‘My tidal wave of monstrous fury’: Simon Schama on tonight’s Holocaust documentary

Far away from now-cold furnaces of the death camp, in a Maida Vale café, our most erudite and brilliant historian may look cosy in his thick cardigan as he sips decaffeinated cappuccino in the weak spring sunshine, but he still feels that anger and he wants to express it.

“My wife thinks I shouldn’t have said it,” he says when I ask him about the “screw pity” comment. “But I felt very strongly about it. Saying sorry is no good. Your licensed pity should have functioned at the Bermuda Conference in 1943 [when American and British leaders decided not to allow more desperate Jews into either the US or Mandatory Palestine]. It should have functioned by trying to get the parents as well as the children of the Kindertransport out. It should have functioned by letting us go somewhere safe after the war.”

Schama has his enormous reputation behind him and says that means that “when you get to 80 years old, you get quite feisty. Yes, you are terrified that you will wake up and something will have dropped off your body, but on the other hand, you do get sort of weirdly liberated.”

As he looks back in anger, he turns to some of the historians who documented the Holocaust as it was happening and whom he features in his one-off BBC film Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz. Historians such as Emanuel Ringelblum, who led the secret Oyneg Shabbos group in the Warsaw Ghetto which collected information about life as a doomed Jew for future posterity.

“History is not just old stuff, it is not a romantic distraction of the past,” says Schama, who feels the echoes of history screaming louder and louder at him. “If you go back ten years ago, the general view, which I probably would have shared, was that, as the survivors die, Auschwitz and the Holocaust will become history. In other words, it would be available for the kind of cool, forensic analysis like you’d apply to the origins of the First World War or the Black Death or something like that; in a time capsule. But after October 7, and possibly even before with the rise in antisemitism, it sort of left the tomb. It walks and stalks us. It’s not gone. It’s not the past. It’s alive and raving.”

A central mission for me was to restore some extraordinary Jewish voices from the anonymity of victimhood

That bigger story of dehumanisation is why the documentary does not start, as you might expect, in Germany with the story of the Nazis but in Lithuania where the Nazi invasion lit the fuse for a bloodlust of murder of Jews by their Lithuanian neighbours. “I have some difficulty with the title of the film – I wanted to call it Against Oblivion. My problem is that for the vast number of people who know anything about the Holocaust, it’s Anne Frank and Auschwitz.

"And when you talk about Auschwitz there’s a kind of mechanical automaton that simply eats alive over a million faceless victims and I didn’t want to do that at all.” He starts in Lithuania because of newer research that he read – including Dan Stone’s An Unfinished History, “an extraordinary book which everyone should read”, and Chris Heath’s No Road Leading Back, which he describes as “terrifying”. Both show how easy it was for the Nazis to do their job of exterminating the Jews when they had a willing populace only too happy to help. Often the locals embarked on a killing spree before the Nazis showed up. In Kovno, Lithuania, thousands of Jews were murdered within a week of the Nazi invasion, often in front of cheering locals.

Concurrently, Jews were being rounded up and taken to Ponar forest outside Vilnius where they were stripped and then shot and buried in mass graves. Up to 70,000 Jews were killed there in the space of a few months. In 1944, the fleeing Nazis, in a desperate attempt to hide their crimes, instructed Jewish prisoners to exhume the mass graves and burn the bodies. Some of the prisoners recognised their own family members – one recognised his wife by a necklace he had given her. Amazingly, three of them survived to write about it.

The historian at the death camp Photo: BBCBBC/Oxford Films

In the film, he is shown a site run by an organisation called Yahad-In Unum, led by a French priest, which maps every site in Europe where Jews were mass-murdered; there are so many dots on the map it is hard to take in. But mainly his hour-long film – of which he also wants to release a 90-minute version – concentrates on some of the individuals who fought against a hostile world in any way they could. From the Sonderkommandos at Auschwitz who secretly took photos, to the writers, the poets and the artists who ensured their stories would live on.

He goes from Lithuania to Holland and only then to Auschwitz on his dark journey.

It was, astonishingly, his first time at the death camp.

“I remember, when I was working on something in Poland and saw an advert to go there and it said something like ‘you will be back at your hotel in time for tea’ and the miniaturisation of this epochal catastrophe to a tourist excursion put me off.” But he says now he realises he should not have stayed away and even that it is a good thing that “thousands of school buses arrive for people who aren’t Jewish to be exposed to it”. He found being there simply “overwhelming”.

Our bookshops, our TV channels may be filled with stories of the Nazis and even of Auschwitz but “something has gone wrong” says the historian. “We have the unbearable paradox that there has never been more Holocaust education and yet there’s never been more post-war antisemitism.

"There has to be rethinking. Jews were dehumanised even before Christianity, there is a long history of us being seen as not rightly human, of being a public danger. I don’t want people to think it just started with the Germans.”

People also, unbelievably, need to be reminded who the Holocaust happened to. “A central mission for me was to restore some extraordinary and strong Jewish voices from the anonymity of victimhood. I wanted to Judaise the Holocaust. All those people at the 80^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz who could not manage to say the word Jew, including the first minister of Scotland. That is appalling.

“Of course, it has happened to Anne Frank too, the teenage victim whose Jewish identity has been completely generalised into universal suffering. It is an offence against Jews and an offence against history.”

Schama is presently writing his third and final book of the history of the Jews. “The first chapter is a report from now and about Holocaust memory but I then go on to talk about the discovery of the Beta Israel tribe in Ethiopia. I don’t want the whole of Jewish history to be reduced to a story of victims. Yes, there’s no more tormented gang than us but we also have a spectacular history of migration and of dealing with worlds from China to Mexico and everywhere in between. Nobody has as rich an experience as us.”

This volume will cover the Holocaust, Israel and the post-October 7 world; 125 years of perhaps the most murderous antisemitism in the long history of the Jews.

“It turns out that antisemitism will never be over,” he says. “But I just want the world to acknowledge that when you utter an antisemitic phrase, you are a racist. If you are calling for the elimination of the Jewish nation, you are racist.”

He likes to end his books “somewhere poetic” but admits that right now poetry feels in short supply. “So, I am not sure where the next one will end, perhaps with you and me drinking coffee and talking?” And for a brief moment in this anguished conversation, the brilliant historian smiles.

Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz is on BBC iPlayer