Simon Schama: The Holocaust, 80 Years On

By Jennifer Robinson / Web Producer

Published April 17, 2025 at 2:50 PM PDT

Simon Schama standing in front of a train carriage at Auschwitz-Birkenau. (undated photo)

Stream now with KPBS Passport on KPBS+ / Watch Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026 at 10:30 p.m. on KPBS TV.

In the year marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the last concentration camps, renowned historian Sir Simon Schama confronts the history of the Holocaust as not just a Nazi obsession, but as a European-wide crime.

Amid rising antisemitism around the world and 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Simon Schama traces the historical road of horror that culminated in the death camps. From Lithuania to Poland, the Netherlands and, finally, Auschwitz, Schama confronts the enormity of the Holocaust as both historian and 80-year-old Jew, to understand how it happened and in the hopes of never again.

In the most personal and unflinching film of his career, Simon visits mass killing sites in Lithuania, the home of his mother's family. He travels to the Netherlands, a nation famed for its long history of tolerance and where he lived and worked as a young historian, to answer the question of why fewer Jews survived here than in any other Western occupied country.

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Simon Schama stands in front of the gate leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau. (undated photo)

And despite a lifetime dedicated to documenting Jewish history, this film also captures the emotional toll of Simon's first ever visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Within all this terror, at every step Simon leans into remarkable acts of resistance, the compulsion of ordinary Jews to document the unprecedented atrocities that were happening to them, in the hope they could never be denied.

The town of Kaunas was once home to a vibrant Jewish community, the second largest in Lithuania. But in the summer 1941, the German army and the local population began a violent persecution that would escalate throughout Europe. It was here that the Germans first discovered that others might actually want to support them in the mass murder of European Jews.

Featuring an extraordinary interview with 98-year-old survivor Marian Turski, as well as the voices of younger generations determined to ensure the Holocaust is never forgotten, the film also asks profound questions about what the Holocaust means now.

Historian Simon Schama speaks with Holocaust survivor Marian Turksi, who shares this message with the world: "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."

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Simon Schama: The Holocaust, 80 Years On

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