Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz, review: a film so powerful it's tempting to turn away from it
There is a temptation when confronted with a film like Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz (BBC Two) to turn away. His story of how the Holocaust was a European-wide crime of complicity is overwhelming, horrific, atrocity layered upon atrocity until it's just easier to change the channel.
The film's primary message, however, is that apathy is deadly. As 98-year-old survivor Marian Turski says to Schama at the film's close, 'Auschwitz did not fall from the sky. Evil comes step by step. And therefore, you shouldn't be indifferent.'
Turski, a heart-rending caption informs us at the end, died three months after that interview, but that was also a reminder of Schama's second tenet: as we reach a moment where the last survivors are dying it is up to historians – and documentary-makers, and in this case viewers – to make sure that it is never forgotten. Time and again throughout Schama's journey, showing how evil came step by step through Lithuania, the Netherlands, Warsaw and eventually to the pitiless conclusion of Auschwitz-Birkenau, he stressed the importance of testimony.
Some of the bravest acts were diary entries, secret photographs, records made in grave danger and then buried so that future generations could know what happened. The irony, of course, is that hatred and Holocaust denial all over the world is on the rise. We are indeed ignoring the lessons of history, even when the lessons are as vital and as clearly explicated as they were in this film.
But it was not an easy pill to swallow because a third lesson was embodied in the photos of local people looking on, sometimes pointing or just walking by as Jews were dehumanised, mistreated, massacred and finally liquidated. Complicity was collaboration: 'What happened was only made possible by centuries of dehumanisation of Jews,' said Schama. 'The Germans were only doing what millions of other people wanted to happen.'
Coming shortly after the government urged the public to view Netflix's Adolescence for instruction on how to understand the next generation, they would do well to add this to their watch list so that we can wrestle with humanity more broadly.
Because, as Schama stressed, even as a historian, there's only so much one can understand. To really grasp what happened at Auschwitz, and the steps right across Europe that led to it happening, you need to talk to someone who lived it. There aren't many left. It makes films like this one all the more vital, where the act of showing it and watching it is part of the message: we must not turn away.
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