Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic “DAY TRIPS TO AUSCHWITZ. Back in your hotel in time for tea.” The tourist invitation was the first thing I saw getting off the train at Kraków station in the summer of 1992. No, I thought. I won’t be doing that, as the filthy rations of camp soup, barely sufficient to keep slave labourers alive, came to mind. A Holocaust excursion, however respectful; ending with a shuttle bus ride while remains sedimented the bed of ponds beside Crematorium 5, filled me with unease. So I steered clear of a visit to the place that Otto Dov Kulka, who was at Auschwitz as an 11-year-old, called “the metropolis of death”.The procrastination is odd because I have long been guided by the necessity of exploring what a professorial mentor of mine called “the archive of the feet”; treading the paths beneath which lie the deep deposits of time. At Auschwitz, much of the architecture of extermination survives: the grim rows of barracks; the single unexploded gas chamber, repurposed, first as a storehouse when four more industrially efficient crematoria were built at Birkenau and, then, as if to show Providence has gallows humour, used as a bomb shelter for the SS. But there is enough of the topography of mass murder to command the historian’s attention: the hut from which the SS, their dogs and medical inspectors such as Josef Mengele would issue forth, as transports arrived at the selection ramp, dead bodies thrown from the cattle car; wailing families broken apart on the selection ramp; unbearable photographs of the elderly, the children, those judged unable to work, who in less than a couple of hours would be turned into smoke.How, then, to account for my absence from all this, even as I began to write The Story of the Jews, more than a decade ago? In part, I think, because I wanted to heed the great Columbia University historian Salo Baron’s warnings against collapsing the Jewish epic into what he called “lachrymose history”; so that the infinite complexity and creative richness of that chronicle is levelled into a highway to the Holocaust. But I have also been nagged by a more personal, historian’s anxiety about the guided tour: proceeding past vitrines enclosing heaps of what was pitilessly taken from the imminently doomed: shoes, spectacles, prosthetic limbs, hair, each one conjuring an individual, but when piled high, a visual rendering of the murdered multitude. What is offered at Auschwitz is educationally exemplary, but at the back of my mind has been an entirely personal worry about an enormity gap; a sense, perhaps misplaced, that none of this can adequately reanimate the horror and terror; the stench and the scorch; the demoniac evil let loose. The approximation might, I thought, settle into a manageable space in my memory attic, accessible for periodic inspection. The Holocaust, in other words, would process itself as history, compactly remote, as available for analysis as other distant calamities — the Black Death or Passchendaele. The paroxysm of this particular extermination is uncontainable by the cool norms of the discipline.Yet there I was on a bone-bitingly cold November day last year, filming the BBC documentary The Road to Auschwitz, torn between the indecency of saying a single word and the necessity of doing what I could, to rescue Holocaust memory from the debasing trivialisation that threatens to turn it into just another obsession harped on by the tiresome Jews. You know the extermination has shrunk to a meme when Elon Musk can grin as he performs the Heil salute or when Kanye West designs the cover of his new album as a swastika; when anti-Covid lockdown protesters pin yellow stars to their coats; when Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan regale their tens of millions of podcast listeners, taking time to talk to Darryl Cooper, who believes the real villain of the second world war was Churchill; and that the Holocaust was a result of poor planning. It’s a commonplace sight at anti-Israel demonstrations to see Jews denounced as the new Nazis, the calculating slayers of children (when they lost more than a million to the Shoah); the Star of David deformed into the swastika. Under the circumstances, all my Auschwitz scruples seemed like so much intellectual self-indulgence. It ought not to have taken the Anti-Defamation League survey reporting in January this year that 46 per cent of those polled globally own up to antisemitic beliefs to make it glaringly obvious that there is still much work to do.Disturbingly, Holocaust awareness often suffers from a poverty of detail. Startling numbers of those polled in a UK survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, depressingly rising among young adults, were unable to name a single concentration or death camp; high proportions were either ignorant of the numbers of victims or believed those numbers have been exaggerated. For many people, knowledge of the Holocaust is confined to Auschwitz and Anne Frank; the one perceived as a seemingly mechanical production line of gas-and-burn death; remote and automated, concealed from the perpetrators (as in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, in which the victims’ slaughter is siloed into noises-off); the other, a teenage girl largely stripped of her specifically Jewish fate, and, through selective quotation, universalised into a stubborn believer in the goodness of humanity, when her diary darkens with anger and despair as the forces that will betray her close in.The depth of the devilry is in the details and they are more all-encompassing than anything that can be bookended by Auschwitz and Anne Frank. The uncontainable, continent-wide Holocaust is the cataclysm we have tried in The Road to Auschwitz to set before viewers, an atrocity that doesn’t begin or end with the gas chambers or was entirely the work of Germans. Mass murder began just days after the German advance into Soviet-held territories in Lithuania in the last week of June 1941. In Kaunas, the first action the occupying Germans took was to release from prison ultranationalist partisans encouraging them to stir up a pogrom in the Jewish quarter of Slobodka in which 800 were killed, many burned alive inside their houses. The rabbi of the local yeshiva was decapitated, his bloody head set on the Talmud he had been studying, and exhibited in his window. A day later, 52 Jews were beaten to death with iron crowbars and clubs in a garage car park, surrounded by a hundred or so witnesses enjoying the spectacle. The massacre was photographed and filmed from a low-flying Luftwaffe plane, supplying reassuring evidence for Berlin that local populations were eager to kill their Jewish neighbours that the Einsatzkommando need not worry about the thinness of their numbers. In late October of the same year, the commanding officer of Einsatzgruppe A, Walter Stahlecker, had 9,200, Jews, including 4,273 children, shot on the single day of October 28.The site of that massacre is a bald, grassy slope, covering the mass grave, surmounted by a colossal modernist-cum-Soviet-realist monument, towering over the emptiness, the personification of the slaughtered made cartoonishly heroic. But spend any time on that hill of horror and the void self-populates, prompted by photographs of desperate, weeping mothers and terrified children trudging uphill to their death. Many of the most unbearably poignant sites of slaughter are like this; the most appalling of all may be Ponar Forest, on the outskirts of Vilnius where between 70,000 and 100,000 Jews were shot, mostly between July and December 1941, batch after batch, 9 to 5, office hours for the shooters who then got drunk at the end of a hard day’s work. Bodies were layered in the pits; “tramplers” working to even out the rows to make the most of available space. At another such site, Walter Mattner, attached to Einsatzgruppe B, wrote to his wife on October 5 1941 that “babies flew through the air in a wide arc and we shot them on the fly before they landed in the pit . . . away with this brood which has cast all of Europe into war”. Not all the victims were granted an immediate death. Covered over with sand, the pits would heave with the last writhings of the wounded.Similar scenes of barbarism, committed together by SS and locals were commonplace through the autumn of 1941 to the late spring of 1942. The heroically inexhaustible researchers working for Father Patrick Desbois’s Yahad-In Unum organisation, looking for mass graves, have produced an online map on which, from the Baltics through to Crimea, hundreds of red dots signify the site of a shooting massacre. Looking at it — as you can readily do — broke my hardened assumption that there was nothing more about the Holocaust that could shock me.It goes without saying that The Road to Auschwitz has been a profoundly painful film to make. But as an effort to staunch the tide of Holocaust denial and dilution, it has seemed to me a morally urgent task and one which speaks to the raison d’être of public service broadcasting. But another reason why I have presumed to add to the already vast literature, visual and textual, about the most horrifying act of extermination in human history, is that I have wanted to honour the many writers and image-makers who, accepting their own eclipse, refused to resign their witness to oblivion. So they wrote and drew and photographed and hid that work, hoping that it might see the light of day and lodge in the conscience of posterity. What they wanted was, as one of them, the Polish novelist Gustawa Jarecka, put it, not long before she died with her children on a transport to Treblinka in January 1943, was to create a “trace” that “should be thrown like a stone under the wheel of history in order to stop it. The stone has the weight of our experience which had reached the bottom of human cruelty. It contains the memory of mothers mad with grief after losing their children, a memory of the cry of children who were carried to their death without coats, in their summer clothes, barefoot and walked crying, unaware of the horror that was happening to them, a memory of despair of old mothers and fathers who had to be abandoned by adult children and the stone silence of a dead city once a sentence on 300,000 people was implemented.”All that I meant to do with this film is to ensure that Jarecka’s stone is not dislodged; that history’s wheel not move on, indifferent to this ultimate calamity and the millions it consumed. ‘Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz’, April 7, 9pm, BBC2 and iPlayer in the UK and April 22 on PBS in the USFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
