Sir Simon Sharma (8:24)

But you mentioned Kaunas earlier. Yeah, and your film is called the Road to Auschwitz. But you don't actually get to Auschwitz for at least 2/3 of the way through. Well, at the very start you do, but then it's 2/3 until you're there. You spend a lot of time thinking about what happened in Lithuania. So just tell us a little bit about that holocaust of bullets as you described.

Sir Simon Sharma (8:42)

Yeah, it was very important to me, not least because my mother's family came from not the City of Kalnas, but the Gubernia Kovna, as it was called, the kind of district. And they were in lumber. So I've always had that kind of connection. But this is an extraordinary story because mass murder starts in the week that the Nazis invade a city like Kaunas and city like Vilnius in Lithuania, when Operation Barbarossa, the kind of Nazi war with the Soviet Union, starts. So we're in the last weeks of June 1941, and what the Nazis have in store, they basically use Lithuania as an experiment to sort of see how much help they can get from the local population. So the first. What they. First thing they do is let ultra Lithuanian nationalists out of the prisons that the pro Soviet regime had put them in. And they immediately, encouraged, in fact, kind of instructed by the ss, embark on a horrific pogrom in the Jewish quarter of Sloboka, over the river from the main part of Kaunas, which begins with the beheading of the rabbi as he's studying the Talmud, then putting his head in the window on the Talmud, on the book the Gemara that he was studying. And then next day, or maybe it was the day after, I can't quite remember, another terrible massacre happens in a place called Lyotechus Garage, which is a kind of car park in the middle of Kaunas in which about 70 people, nearly all of them Jews, not absolutely all of them, are beaten to death with iron and steel crowbars and clubs, horrifically, while an audience of spectators, hundreds of them, look on at this happening. And above them, a Luftwaffe small plane is flying, filming this massacre so it can be sent back to Himmler and Hitler in Berlin. And the answer that the Nazis get is that the local population cannot wait to be murdering Jews.

Sir Simon Sharma (10:52)

And this is the point that you're trying to make in the film, is that, you see, this is the encouragement to Hitler and co that they could proceed with their plans.

Sir Simon Sharma (11:02)

Absolutely. There was an extraordinary online map of massacres in Lithuania taking place overwhelmingly in 1941. In Lithuania alone, there were 289. So that's massacres. The Germans then. I mean, they're very clever in what they're doing. They describe events like that massacre in the car park as chaotic violence, you know, tut, tut, tut. And that's the excuse they have to move Jews all over from big cities like Vilnius to little villages of, you know, 800,000 people into ghettos, and then the ghettos can be emptied by people being taken out in lines to pits and mass graves and shot in the back of the head. So that happens all over, not just Lithuania, but Ukraine, Romania, all the way.

Sir Simon Sharma (11:56)

You've got some witnesses and perpetrators in the film, and they kind of express the complicity of the local people in it. There's one particular example where there's a small boy who sits on his father's shoulders.

Sir Simon Sharma (12:09)

Tell us that, yes, this wonderful Lithuanian filmmaker interviewed someone who's grown up now and who is sort of six years old or something, when that massacre was happening. And he cried and cried and cried because he couldn't see what was going on as people were being beaten to pulp and killed. So his father put him on his shoulders and then he said, oh, I stopped crying. Cause it was perfectly okay. And now he could see. There's another moment where a woman who was interviewed, who'd bought a gold tooth which had been wrenched out as it was, of all those who were going to die, and the interviewer says, well, what happened to the gold tooth? And she opens her mouth and points to it.

Sir Simon Sharma (12:48)

It's an incredible dark moment, isn't it?

Sir Simon Sharma (12:50)

Yes. So I mean, this is much less known or much. I mean, not among historical community, but I think generally among the way people think about spectators. People think about it again as gastroemus and crematoria, and that's quite right. But the notion that it was a kind of spectator sport and that columns of Jews being marched out of their towns and villages towards these immense death pits. We filmed in a place called Pernal Forest, also in Lithuania, on the outskirts of vilnius, where nearly 80,000 people were shot over a year and a half or something like that, very short time. And these were pits that were dug by the Soviets with fuel tanks in them. But the invasion came too quickly and the Soviets abandoned them. So they were perfectly prepared for mass executions. And there's a Polish journalist, not Jewish, just a few hundred meters living away, called Kazimierz Sakowicz. And we quote him and I read from him, and he sees everything from his kind of attic window and hears everything. So we have thousands of people per day. In the end, those pits, the sessions were talking about 15 tiers of bodies deep. There was a specific job done sometimes by SS police, sometimes by the trampler, which just trample over the dead bodies so it can be pressed down so another load could be shot the following day. Children were not shot, cause why waste the bullets they were just thrown into and then died, smothered by the weight of bodies above them.

Sir Simon Sharma (14:24)

It's disgustingly horrific, isn't it? And this precedes the sort of the.

Sir Simon Sharma (14:28)

Whole proper, in a way, was not operational at all. Yeah, the first gassing happens in trucks through carbon monoxide fed into them at Chelmno in Poland in December 1941. So all this is happening through 1941 and the first part of 1942. And then there are shootings that do go on in some places even into 1943. So it's happening in parallel, but it's before really the major extermination camps are Sobibor and Treblinka and Belsetch, which isn't the right pronunciation. So this is all really before this, you know. So the sense in which really there is a complicity between Nazi intention and. It's embraced by obviously not everybody in Lithuania, but enough enthusiastic local support or indifference to make this extraordinary extermination possible.

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Sir Simon Sharma (15:58)

So at what point in this story do we start to see the sort of the Nazi operation come into full effect?

Sir Simon Sharma (16:05)

Well, I think exactly the time we've been talking about in summer of 1941, the plans for extermination are there. You know, I think particularly after Pearl Harbor, I'd say when America enters the war, Hitler renews his vocal belligerence. The promise that he'd made in 1939 to the Reichstag, that if the Jews succeed in fermenting another war, they'll be wiped out. So, you know, that hasn't really changed. The issue is actually whether it could be done. And 1941 and some of the things we've been talking about shows it can indeed be done and indeed it should not be forgotten. And we don't talk about that in the film because I talk about Europe and Pan Continental. But had El Alamein gone the other way? There's an SS team in North Africa then. The plan was to wipe out the Jews in Palestine. And not just in Palestine, in Egypt and Algeria and Tunisia, there's a huge population of Jews from one end of the Maghreb, the Atlantic coast, through to Iraq and Yemen. And, you know, there's an exploratory planning committee of the SS in Italian Libya, I think, actually, who was sent to plan exactly that. The Mufti of Jerusalem had had talks with Hitler in November 1941. So the plan was global, if possible.

Sir Simon Sharma (17:28)

Yeah. And moving somewhere else in the globe. Another part of the film is in the Netherlands, which is a very interesting part of the story and a very moving bit where you talk about how the Netherlands went from being a place of great tolerance to a place of great intolerance quite quickly. And you've got a very moving phrase you're quite withering about, actually, where you talk about the Dutch bravery shriveling in the face of the Nazi clampdown. So what happens there?

Sir Simon Sharma (17:51)

Yeah. Oh, yes, it is. Because I've worked so much in Dutch history, it's almost a kind of additional home for me where I speak Dutch and so on. So this is a very upsetting and complicated story. It was precisely because actually it was the one place in Europe where there'd never been a ghetto, there'd never been an expulsion. It was the most tolerant place in all of Europe. So even when the Germans invaded in May 1940, the sense was that they'd somehow be protected. I mean, nobody knew about the gas chambers then, but they'd be protected by at very least the neutrality or the benevolence of governing institutions. And in the early stages, the first year of the occupation, that seemed to be vindicated by the attitude of ordinary people. I mean, there was a bitter, brutal debate in the Netherlands right now between those who say most Dutch people were hiding. Not most people were hiding Jews, but it was true. There were 30,000 so called Onderdekas. 30,000 people is a lot very dangerous hiding Jews. But 12,000 of those Jews were betrayed as well. But the bitterness of the debate is about those who say, well, we were really brave in defending the Jews as long as we could, and those non Jewish Dutchmen who'd say no, we're actually completely callous about. Most important thing about Anne Frank was that she was sold out. And so there is a middle ground. In fact, both things are not quite true. So I was going to say, when we know from many, many sources that when the Jews were forced to wear yellow star on their clothes, people come up to them and take their hats off in respect. There were a lot of gestures, but more than just gestures. There was a massive general strike against the most brutal restrictions and casual shootings of Jews. Massive general strike in Amsterdam. Around the country, institutions closed. Then the Nazis Absolutely, brutally shoot and imprison anybody they can find remotely responsible. So they come down very, very heavily. But again, sort of uniquely in the Netherlands, there was an extraordinary thing called a dot map in Amsterdam. The Dutch are very, very good at bureaucratic compilation, as it were. Data collection is the right word. And the dot map managed to show exactly where each dot were ten Jews, exactly where every single Jew in Amsterdam. And Amsterdam was much the most dense concentration of Jews in the whole country. And we describe, you know, someone reporting the second in command of German occupation security reporting to Artur Seyss Inkvart, the in fact Gauleiter of Holland, saying, we have the Jews in a bag. So it made it. As well as the fact the country is very unified by rail. There are no long distances, there are very few hills or little woodlands. You know, the possibility of Jewish partisans hiding, which they did in Lithuania and in Poland and in Ukraine, could not happen. So there was this sort of, I call it the Holocaust with the gloves on until the gloves come off. And when they do come off, and the deportations start via a transit camp at a place called Westerbork in the north of the country, it just rolls on at a precipitous rate. And indeed 75% of the 116,000 Jews in Holland are killed, don't make it out of the war. The rates are much higher than in France, much higher than in Belgium even, actually. So in a sense, actually Jewish populations keep on believing really that it won't be happening to them. There was something we shot in the film and didn't make it into the finished, that Jews in Amsterdam were in the first instance gathered up in to be deported to Westerbork. And then from Westerbork onto Sobibor or Auschwitz, was a theater called the Holland Theatre, the hollandseschauburg, which became then renamed the Jewish Theater. The. And there were sort of thousands of people crammed into space, you know, which was meant to be. Audiences were 2 or 300, but there's a photograph, but it's surrounded, it's in a very beautiful part. Next part on, you can go from the Jewish district of Amsterdam and it's surrounded by apartment blocks, sort of slightly old fashioned late 19th century apartment blocks. Again in the kind of compassionate, humane way the residents of the apartment block sit on their window sills or if they have a little balcony terrace, and look down benevolently, not creepily, at the thousands of Jews who are walking around the auditorium area, which is now kind of an open courtyard. And one of them Sees one of her best friends. She's, I think, a young woman in her early 20s. And the friend, the Jewish friend, suddenly sees her friend waving to her and she smiles and waves back. The girlfriend sitting on the balcony of the flat takes a photo of her friend, her face wreathed in smiles, and two days later, she's deported. You know, one of the most important things, if you ask Dutch person Taos, being at home, the sense of domestic safety that goes so deep inside Dutch culture. It goes all the way back to the wars against the Spanish, when a lot of the kind of propaganda prints are about how the Spanish will plunder your home and rape your wife and kill your children and so on. Jews for the first time when they get to the Netherlands in the 17th century, have a sense of being at home terce and being unhoused really was awful and unexpected and catastrophic for them. And there's that little sequence where I'm standing by the side of the newer Kaiserscracht canal next to the Jewish Quarter. It's profoundly moving. There are those plaques set on the edge of the canal so you can look across the canal to the houses, and plaques have the names of the people who are at home in those houses. So absolutely see them there.

Sir Simon Sharma (24:37)

Really a very powerful moment. And I think it's at that point you observe that had Hitler been successful in his plans to cross the Channel, you think that basically Britain would have had the same thing.

Sir Simon Sharma (24:50)

There's no reason to suppose not, you know, that. Not that the British particularly anti Semitic, although that of course, Mosley had been very powerful in the 1930s. There's plenty of anti Semitism in Britain, but no worse than in Holland, but almost certainly no better because again, my family would have trusted essentially in, even in a kind of, you know, pro Nazi government to sort of keep them from the worst. But that wouldn't have mattered. So that's my pessimistic instinct. And I think the British would have been, you know, it would have been a kind of computer, sorry, but the computer says, no, you have to go on the train. But Holocaust through understatement or something in Britain, I think it felt as if.

Sir Simon Sharma (25:29)

When you were talking about what happened in the Netherlands, a lot of the success of the Holocaust, that's not the right word to use, but was because of the bureaucracy, the institutions that they had, the kind of like to enable them. Presumably that would have been double in Britain, the home of the world.

Sir Simon Sharma (25:42)

Well, it certainly wouldn't have been, no less, I think, yeah.

Sir Simon Sharma (25:44)

So then you do finally make it to Auschwitz. A very powerful bit of the film. Tell us a little bit more about what it felt like for you to go there and to sort of encounter the horror that you're obviously painfully aware of.

Sir Simon Sharma (25:59)

Well, for those of you out there, which will be most of you, I imagine, have not been to Auschwitz. It comes in two bits. There is Auschwitz 1, which is by the first gas chamber, the only one to survive. Because when bigger gas chambers on crematoria were built, the little one was no longer needed and it worked too slowly. So it was turned into a storeroom. And then as the Allies began to bomb occupied Europe, it was actually a bomb shelter for the ss, ironically. But Auschwitz Birkenau, which is when Auschwitz kind of goes imperial, is a kind of factory country full of slave labor that takes a good 10 minutes or 15 minutes by bus or car to get there. So it sort of adjoins it and it's absolutely enormous and sort of empty with the exploded remains of the four crematoria which are fully operational and therefore the kind of emptiness and the ruins, as I was saying earlier on, somehow deliver. It sounds too paradoxical perhaps to make sense, but deliver a sense of extraordinary presence helped, if that's the right word, by photos that you see. For example, you can go to the notorious selection ramp when trainloads of thousands of people arrive, 100 to each, you know, freight car, cattle wagon, basically. So the first thing that happens when this crowd is that those who died en route could be as much as a third, 30 or something people, bodies are thrown out. Then the selection happens. And the selection with SS and doctors like Mengele and with dogs barking at people, you know, so people are already traumatized, going to be still more traumatized. So those who are regarded as able bodied and can be used for slave labor go to the right. So you get off the train, you're facing that gateway which you'll. Everybody, I'm sure has seen pictures of. If you go to the left, you go down a sandy path and that's where anybody who's regarded is not able to be part of slave labor. Old people, children, they are sent and there are photos of. There's one photo we show that's particularly heartrending of an old woman, possibly a grandma, holding the hands of a small child on either side. And that presumably, and again, I don't know, but I'm presuming that's because their parents have been selected on the other side to be slave laborers and will have their heads shaved and the striped and all the rest of it. But the people going on the left, going down that sandy path, will end up, as I say, within a few hours at most, gassed and burnt. So what happens? The film picks it up in summer of 1944, in about the same time as D Day would have more on their mind than killing another half million Jews. But they don't. They, in this sort of rigorous way, they need to be finishing the job that Hitler had promised. So 430,000 Hungarian Jews, for example, this is Eichmann's doing. Adolf Eichmann, arrive in Auschwitz and the crematoria. All four of them, even though they're technically super efficient, just are backed up with a number of bodies. So even not quite pulverized bones and especially human fat make the furnaces stop working so that the SS have to build barbecues, basically open enormous fire pits into which the bodies are thrown. But this is a heavy duty task. So Sonderkommando's, Jewish Sonderkommando's, the Jews were forced, prisoners forced to push Jews into the gas chambers, wrench out the teeth, take the bodies out, and then throw the bodies into the fire pits. These Jews actually managed to take the only four photographs that document what was happening, that were not shot by collaborators and Nazis. And these photographs are famous and kept in the Auschwitz archive. And they are really, really extraordinary. And those Sonderkommandos, including one who was astonishing writing, we quote from a man called Zalman Gradowski, lead an uprising at Auschwitz. I think it was the first week of October 1944, and they're all killed. But the fact of the uprising is absolutely astonishing. They do manage, in effect, to destroy one of the crematoria. So there's this kind of horrific, absolute commitment to getting through as many hundreds of thousands of Jews as you possibly could, even as you know you're not gonna win the. And the increasing determination and bravery and resolution of Jews who are still alive to fund some form of not just resistance, but also have their witness endure. And what's extraordinary, and again, really at the heart of the film for me, actually, is how those writings and in one case, drawings, do survive. They're all hidden. Gradowski's writings were hidden under a tree just at the back of crematoria 3, where the Sonderkommando barracks was. And it's just astonishing how these hidden writings, which are often, you know, they're amazingly powerful pieces of literature. Gradowski writes like a kind of Dante on drugs.

Sir Simon Sharma (31:37)

I was just so struck by he wouldn't have known whether anyone was ever going to see those things again.

Sir Simon Sharma (31:42)

That's right.

Sir Simon Sharma (31:42)

And it's just like. But he's gone to the effort to hide it.

Sir Simon Sharma (31:46)

This is very moving for historians, you know.

Sir Simon Sharma (31:48)

Absolutely.

Sir Simon Sharma (31:48)

We are so costarded and, and luxurious about how we do the memory keeping work.

Sir Simon Sharma (31:54)

But what I wanted to know was why these people were so set on making this record, what was driving them, because, you know, they couldn't have known that Holocaust denial was going to be a thing.

Sir Simon Sharma (32:06)

Well, I think they suspected it might be, but I think the answer lies deeper in Jewish culture. We are the culture of the portable book. From Josephus onwards, the first Jewish historian or even the writers of the Bible, we were not into monuments really. Your culture depends on vainglorious buildings, but Jewish culture depends on the survival of writing. We're the wordiest culture really, as you might have noticed over the past hour. And whether you look at what was written during the massacres of the First Crusade at the end of the 11th century, or the pogroms, for example, in the early 20th century. Prose and poetry. And there's a belief that language is not just a means of instrumental communication, but it's actually a kind of moral power. My own family believed that very strongly and I think that was. And you know, we just scratched the surface of these writings.

Sir Simon Sharma (33:02)

The film ends with a survivor, someone who lived through it and is able to still speak the words. Marion Tursky.

Sir Simon Sharma (33:09)

Yeah, he was 98 when we interviewed him and he passed away now. And he spoke at the Auschwitz liberation 80th anniversary very lengthily did Marianne. But he was amazing. One of the most amazing people I've ever met.

Sir Simon Sharma (33:21)

Yeah, but the point he makes when he's talking to you at the end is that evil comes step by step and it's incremental. It kind of. It steps up and maybe you wouldn't see it coming. What do you take from that?

Sir Simon Sharma (33:33)

Well, you know, I'm slightly conflicted about the step by step thing. You know, if you think about Germany itself, quite apart from what we've been saying about the Netherlands, where it is most definitely true, and if you think about Germany, really it is probably true because it had begun. Well, it begun with the fact of, you know, Hitler's election, but it began in earnest with Nuremberg laws in 1935. There was nothing about Nuremberg Laws which, you know, preordained physical mass extermination and why Jews stayed on in Germany. I think, what was it, quarter of a million of them, even after Kristallnacht in 1938. So it works there, I guess it sort of works in France too. But again, I would say the, you know, the other side of the thing is that in Lithuania and in Poland and in Ukraine in 1941, it's not step by step. It comes absolutely exploding out of the gate in those horrific daylight, witnessed mass executions. So it depends sort of where you are. And the Nazis thought about both tactics, you know, that you could make a population, a local population real and just, you know, with this sheer wild, public open savagery. Right away, I mean, on that day at the Ninth Fort in Calnas, everybody saw, you know, 10,000 Jews being marched out of the ghetto in the middle of the city. Everybody knew that, you know, so it's a little bit more complicated. But Marianne was so extraordinary, extraordinarily moving and eloquent.

Sir Simon Sharma (35:10)

But in the film and this, you can tell me if this is deliberate omission or just because you didn't have time. You only had 60 minutes. I mean, you could have had lots of footage of like a barking Hitler, you know, standing on a cliff. He doesn't really feature very much in the film.

Sir Simon Sharma (35:23)

No, no, I didn't want him there at all. Not, not out of piety or as it were. There were just lots and lots and lots of documentaries about the rise of the Nazis and about the perpetrators. And in the end, I'm not interested in the perpetrators, actually, or not as interested. I wanted the victims to not just be data, not just be statistics where we could have the testimony of actual people as in Warsaw Ghetto faces, you know, that's what I wanted. I was very struck by Jonathan Glazer's sort of extraordinary film zone of interest in lots of ways. But I was also struck by the fact that it's completely free of any Jews whatsoever. The Jewish presence in that film, which is about the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hirs, and the way he was able to have this strangely domestic life, you know, with his wife trying on fur coats taken from people, Jews who have been gassed and so on. All you hear really what was going on, you hear it as a so called soundscape. So that the only fierce critic of that film in America anyway, said, oh, well, that's okay, isn't it? The Jews reduced a room tone, which is term we use in making films, basically kind of sound atmospherics, and I'm a bit sick of that actually. So I wanted to re establish the Jewish presence and what was endured and who they were. And for example, that's why we have this wonderful woman artist, you know, Kayla Schechter, in the Warsaw ghetto drawing pictures of children who, you know, were murdered along with her and her husband. Really, our aim in this film, unlike a lot of other Holocaust films for whom I have nothing but respect and praise, bring people close up into the center of the catastrophe. As Gradowski says, don't look away. Actually be in the heart of this horror and savagery. So we were really allergic to film cliches, really, of Hitler screaming his head off.

Sir Simon Sharma (37:37)

It's a very powerful film, and it gets across exactly what you're trying to say. I just wanted to wrap up. When you hear about the Holocaust, you kind of want some sort of lesson, some sort of moral thing that we can take from it that's gonna prevent it from happening in the future. You finish with Marion Tursky, and I think he says his final word is, so you shouldn't be indifferent. Is that the lesson we should take? Is that the lesson that you would impart to us?

Sir Simon Sharma (38:02)

If there is a lesson, I would endorse that. He says, don't be a bystander. Once you start really to dehumanize people, whoever it is, this particular thing happened overwhelmingly to Jews, and because, as I say, they've been dehumanized for a very long time. But the outward message is, once you start to really treat people as having no relationship to you in a humane, kinship way, you are in deep trouble. And alarm bells really, really need to go off.

Sir Simon Sharma (38:31)

Last thing. It's the 80th anniversary of these events this year. Why else should we be thinking about the Holocaust? Now, you've talked about the rise of antisemitism. Why is it particularly pertinent now to.

Sir Simon Sharma (38:43)

Be looking at it the way in which strong feeling, totally understandable about what's happening in the Middle east between Israel and Hamas, for example, has kind of bled into blaming Jews, really. I mean, it was extraordinary. I was just in Australia, and originally it was said incorrectly that a day after October 7, the chant of the Palestinian demonstrators was gas the Jews. That was not true. But what was true was that the chant was, where are the Jews? Not where are the Zionists? But where are the Jews? As if that was any better. Much better. You know, that's the kind of hunting cry of the pogroms, really. And just when, for example, even on demonstrations in London, you risk a lot by having a Star of David around your neck or having a kippah Jewish skullcap, you're going to be verbally or physically attacked. Really, if that happens. Synagogues have been burned in Melbourne, Australia, twice. Montreal, another synagogue that's been burned in New Zealand. In Auckland, the only Jewish school, the kids arrive one morning to see a slogan sprayed on the wall which said, genocide High School. You know, so this is vile, I think, actually, and we need absolutely to learn where this can lead.

David Musgrove (40:04)

That was Sir Simon Sharma, historian, writer, art critic and presenter. He was speaking to David Musgrove. Simon's film the Road to Auschwitz airs at 9pm on BBC Two today and will be available afterwards on BBC iPlayer. You can read more on the Holocaust on historyextra.

Sir Simon Sharma (40:22)

Com.

David Musgrove (40:23)

Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.