As antisemitism rears its ugly head across the globe, historian Simon Schama traces the Holocaust path in Simon Schama: The Holocaust, 80 Years On. The documentary previously aired in Great Britain as Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz.

Simon Schama: The Holocaust, 80 Years On airs on PBS one night before Jews will observe Yom HaShoah in the Jewish and Israeli calendar. If my local PBS affiliate is any indication, there will be multiple opportunities to watch on TV. While the date is shifted when it is on or adjacent to Shabbos, it usually falls on 27 Nissan, which falls a week after Pesach begins and eight days before Yom Ha’Atzmaut. This year, the calendar shifts things to 26 Nissan, starting at sundown on April 23 and ending at nightfall on April 24.

Simon Schama: The Holocaust, 80 Years On is a few minutes shy of an hour, with Schama journeying to a few key sites throughout the documentary. He meets with a few others, including one of the last survivors of Auschwitz. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation and last year of the Holocaust. But as we get up there in years, an increasing amount of survivors have passed way, leaving the world with fewer eyewitnesses while Holocaust denial is on the rise. That’s where documentaries, museums, memorials, and historians will begin to play a prominent role in keeping memories alive.

Schama cuts straight to the point in the opening moments:

“As we reach a moment where the last survivors of Auschwitz are passing on, it’s now up to us historians to make sure that the full enormity of what happened will always be remembered as lessons never forgotten. If there’s any project where your usual tools as a historian are inadequate, it’s this one. It’s immediately overwhelming and so it’s already quite hard to deal with. If you’re going to Auschwitz, you feel this immense monster lying beneath the surface so we’re going to meet the monster.”

Simon Schama: The Holocaust, 80 Years On does not immediately start with a visit Auschwitz. Instead, he started out in Kaunas, Lithuania. It was there that the first Jews were shot during the Holocaust. It’s also where his mother’s family had come from. It was a flourishing Jewish community before the war with some 40 shuls. He visits with Lithuanian filmmaker Saulius Beržinis, who has been collecting testimony from the last surviving eyewitnesses and perpetrators for about thirty years.

After all the acts to dehumanize and denationalize Jews, the Nazis and local collaborators turned to acts of violence in cities, forests, etc. The Nazis would further blame the “local violence” for why they needed place Jews in ghettos. Of course, the ghettos would later be liquidated. Schama felt the grief as he visited some of the sites in Eastern Europe, like the Ninth Fort, a memorial located five kilometers from the Slobodka Ghetto. It is a quiet place and one wouldn’t know that so many people were killed there if not for the memorials–several thousand were killed in the town square.

“I think it’s very difficult to come to this place and not feel the mortal shock of it,” Schama said of visiting the memorial. “I think that the Holocaust is so immense a catastrophe that it has to be structured in memorials and museums and sculptures and dates and chronologies. And then you come to a place like this–an empty place–where you feel every second and you feel every face and all the data disappears in this grief and the crime of the grief.”

Schama visited the Ponar Forest with Joe Seligman. Seligman knows the site better than anyone. He’s mapped it and many members of his family were murdered there. This forest, outside Vilna, saw some of the most horrific violence with 70-80,000 Jews were shot along. Schama and Seligman educate the audience about the atrocities that took place there.

At one point in Simon Schama: The Holocaust, 80 Years On, Schama visits the Yahad – In Unum website. Yahad – In Unum has put together a map collecting the sites where Jews were killed during the Holocaust. When one takes a look at the map, it really adds on an entirely new perspective to the killings. It didn’t start with the death camps like Chelmno or Auschwitz-Birkenau. Hell, it didn’t even stop along the Eastern European borders with Russia. There were Jews murdered in Georgia on the western border of the Black Sea!

Much like Resistance: They Fought Back, Simon Schama: The Holocaust, 80 Years On also brings up the Oneg Shabbos archive when discussing the Warsaw Ghetto. It’s because of Emanuel Ringelbaum’s efforts that the story of the Warsaw Ghetto still lives on to this date. Unfortunately, one of the three cannisters containing the archive has yet to be discovered. It’s still somewhere in the Warsaw vicinity unless it’s been completely destroyed.

The Oneg Shabbos mission played a critical role when it came to news of the death camps and the story of their escape. It’s where Szlama Ber Winer was able to provide testimony about his experiences at Chelmno. The escape was recently depicted in Lior Geller’s The World Will Tremble. Schama spotlights an artist, Gela Seksztajn-Lichtenstein, and some of her artwork. Gela’s daughter was among a million children murdered during the Holocaust.

Next up in the journey was a visit to the Occupied City, Amsterdam. The Netherlands were home to the highest percentage of Jews murdered during the Holocaust as 75% didn’t survive. “It’s a profoundly upsetting statistic,” Schama notes, explaining how Jews were able to live in the Netherlands in peace for the previous 300 years. Things only grew worse after the 1941 general strike. The city’s own tram company even played a horrifying role in the deportations.

Finally, Schama paid his first visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial to “face the monster.” The camp was an “industrial killing center” and “extermination central.” The site reached its peak extermination during the spring and summer of 1944. Schama walks through the last surviving crematorium–there were four in operation during the Holocaust–and one can’t help but think about the many people who were murdered for no reason whatsoever. While walking through the crematorium, the documentary shares the writings of Zalman Gradowski. Gradowski had documented his experiences at Auschwitz, burying them for someone to discover.

Having never gone on the March of the Living or traveled to Poland, I can only bear witness through watching documentaries like Simon Schama: The Holocaust, 80 Years On. If Schama’s reaction is any indication, visiting the memorial will only break me. All I can do from here is just sit and watch in silence while thinking about all of those who were killed. Was my second great-grandmother one of them or did she get murdered earlier in the Holocaust?

“The Holocaust is absolutely overwhelming,” Schama says. “Even as a historian, there’s only so much we understand and to really grasp it, you need to talk to somebody who lived in.”

In the final minutes of Simon Schama: The Holocaust, 80 Years On, Schama meets with Marian Turski in Warsaw. Turski was one of the last survivors before passing away three months after the interview was conducted. Schama asked Turski what message he would like to give to the world. Turski responds with these comments:

“Auschwitz did not fall from the sky. It comes step by step. Evil comes step by step. And therefore, you shouldn’t be indifferent. Let’s start with reducing hatred, and trying to understand other people.”

Turski proceeds to quote parts of a poem, Compassion, by Polish poet Boleslow Taborski:

The most important thing is compassion…
Its absence dehumanizes.
Take the perpetrators of the Holocaust,
The devil’s servants on his earth.
They pretended to be humans,
Nay, superhumans.
They were nothing,
They knew not what compassion is.

Simon Schama: The Holocaust, 80 Years On is not quite an hour long but the documentary offers an essential opportunity for audiences to bear witness. NEVER AGAIN.

DIRECTOR: Hugo Macgregor
SCREENWRITER: Simon Schama
FEATURING: Simon Schama, Saulius Beržinis, Jon Seligman, Dr. Maria Ferenc, Liesbeth Van Der Horst, Marian Turski

Simon Schama: The Holocaust, 80 Years On premieres April 22, 2025 at 9 PM ET/8 PM CT on PBS (check local listings), PBS.org, the PBS YouTube channel and the PBS App. Grade: 5/5

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