Simon Schama Uncovers New Histories in “The Holocaust, 80 Years On”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, ANCHOR: This week marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. in Germany. This just a few months after the liberation of Auschwitz was commemorated, the notorious extermination camp in Poland that was the epicenter of the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. These grim anniversaries offer us the opportunity for reflection. And now, in a new PBS documentary, “THE HOLOCAUST 80 Years On,” historian Simon Schama travels across Europe to speak to survivors and better understand this very dark period in our history. As a British Jew with ancestral roots in Lithuania, it is also deeply personal for him.

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SIMON SCHAMA, HISTORIAN: All over the world, hatred and Holocaust denial are on the rise. And as we reach a moment when the last survivors are passing on, it’s now up to us historians to make sure that the full enormity of what happened will always be remembered.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Auschwitz did not fall from the sky. It comes step by step. Evil comes step by step.

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AMANPOUR: And Simon Schama joins Hari Srinivasan to discuss what he learned on this particular journey.

HARI SREENIVASAN, HOST, “AMANPOUR AND COMPANY”: Christiane, thanks. Simon Schama, thanks so much for joining us. Your film, the “Holocaust 80 years On,” will be airing on PBS on Tuesday. I guess, first, why did you want to make this film — why now?

SCHAMA: Well, two reasons, really. One, there’s a painful paradox that we’re facing right now, namely, there’s never been more Holocaust education available, whether in schools, museums, memorials. But we’re also faced with a kind of eruption of anti-Semitism, very upsetting. I think it’s almost as though anti-Semitism has been normalized, not just in the kind of far left and far right, but when — it’s almost the sort of result, I think, of people yawning when they hear the word Auschwitz, exactly because they think they know everything there is to know about it. And the Holocaust used a pretext for people who are passionately devoted to Israel, both rightly or wrongly. So I’ve known for a while that this isn’t the whole story, and that there was much more to it and a different kind of story to tell, both in terms of timing and also in terms of ultimately, how did this uniquely horrific, catastrophic extermination come about? So we begin the story, as you know, of horrifying massacres as early as the summer of 1941, and in spatial terms as well. It isn’t just the Nazis and the Germans who managed to bring this about. So our mission to ourselves was notwithstanding, everybody feeling there is nothing more to learn about the Holocaust. We felt, including myself, I learned a lot while filming it and researching it. There is a lot more to say and a lot more that urgently needs to be said and shown.

SREENIVASAN: Why start there in Lithuania? What was happening there for our audience?

SCHAMA: Yes. Well, it was an extraordinary, a horrifyingly tragic moment. Almost as soon as the Germans invade Eastern Europe, invade Lithuania, in this particular case, they are embarking on an experiment. There is no question that extermination was at the top of Hitler’s agenda, but how it possibly could be done while fighting war at the same time was a matter, it’s terrible to talk about it this way, matter of practical strategy. So it was necessary really to test the waters to see if local populations in Eastern Europe would, as the Nazis correctly guessed, be more than willing collaborators. So a few days, just a very few days after the Germans occupied, for example, the cities of Kaunas and Vilnius, and we concentrate at the beginning on Kaunas, terrible massacres occurred, which is where my maternal — my mother’s family originally came from.

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SCHAMA: There were 40 synagogues in Kaunas before the war. And Jews in Kaunas were an amazing community. They’re an amazing community. There were five Yiddish newspapers, there was youth organizations, there was an athletic club, there was every kind of Jewish activity. So it was flourishing, prospering culturally and in every other way too. And that’s why when a few days after the Germans arrived in the last week of June, the shock, actually, of the hatred that the Jewish community felt was traumatic.

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SCHAMA: There’s an extraordinary massacre in a car park at the Agricultural Union in which something like between 50 and 70 Jews are beaten to death with iron bars. And the whole thing is photographed and filmed. This happens in broad daylight with spectators standing around. There was something — hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of massacres occur in 1941, before Auschwitz is even thought about as a kind of death camp. Something like 1.5 million people were murdered by shooting, the so- called Holocauster bullets (ph) in that early stage. So the Germans have their answer. They have helpers galore right through the whole belt of Eastern Europe from the Baltic States right down to Crimea. So it’s a terrible thing, but part of our mission was that we shouldn’t flinch in front of these things, actually. We shouldn’t reduce them to simply numerical data.

SREENIVASAN: Yes. There’s this fascinating map that you have in the film which shows, you know, a dot where every one of these massacre. And in my head, it made me kind of wonder what is it about human beings that we can set aside our humanity to no longer see that person who used to walk the streets with you yesterday as worthy of life anymore. I mean, there’s a scene you mentioned with the — I think it’s footage from a historian who had interviewed one of the survivors of that area. She’s wearing a tooth from a body.

SCHAMA: Yes, yes. Well, actually the woman says she’s asked by the interviewer, was people living or dead when you’ve got the tooth? And she says with this extraordinary almost gnomic expression, oh, they’re very much alive. I think the majority of people were dead. The answer to your very important question, Hari, and you know, this is what one meditates darkly on in any kind of encounter with the Holocaust, what is it about us really that can do that. But one of our survivors who we interview at the very end, just before he died, wonderful Marian Tursk, says very profoundly Auschwitz did not fall from the sky.

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MARIAN TURSK, POLISH HISTORIAN: Auschwitz did not fall 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.

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SCHAMA: It takes hundreds of years of utter dehumanization to make people suddenly, you know, realize, well, they’re not really humans at all. They might be living among us, they might have businesses like we do. They might seem like the rest of us, but truly they really aren’t. In the case of the Jews, Jews were thought of, from the Middle Ages, as carrying infectious diseases, for example, as kind of literally pedestrian vermin. So that when the Nazis many hundreds of years later say, well, this is really a case of pest extermination. People were already primed by generations of unspeakable hatred, racist memories to do that.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

SCHAMA: It still is, you know, that’s the sort of intellectual explanation, emotionally, for me, after all this time, after all this research, after — they still doesn’t quite compute, because the better part of ourselves doesn’t want to make it compute, but it unfortunately does.

SREENIVASAN: One of the things that’s fascinating about your film is in the Netherlands, I think not until your film did I see the sort of scale of the bureaucracy you called it Holocaust with gloves on. What was happening there?

SCHAMA: The most painful thing, and a lot of my life has been spent in researching Dutch history, is that the Netherlands, the Dutch Republic as it had been, was the most tolerant, hospitable place for Jews to live in Europe between the early 17th century and until the Holocaust arrive. So particularly upsetting to realize that the Netherlands had the highest rate of massacre and extermination in all of Western Europe.

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SCHAMA: I think sort of the dumbfounding thing is that then an entire world of Dutch Jews, more than 100,000, could be made to disappear with institutional passiveness. You know, Eastern Europe and Auschwitz seems like the Holocaust. But the Holocaust can also come with gloves on, with gloves on until they’re taken off. And that’s as horrifying in its own way.

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SCHAMA: So when you tackle that and when you look at it, you see two things. You see the genuine sense among the Dutch, especially in Amsterdam, of solidarity and brotherhood. In the first year of the German occupation, there are all kinds of signs of sympathy and resistance when Jews. When Jews were forced to wear a yellow star, people, this is not just hearsay, people doff their hat in the street. Most remarkably, there was a massive general strike against deportations that took place in February of 1941. After that, two things happen. The Germans hit very, very hard. Execute anyone they take to be responsible for the protests. They replace the regular police with people they can trust who are essentially Dutch Nazis. But the other thing is they create a kind of bureaucratic apparatus. It’s not like Warsaw, it’s not like Ukraine, it’s not like Lithuania where people are beaten to pulp in broad daylight and carted off into cattle cars. I mean, the Dutch do get carted off in the cattle cars. But the first thing is a system of information, of identity cards. There was something you’ll recall from a film called the Dutch Map (ph), which showed exactly where a group of 10 Jews were living. And Amsterdam was such an assimilated and integrated city that this wasn’t just in the so called Jewish quarter, it was all over the city. And when that information is collected, the second in command of the occupation tells his superior, we now have the Jews in the bag. So the Nazis were very nimble in a way. They could go for full on slaughter and terror or they could rely not on barbaric collaborators in broad daylight massacre, but on bureaucratic indifference. The institutions, people who did not want to put their head above the parapet, who felt indeed they were just doing their administrative work in registering Jews which was essentially an accessory to their slaughter.

SREENIVASAN: This also seems to be a film that is a tribute to historians. I mean from Lithuania to Warsaw, you really go out of your way to show the level of risk that the historians had put in the time of the Holocaust to archive this, but then also to try to preserve this material and to be able to present it for us.

SCHAMA: Yes, that’s kind of exactly right. If I had one brief to myself, apart from showing aspects of the Holocaust that people were much less familiar with than Auschwitz, it was to kind of honor their sense that they were memory keepers. So many of them actually, particularly when they resign themselves to the fact it was very unlikely that they would survive. And very few of them did, said over and over again, we want what we are doing. We want our record, our witness, our testimony, our evidence to survive. In the case of the wonderful Warsaw group called Oneg Shabbat, the joy of the Sabbath, led by historian with whom, you know, for whom I have professional reverence, and a man called Emanuel Ringelblum. They hid their archive in milk churns and steel cases, and buried them under a school. And they were so obsessed with the survival of these documents that only a tiny number of this group, of 60 people, knew at any moment the location of where those records were, lest they be tortured by the Gestapo and forced to reveal.

SREENIVASAN: There’s a, there’s a line in there. You say, “I wonder how I would’ve dealt with it.” I mean you see, there are several shots. We kind of see you sort of walking introspectively into just absolute the moment places where are the moments that are the worst of humanity?

SCHAMA: Yes, yes. I do. And that’s never left me actually while I was filming, and since. The particular moment, I think, when I actually say that is quite profound. It’s when you remember these extraordinary kind of couriers escape from the first gassing camps, Chelmno, in this particular case in the north of Poland and make it to Warsaw. And the people who are responsible for the kind of psychological, as well as physical care of this catastrophically beleaguered ghetto, have to decide whether or not what they’ve just heard – namely, there are gassing places – should be widespread among a population, whether that’s going to do more hurt or more good. And they, as you might expect, divide about that. And the majority decide panic is not necessarily going to be a good thing. So the sense of actually being, I think, I think when you, you know, it’s a funny thing when you, I’m an old guy now, and I’ve been doing history for 60 years, really as an academic as well as a popular writer. It’s the one history that doesn’t fit into the box of historical analysis for me anyway, where you can describe the phenomenon. You seek the causes, you try and describe the effects. And about 10 years ago, everybody thought, well, the survivors are dying out. The Holocaust is long ago. It is history. It’s subject to the same cool objective analysis that we do when we’re talking about the origins of the Second World War or something, or the First World War. It’s not like that. It’s not like that. It actually is, it escapes the tomb of reason, not tomb of reason. It escapes the box of reason. Something about it, a lot of the things that you and I have just been talking about, it’s it, you know, the pro, the sense in which you cannot believe how people can turn on their neighbors all rested. How someone can stand in the middle of a square and broad daylight and beat an old man to death with an iron bar. All those terrible things, means that it’s not like other kinds of history. It walks and talks and stalks are present, I suppose, our future too.

SREENIVASAN: I want to ask how much of our collective, I guess, fading memory is because of the sort of general recency bias that we have. And you kind of just have this tendency maybe to assume, oh, this is history, this isn’t today, this couldn’t happen now. But, you know, I don’t know. I mean, have we let our defenses down?

SCHAMA: Yes. Well, I think we’re in terrible jeopardy because of short attention span, because of the kind of cult of the immediate, if you think about Instagram and Snapchat. But the young are seduced and fixated by impatience. Impatience is exciting, then bring the next thing on, bring the next moment on. This old stuff in faded colors, as you say, in black and white could be as remote as the Egyptians at the time of the pyramids or something. But that’s not how — that’s why historians struggle, as we might continue to persist with the notion that the past lives amongst us. It never really goes away. We are the sum of our pasts as well as the hope for breaking free of them in some case and having a better future. But what the past tells us is not a kind of — it’s not like antique collecting, it’s an insurance policy against making the same horrible mistake all over again. And in the case of the Holocaust, the many ways in which evil and catastrophe can pounce on you, from the liberation of horrific violence to this sinister step by step, sneaky approach, gradual degradation into utter ruin. That can happen at any time and in any place.

SREENIVASAN: The film is called “The Holocaust 80 Years On.” Simon Schama, thanks so much.

SCHAMA: Thank you very much.