PREMIERES TUESDAY, APRIL 22 at 8:00PM
Against the contemporary backdrop of rising antisemitism around the world, and 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Simon Schama traces the historical path to the death camps – the endpoint of a much longer road of horror. Simon Schama: The Holocaust, 80 Years On premieres Tuesday on APT.
From Lithuania to Poland to the Netherlands, Schama visits the scenes of early atrocities and systematic genocide before traveling with trepidation – for the first time in his life – to Auschwitz. Along the way he meets with people determined to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive and reads testimonies from survivors and eyewitnesses of the increasingly violent persecutions. By finally “meeting the monster” as both a historian and 80-year-old Jew, Schama’s hope is to more fully understand how the Holocaust happened, in the hopes it will never happen again.
“Never has there been so much Holocaust education while also as much ignorance about its true enormity, the most profound act of calculated evil known to history,” said Simon Schama. “The conflicts and agonies of our present moment, not least the appalling return of antisemitism, only make a retelling of the Holocaust story the more urgent.”
Simon Schama: The Holocaust, 80 Years On is part of Alabama Public Television’s Holocaust Remembrance programming which continues Thursday, April 24 with the Alabama Holocaust Center film The Torch and the documentary The Cure for Hate.
Simon Schama: The Holocaust, 80 Years On can be streamed free on all station-branded PBS platforms for an extended period from April 22 through early July.
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