Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz

In this year marking 80 years since the liberation of the last concentration camps, renowned historian Sir Simon Schama has made an extraordinary new documentary film.

The Road to Auschwitz is the most personal and unflinching film of Simon Schama’s career, in which he confronts the enormity of the Holocaust as not just a Nazi obsession, but as a European-wide crime of complicity. In a journey that ends with his first visit to Auschwitz, Simon travels to mass killing sites in Lithuania – the home of his mother’s family – and to the Netherlands – a nation famed for its long history of tolerance – to reveal how across the continent deep-rooted prejudice was weaponised to turn people against their Jewish neighbours.

Simon was born two weeks after the liberation of Auschwitz – it’s been with him all his life, but until now he’s never actually been there. He has dedicated much of his career to documenting Jewish history, but has been committed to telling the story of life, not death. In a profoundly emotional first ever visit to Auschwitz, the film follows Simon as he finally confronts the ‘monster’ and comes face to face with the horrifying reality of what happened there.