In the most personal and unflinching film of his career, historian Simon Schama confronts the enormity of the Holocaust as not just a Nazi obsession, but as a European-wide crime of complicity.
In a journey that ends with his first visit to Auschwitz, Simon travels to mass killing sites in Lithuania – the home of his mother’s family – and to the Netherlands – a nation famed for its long history of tolerance – to reveal how across the continent deep-rooted prejudice was weaponised to turn people against their Jewish neighbours.
Simon was born two weeks after the liberation of Auschwitz – it’s been with him all his life, but until now he’s never been there. He has dedicated much of his career to documenting Jewish history but has been committed to telling the story of life, not death. In a profoundly emotional first ever visit to Auschwitz, the film follows Simon as he finally confronts the ‘monster’ and comes face to face with the horrifying reality of what happened there.
At every step Simon uncovers extraordinary evidence of the resilience of the Jewish people and recounts remarkable acts of resistance, above all the compulsion of Jewish “keepers of memory” to document the unprecedented atrocities that were happening to them, in the hope they could never be denied or repeated.
And, as a moving interview with 98-year-old survivor Marian Turski reveals, ‘evil comes step-by-step’ – a statement that remains powerfully relevant today. With hatred once again on the rise and the last survivors passing on, this film is a powerful testament to the importance of preserving the truth and ensuring that the full enormity of the Holocaust is never forgotten.
Coming soon to BBC2 and iPlayer.