More than 70 years after the end of the Holocaust, a campaigner is calling for action to address the "inherited trauma" descendants still experience today.

Dan Glass has spoken to more than 100 people who, like him, have been affected in their adult life by the stories passed down by their elderly relatives.

Clinical depression, anxiety, addiction and eating disorders have all featured in tales told to the 31-year-old through his time campaigning for issue to be recognised.

Dan, who is originally from London, came to Glasgow to study at Strathclyde University.

After setting up a group called Never Again Ever! in 2015 to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust, he is hoping the Jewish community will share their experiences of how the events of the Second World War have affected subsequent generations.

The activist first raised the issue in an interview with the Guardian 18 months ago.

He told STV News: "Obviously the Jewish community in Glasgow isn't as big as it is in London but there is a significant presence.

"One thing I found, and I met lots of people in Glasgow who are grandchildren of Jewish Holocaust survivors, but then you've also got grandchildren of people in Glasgow who were part of the Clyde bombings, for example.

"I've had about 100 people getting in touch with their stories of what happened to their grandparents.

"It's like Pandora's Box. I wasn't expecting it at all because the article was a year and a half old anyway and there was a bit of interest at the time."

He added: "But I just put it out again, and it makes me question why - I think partly because I guess the global political climate has changed so much in the last 18 months that people are more scared about the rise of fascism and resonate with these stories more and are more willing to open up. 

"I think since the article came out it's become the whole concept of 'better out than in'. These things have dominated my life for so long and when you start getting it out of your system and talking about it, it is therapeutic."

Dan added one of the key themes he found was in his parents' generation, some were old enough to remember the aftermath of the war, as well as the sense of fear in that overshadowed their upbringing.

While previously living in Berlin, he also found the bond between grandparents who had survived the Holocaust and their grandchildren had revealed more stories but also more hurt and trauma.

"All of their stories were so influential when I heard them," he said.

"When I was 12 I didn't really get it because you're 12 and you just want to watch Grange Hill.

"Often grandparents tell their grandchildren before their own children because they're a bit further away and there's that bit of space to talk about it.

"It can be really, really powerful and I found that with the people that got in touch - the special bond grandparents and grandchildren have - it was still fresh when they were bringing their own children up."

Dan's Polish grandfather was from an orthodox Jewish background and escaped a labour camp in Siberia. His German grandfather escaped before the war.

His German grandmother's family escaped to the Netherlands and went into hiding.

In the last 18 months he investigated what happened and found information on them at the records office in Essen.

Compensation claims were found for the 20 months his grandmother's sister was kept in Auschwitz before she died.

Other claims were found for the duration of time his great-grandmother was wearing the yellow star and for money lost in her husband's business.

Dan added: "We found the written testimony of my grandma because she hid in a cupboard essentially for most of it and her actual writing about fainting a lot of the time because she was in such a small space.

"When I knew her she had asthma and thrombosis which I think was a direct result of being in a cupboard for however many years."

His Polish grandmother had to go to the extreme step of hiding her true identity to survive.

Dan explained: "Her family were separated in Krakow and said if they ever got to see each other again they'd meet at the flat in town.

"They all got separated, my nan and her sister ended up being nannies in a Nazi household, undercover obviously, to quite a high ranking Nazi officer.

"They were blonde, that's how they could go undercover. A lot of people who got offered false papers by the underground Polish Resistance wouldn't have taken them out of pride and whatever but my nan did."

He added; "Being a nanny there would have been brutal and she would only have been 20 or younger.

"And when it was over she presumed the rest of her family was dead because Poland had been blitzed but she went to this flat anyway and talked to me very vividly about what she was wearing, what the sun was like, how many steps down the road it was, and she knocked on the door and all of her family were in there."

Dan hopes to explore more tales and build on special relationships like the ones he had with his grandparents, who are no longer alive.

"Everyone's got a story," he said. "One imagines how we can use history as a propeller for change today.

"Fascism is not over, clearly xenophobia is on the rise, hate crimes are on the rise, and you've got a lot of Jewish people leaving Britain because they fear what's going to happen."

Dan has been approached to help contribute to a documentary on inherited trauma associated with the Holocaust.

The activist said he hopes to create year-long action on the topic in 2017.

"Obviously the Holocaust survivors we work with aren't going to be around forever," Dan said.

"And it's always a combination of doing events and actions and then also building community and having a nice time together.

"One thing that has had a massive amount of interest that came along is to do a big kind of oral history project, to document all their stories as well as the need to actually have more therapeutic projects and infrastructures to see war trauma as a real thing."

He added: "Most of social change comes from building friendships and communities so it's a whole year-long plan of action to harness and bring lives to those incredible relationships that young people are now building with Holocaust survivors.

"Then simultaneously protest and challenge the root causes of xenophobia that still exist."

Through the sharing of the impact of the horrors of the Second World War on subsequent generations, Dan believes there may be a chance to celebrate and remember those who survived, often risking their lives in doing so.

He said: "All over Britain we've got statues left, right and centre of warmongers and war criminals who we need to challenge about actually what they stood for.

"Of course Britain has such an empirical war mindset that we don't challenge what we stood for.

"What we should be celebrating is resistance, celebrating people who risked their lives to save others and not those who started the wars in the first place."