(JEWISH GROUP) Our preeminent historian of the Jews is finally ready to confront Auschwitz

One road to Auschwitz ran through a small garage in Kovno (now Kaunas), Lithuania. In June, 1941, local nationalists surrounded and murdered about 50 Jewish men and left their bodies out in the street while crowds watched. Lithuanian nationalists, meaning people we might today call “extremists,” deliberately came to beat their neighbors to death with iron crowbars. They also took pressure hoses normally used for cleaning motor vehicles and used them to blow out the insides of Jewish men by inserting them into a variety of bodily orifices.

Sir Simon Schama, today’s preeminent historian of the Jews, turned 80 this year. He tells us at the outset of his new hour-long documentary airing on PBS that “I was born two weeks after the liberation of Auschwitz, it’s been with me all my life.” In Simon Schama: The Holocaust, 80 Years On, he documents how he, finally, approaches the “monster” of that death camp. It’s a personal, intimate journey during which Schama treats the camera as a younger confidant — who needs some explanation of what Schama shows, but who can be trusted with the historian’s feelings.

The first place he visits is not Poland or Germany, but Lithuania. That’s because the events there provide a glimpse into both the humanity and the inhumanity of the European catastrophe.

What is especially horrifying about the Lietûkis Garage massacre is not the brutal actions of these men — this was, as Schama narrates, “just another day in Kaunas” (racists had beheaded a man studying gemara the day before and displayed his head in the window) — but the twin reactions that the actions prompted. The first reaction was from the locals. One Lithuanian archivist interviewed a witness who had been a small child of 4 or 5 in the watching crowd. The witness said that he was crying, so his father asked him why. “I am crying because I do not see, because I am small,” he said. So his father put him on his shoulders to see and then “everything was OK.”

The second, even more chilling, reaction came from the Nazis who were watching their recently conquered Eastern European lands closely. Schama, who narrates the whole show – or rather, engages with the audience as a travel companion – tells us that the “entire horror [of the garage massacre] was photographed by the Germans.” He notes that it was the first time that the Nazis thought that “others might want to support them in the mass murder of European Jews.”

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It is pathetic and sad how little many know of the Holocaust, yet they love to use it as cannon fodder for their own biases and hatreds. It never started with the "camps".