difficult – a 1938 board game called Jews Out, where the players roll a dice in order to travel around a board collecting “horrid conical-shape caricatured Jews,” who are eventually shipped off to what was then Palestine.

“This was made for children,” explains Fiona. “The corruption of innocents I found utterly terrifying.”

Another survivor she met while filming the programme had endured the concentration camps as a young girl, losing her whole family apart from her grandmother. She brought in with her a tiny, flat square of gold – “no thicker than a fingernail” – with a four-leaf clover on one side and her grandmother’s name and date on the other.

“Her grandmother wanted to give her something for her ninth birthday,” Fiona reveals. “And all she had was a gold crown she kept right at the back of her mouth that the Nazis hadn’t spotted. She’s kept it all her life.”

Fiona has fond memories of watching the Antiques Roadshow with her parents when she was younger. But her own brood is unlikely to follow suit.

“My kids are not particularly interested in watching anything I’m on,” she confesses.

Despite all the programmes she’s made, news remains her first love.

“I love doing news,” she says. “Ask any journalist – if you love news, you want more of it, so to work in news in such an extraordinary year has been brilliant.”

However, she adds: “I’m not sure the news has been brilliant. I wouldn’t describe it that way, but what a time to work in! You couldn’t ask for more.”

• For Holocaust Memorial Day events in London see http://hmd.org.uk/events/find/london