It is 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz. That means it won’t be long before all the people who lived through the Holocaust are gone. It is now left to those who weren’t there – such as the historian Simon Schama, born in London two weeks after the liberation – to ensure it is never forgotten or misremembered, and to preserve its lessons for future generations.
But how to go about it? In his new show, one of Schama’s main methods is to unflinchingly relive the depravity. The Road to Auschwitz holds you in its grip and forces you to absorb the details. We hear of Jewish people being murdered using high-pressure water hoses. We see photographs of the cramped, repellent ghettoes, in which they were starved until they resembled walking skeletons as children froze to death in the streets. We see the piles of shrivelled corpses in Auschwitz. We hear that the slaughter was so prolific that the camp’s purpose-built crematoriums became clogged with fat; in Schama’s words, “the furnaces were gagging”. An inmate of Auschwitz – who buried his testimony in the ground before he perished – describes the burning of corpses: the skin blisters and bursts in seconds, the stomach explodes, blue flames come out from the eye sockets, the head burns longest.
