Latest news with #Schama
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Yahoo
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. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
07-04-2025
- Telegraph
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.
The Guardian
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz review – this gripping show isn't afraid to ask awkward questions
It is 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz. That means it won't be long before all the people who lived through the Holocaust are gone. It is now left to those who weren't there – such as the historian Simon Schama, born in London two weeks after the liberation – to ensure it is never forgotten or misremembered, and to preserve its lessons for future generations. But how to go about it? In his new show, one of Schama's main methods is to unflinchingly relive the depravity. The Road to Auschwitz holds you in its grip and forces you to absorb the details. We hear of Jewish people being murdered using high-pressure water hoses. We see photographs of the cramped, repellent ghettoes, in which they were starved until they resembled walking skeletons as children froze to death in the streets. We see the piles of shrivelled corpses in Auschwitz. We hear that the slaughter was so prolific that the camp's purpose-built crematoriums became clogged with fat; in Schama's words, 'the furnaces were gagging'. An inmate of Auschwitz – who buried his testimony in the ground before he perished – describes the burning of corpses: the skin blisters and bursts in seconds, the stomach explodes, blue flames come out from the eye sockets, the head burns longest. Told in this way, the Holocaust will never not be shocking to the point of utter incomprehensibility. But The Road to Auschwitz is also concerned with how the murder of Jewish people on an industrial scale was tolerated by Europe as a whole. This is not a journey back to the advent of antisemitism (that was a subject for Schama's 2013 series, The Story of the Jews), although centuries of hatred obviously played a key role. Instead, Schama returns to the early years of the second world war. First, he visits Kaunas in Lithuania, occupied by Germany in 1941. There, a local rabbi was decapitated before Jews were killed in the town centre as their neighbours watched. A local film-maker has spent decades interviewing witnesses, including a man who remembers crying at the spectacle as a child – because he couldn't get a clear view. In footage seemingly from the 1990s, a woman shows off her gold tooth, which was wrenched from the mouth of a Jewish person. She seems to be repressing a smile. Lithuania was a test case for the Nazis – it proved, we hear, that there was a voracious appetite for the murder of Jews. The allies knew what the Nazis were doing in eastern Europe, but believed it could never happen in 'tolerant' Britain. This is one misapprehension that still needs to be corrected, and by examining how the Holocaust took hold in the Netherlands – which had hitherto been the safest place in Europe for Jews – Schama lands on an extremely effective way of doing so. Initially, the Dutch deplored German antisemitism, 'doffing their hats' to those forced to wear yellow stars and putting them at the front of queues. They even staged a widespread strike against their persecution. In the end, it didn't make any difference: the public became fearful of their new overlords and 75% of Dutch Jews were murdered. The moral is simple: no country is immune to the forces of fascism. Yet there are moments in this documentary when the very act of remembering the Holocaust feels hopelessly complicated. Schama's decision to retell it via graphic depictions of the violence and horror does an important job: it ensures the Holocaust continues to rank as one of the very worst events in human history. However, the events in the Netherlands suggest the power of sympathy is negligible. Rather than naked fear or a vicarious sense of personal trauma, 'pity is what others [who] aren't Jews feel' about the Holocaust, says Schama, standing on the site of Auschwitz for the first time in his life. 'Screw the pity.' What should go in its place is a question this programme doesn't answer, unless you count a close synonym. Schama spends much of this documentary bumping up against the limits of language when attempting to articulate his response to the atrocity; 'deeply distressing' is sometimes the best English can do. He gives the final word to the Holocaust survivor Marian Turski, who died in February this year. 'Evil comes step by step,' says Turski. 'And therefore you shouldn't be indifferent. Let's start with reducing hatred.' He reads from a poem: 'The most important thing is compassion. Its absence dehumanises.' Pity, compassion, sympathy: they can't fight fascism alone – but a world without them doesn't bear thinking about. Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz aired on BBC Two and is available on iPlayer.
