-What?

-Everywhere was the repeated, monotonous sight and stench of corpses.

♪♪ -It's almost impossible to say, isn't it, that we're going to Auschwitz?

There is a sort of, you know, the sort of reason it's impossible, there's a sort of gap, really, between the everyday way of talking, and what lies underneath.

-In Auschwitz, poison gas, Zyklon, was released through the shower ducts.

-I was born two weeks after the liberation of Auschwitz.

It's been with me all my life.

But I've never been there, because the Jewish history I've wanted to write has always been more than a highway to the Holocaust.

The story of life, not death.

But things are different now.

All over the world, hatred and Holocaust denial are on the rise.

-Anti-Semitism on the rise across the United States, and around the world.

-And as we reach a moment when the last survivors are passing on, it's now up to us historians to make sure that the full enormity of what happened will always be remembered.

And its lessons never forgotten.

If there's any project where your usual tools as an historian are inadequate, it's this one.

It's immediately overwhelming, so it's already quite hard to deal with.

But if you're going to Auschwitz, you feel this immense monster lying beneath the surface.

So we're going to meet the monster.

♪♪ ♪♪ Funding for this program was provided in part by: ♪ ♪ ♪ -To fully understand what the Holocaust was, you can't start in Auschwitz.

Auschwitz was the end point of a much longer road of horror.

If you want to know where the Holocaust really begins, you begin in Lithuania.

In particular in the town of Kaunas, in the summer of 1941.

It was here that the Germans first discovered that others might actually want to support them in the mass murder of European Jews.

♪♪ ♪♪ Kaunas was once home to Lithuania's second largest Jewish community.

Today, there's almost nothing left.

And Kaunas, or Kovno, as it was known in Yiddish, means a huge amount to me because it's where my mother's family came from.

There were forty -- forty synagogues in Kaunas before the war.

And Jews in Kaunas were an amazing community, they're an amazing community.

There were five Yiddish newspapers, there was youth organizations, there was an athletic club.

There was every kind of Jewish activity.

So it was flourishing, prospering culturally and in every other way, too.

And that's why, when a few days after the Germans arrived in the last week of June, the shock, actually, of the hatred that the Jewish community felt was traumatic.

♪♪ In the summer of 1941, the Germans invade Lithuania, part of the war against the Soviet Union, and almost immediately, Jews are subject to violent persecution.

Not just by the Germans, but also by the local population.

[ Speaking foreign language ] ♪♪ -Even worse was to follow the next day.

This was the garage of the Agricultural Union, and on June 27th, just days after the Germans entered Kaunas, Lithuanian partisans and ultranationalists violently assault between fifty and as many as seventy people, nearly all of them Jews.

Terrible thing.

Even within the annals of the Holocaust.

They were just slaughtered, beaten to a pulp with iron crowbars, and even more -- I know "even more horribly" is an absurd thing to say, but, um, they had hosepipes which were used, I guess, to sort of wash trucks and cars, high-force hosepipes were inserted in to their mouths, and some people say other orifices, too, till they were killed, till they were basically waterboarded to death.

And the entire horror was photographed by the Germans.

And, so, here is the water hose coming at them.

And here is this figure, yeah, this blond-haired fellow who thought he was a hero of Lithuania nationalism, with this massive iron club that he's used to whack people into their death.

Oh, God, just crowds of onlookers pointing, chatting away, just another day in Kaunas.

♪♪ ♪♪ Lithuanian filmmaker Saulius Berzinis has spent thirty years collecting testimony from the last surviving eyewitnesses and perpetrators.

-We interviewed one witness who was, at that time, he was four or five year old.

-Hmm.

-And he said that, when the massacre started, "I started to cry, and my father asked why crying.

I said, 'I'm crying because I do not see, because I'm small.'"

-Ah.

"So then father took me on his shoulders, and then I was okay.

I saw everything."

♪♪ Maybe I'm wrong, but it's my belief that Holocaust started in Lietukis Garage.

-Yeah.

-We interviewed different witnesses, and they all told that, during the massacre, there was a Luftwaffe plane turning round and round, and they saw the cameraman, who was sitting behind the pilot, filming.

To show to Hitler that, in the Eastern Europe, the Jews can be murdered in the center of town.

-In full public view, yeah.

-Yes, in full public view.

So, it maybe helped the Nazis take a decision that the local population will murder their Jewish neighbors.

And their laboratory of -- of this concept was Lietukis Garage.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Executions have happened at this old tsarist fort after the Germans came to Kaunas.

Any intellectuals, anybody who had been associated with the Communist Party were brought up here and shot.

♪♪ But the late October, the so-called Great Action, was a kind of monstrous exercise in mass extermination.

If I was walking up that road there, on the 28th, 29th of October, 1941, I'd be walking to my death, and I would know I'd be walking to my death.

There would be nearly 10,000 Jews in an enormous column, very old people, babies, women, men.

This is all happening before things are happening in any place like Auschwitz or Treblinka.

Oh, God, yeah, look.

It's all so bald and brutal here.

And they would meet their end in huge pits that had been dug.

And on the 28th, everybody in the ghetto, 27,000 people, were lined up in the square, and they wanted 10,000 bodies.

And there were separated families, there were mothers and fathers who saw their children in the line of death, and tried to climb through the fence to sort of save them.

So you have to imagine people hanging on the fence between, you know, screaming and crying, and praying.

So, the following morning, the 10,000 trudged their way up here.

And they were ordered to lie down in the pits, and they were shot in the back -- back of the head.

What had they done?

You know.

As one said, just the sin of being born a Jew, so... ♪♪ Really, I mean I think it's very difficult to come to this place and not feel the mortal shock of it.

And I think that the Holocaust is so immense a catastrophe that it has to be structured in memorials and museums and sculptures and dates and chronologies.

And then you come to a place like this, an empty place, where you feel every second, you see every face, and all the data disappears in the screaming, and the crying, and the grief.

♪♪ Mass executions are taking place all over Lithuania, but the most horrific of all takes place in a forest just outside Vilnius, at a site in Ponar Forest.

The road to Ponar has exceptionally brutal and powerful resonance because this kind of leafy paradise ends in pits of death, where between 70,000 and 80,000 Jews are shot.

Alongside around 25,000 Poles, Russians, Communists, and Roma.

-Simon, I always find, just as we're entering into the camp area, I always get a feeling of nervousness... -Yeah -...a feeling of trepidation, there's actually a kind of fear, as you come past this point.

-I wanted to go with Jon Seligman because he knows the site better than anybody, he's mapped it, and many of his family were murdered in Ponar Forest.

♪♪ -The Jews that were brought by foot would have come on this pathway.

And would have immediately assembled like in this area here.

They could hear the shooting but they would not necessarily see what was going on behind these mounds.

-Sort of embankments, like these.

-Yeah, and so they were taken in groups and... -"July the 11th, 1941, the volleys begin."

[ Gunfire ] "Ten people were shot at a time.

Executions continue on the following days, July 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th and"... -The only pictures which we have of Ponar are the three, four shots, and after that, the -- the Germans shut down any possibility of photography.

And they are not of the shooting, but of the people gathered... -Yes.

-...in one of the pits.

This one pit has been used as a collection place.

It's very, very clear, you can see the people held in the pits with their hands on their heads.

These are the Lithuanian riflemen around the outsides whose names we all know.

We have -- know exactly who they were, 150 shooters in total, that's all.

And then, you can see, over here, a group that's been taken to the adjacent pit, where they're then being shot.

-"April the 5th, 1943, the Lithuanians throw the clothing onto a pile.

Suddenly one of the Lithuanians pulls out a child from under the clothing and throws him in to the pit, again a child, and again another.

In less than four hours, about 2,500 people were murdered.

It is not yet the end.

A new train arrived with victims."

♪♪ -For me, the Holocaust in Lithuania would happen completely in different way, if the local population would not have supported the extermination of Lithuanian Jews, of -- of their neighbors.

It was the society of our grandparents who tolerated the murder, who -- who profited from the murder.

For example, one woman I interview tells that, after the massacre, she got teeth of the victims.

[ Speaking foreign language ] ♪♪ -At Ponar, you're faced inexorably with the atrocities that human beings are capable of inflicting on other humans.

And after finishing filming there, I was made aware of this extraordinary map created by an organization called Yahad-in-Unum, which shows the scale of the horror.

This is a map of almost incomprehensible tragedy and sorrow.

All the places that can be documented as having had a massacre, shooting of Jews, and it goes from the Northern Baltic, down through Poland, into Ukraine, almost into Georgia.

It's a digital portrait of an astounding, almost incomprehensible mass extermination of a million and a half people that takes place in weeks and months in 1941, before anyone's heard of Auschwitz.

And the murder happens not just in occupied countries.

Without much prompting, it happens in countries which were allies of Hitler, Romania in particular.

So, in the last days of 1941, 48,000 Jews are slaughtered in ten days, almost entirely at the hands of the Romanian government, and Romanian volunteers.

And you can't understand the Holocaust without understanding this degree of complicity.

It's only made possible by centuries of dehumanization of Jews.

So it's as though the Germans were simply doing what millions of other people wanted to happen.

That the Jews should disappear forever from Europe.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ The Holocaust by Bullets happened so fast, it was almost impossible for local Jewish populations to react.

But there was a place where they began to piece together what was happening to them and fight back.

Not with guns, but with the pen.

[ Speaking foreign language ] -It's quite easy to imagine, actually, this huge obstruction between one world or another.

One side the ghetto, the other side not the ghetto.

♪♪ ♪♪ Ghettos are established in Poland while the Germans are deciding exactly what they're going to do with the Polish Jews.

The first thing is to totally debase, humiliate, and dehumanize them.

You weren't allowed to go to synagogue and pray out loud.

Random shootings happen, property is stolen.

There are just constant, constant humiliations.

And in this kind of swarming ant heap of horror, people couldn't get food.

So the ghettos actually were reduced to starvation.

"4th of January, 1942.

In the gutters, amidst the refuse, one could see almost naked and barefoot little children, wailing pitifully."

"Every morning you'll see their little bodies frozen to death in the ghetto streets."

"It's become a customary sight."

♪♪ Visual evidence of the ghetto are Nazi propaganda films.

And they were trying to show that these weren't humans at all, see for yourself, bundles of disgusting half-creatures, shriveling in to animal dirt.

But there was a Jewish group, a secret society of sixty people, called Oneg Shabbat, "Joy of the Sabbath," led by a long-time hero of mine, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum.

They risked their lives to preserve evidence of what was happening in the ghetto.

And this was extremely dangerous.

Only three of them at any one time knew actually where their writing was being hidden, so should the worst befall them and they be captured and tortured, they would literally not know where the archive was.

And the danger, somehow, makes them braver and more courageous and more determined that this is remembered, and the world will know exactly what happened in Warsaw.

Oneg Shabbat's mission became even more critical in early 1942, when a network of Jews all over Poland started to deliver terrifying news about a new development in the Nazis' plans.

The first death camps.

One of the most amazing and powerful stories in the archive is from someone called Szlamek, and fellow Jews from -- from -- from the village were deported to Chelmno in December, 1941, so in the very, very early stage of the camps' operations, were the first death camp to operate -- -Gas.

-Yeah.

In beginning of January, 1942, he and few of his fellows managed to escape.

And what is quite amazing is that he kept on walking and he reached Warsaw Ghetto on foot.

-How many kilometers is it?

It's a lot?

-170, so it's, you know, it's not... -Yeah.

-...really usual understanding -No.

-...of walking distance.

And he gave this amazing testimony of not just something going on, but he was able to recount all the details of camps' operations, and delivered them to Oneg Shabbat's group.

-"February, 1942, the truck looked roughly like a regular gray van, hermetically sealed with two doors at the back.

On the inside, the van was covered with sheet metal.

There were two pipes coming from the driver's cabin, through which the gas could enter.

Where the driver was sitting, there were two little windows, through which, using an electric lamp, he checked whether the victims were dead."

♪♪ -Of course, having this knowledge created, you know, a massive... -Yeah.

-...red flag, and Oneg Shabbat started compiling reports based on these testimonies.

So this report is trying to kind of map it out.

-Yeah.

-And importantly, includes numerical estimates of the victims.

Because the aim of those reports is to alert the world.

-Mm.

-And, to stop it before it escalates even further.

-How did the ghetto feel about that when they... -In the beginning, this knowledge was not at all widespread.

People might have heard rumors, but it became clear only during the deportation... -Yeah.

-...that no one's coming back.

-It's very moving itself, isn't it?

-Yes, it is.

Yeah.

-I mean, I wonder how I would've dealt with that.

[ Speaking foreign language ] -In July, 1942, the first deportations happen, and when it actually starts, it's just the most horrific blow.

The people in Oneg Shabbat know their death is very near, so they start to make their last wills and testaments.

♪♪ And one of the most touching is that of a young woman artist called Gela Seksztajn who does drawings and portraits of people in the ghetto.

Gela herself wants these drawings to be preserved, and she delivers this wonderful statement at the moment of deportation.

And here's what she says.

"I am now standing at the boundary between life and death, and that's why I wish to say good-bye to my friends, and to my works.

I don't ask for praise, just to be remembered, me, and my little daughter.

This bright girl, the age of twenty months, shows indications of artistic talent.

Speaks Yiddish beautifully, and is very well-developed in mental and physical sense.

I'm at peace now, I must die, but I've done what I had to do.

Good-bye, my colleagues and friends, good-bye, the Jewish people.

Do not allow such destruction ever to happen again.

Gala Seksztajn, 1st of August, 1942."

And, of course, the Nazis' war is on children.

They want to kill as many children as they possibly can so there's not ever gonna be another generation of grown-up Jews, so they're not collateral damage.

They are the targets, they are the bull's-eye, as many children as possible.

And they did succeed, more than a million children died in the Holocaust.

♪♪ During the deportations, Oneg Shabbat buried their precious archive in a number of metal cases and milk churns beneath the school in the ghetto.

Three of Oneg Shabbat do manage to survive, and early after the war, they take people back to where the archive is hidden in the catastrophic remains of the ghetto.

It'd been blown to bits by the Germans after the ghetto uprising in 1943.

And out of a deep hole, steel cases are being extracted.

So what Ringelblum and Gela and Oneg Shabbat wanted has come to pass.

And the memory has not perished.

That is profoundly moving, actually.

I think somehow the truth lies underground, as they kept on saying, you know, "We cannot shout out to the world, the truth will lie buried."

And they just hope it will be pulled up from there.

This film is being made to really vindicate, among others, Oneg Shabbat, and the absolute determination, as they knew they were gonna die, to have the truth be known.

And the truth is still having an uphill battle.

So you've just got to do your best to spread the word.

As we say, when someone dies in Judaism, "May their memory be a blessing."

So, that's it.

♪♪ ♪♪ Well, the grim, catastrophic news from Warsaw made it out of Poland and all the way to the Allies, but I think partly the reason this message fell on deaf ears is because there was a sense, in Britain and America, that's what you'd expect in Eastern Europe, with its long history of pogroms and political anti-Semitism.

And how it would not happen in a country like Britain, so traditionally tolerant and hospitable to Jews.

But there was a country across the other side of the North Sea which felt very much like Britain, where extermination did happen, in fact the highest percentage of Jews in all the western Europe to be murdered was in the Netherlands.

75% didn't make it through the war.

♪♪ It's a profoundly upsetting statistic.

For 300 years, the Netherlands had been the safest place for Jews in all of Europe.

In almost every way, they were inseparable from their Dutch neighbors.

But what happened here shows just how easy it was for a country to fall in to the grip of the Holocaust.

The first years of the occupation, the Dutch are uniquely repelled by the German invasion, and what happens to the Jews.

When the Jews are forced to wear a yellow star, there are stories of the Dutch doffing their hat in respect, or putting Jews at the front of a queue.

And the irony is, because of those acts of genuine sympathy, the Jews were convinced the worst couldn't possibly happen to them.

But then, in early 1941, there was a general strike against the persecution of Dutch Jews.

Everything shut down.

The railways shut down, offices shut down, shops were closed for two days, and it was ferociously repressed by the Germans, and gradually, there's a shriveling of the bravery.

Understandably, people were scared to sort of put their head above the parapet in the way they had done early on in the occupation.

And so the most inclusive place in Europe for Jews became a place of exclusion and seclusion.

That is a waiting and dark moment.

♪♪ After the strike, the Germans realized that they have to do something drastic to actually expedite their policy.

So what they do is actually replace people who'd been heads of departments in the civil service and the police with far more reliable collaborators.

And a ripple of fear and subservient orthodoxy, like a kind of toxin, runs through the channels of the Dutch government.

♪♪ -From January, 1941, it was required for the Jewish people of Amsterdam to register.

It already was known who was -- who had the Jewish religion, but people had to report it.

It seems innocent, but, well, it had enormous consequences.

It made the persecution of the Jews very easy.

[ Speaking foreign language ] -And the Nazis took the measures, with very small steps.

It was kind of sneaky, so, later on, the Nazis introduced this identity card, and the "J" of Jew was stamped on it for Jewish people.

The Dutch civil servant, Mr. Lentz, you know, he wanted to have a state-of-the-art identity card before the war, but in a democratic context, there were always objections, so when the Nazis came into power, he got his chance.

And it was really a magnificent identity card.

There is a photo and a seal, and then there was a fingerprint, and a stamp in a special ink.

It was really very hard to forge.

♪♪ "And now, Jews may no longer visit greengrocer shops.

They'll soon have to hand in their bicycles.

They may no longer travel by tram.

They must be off the streets by 8 o'clock at night."

♪♪ What then follows is the creation of the "dot map."

And this is a deeply scary and alarming moment.

-After the Jews have been registered, the Nazis asked the civil servants of Amsterdam to -- to make this map, and every dot means that there are living about ten Jews.

So they knew exactly where most of the Jews lived.

It's a very painful document because this is made with the purpose to deport Jews and -- and -- and to kill them.

So, you can see how bureaucracy could be important for persecution of the Jews.

-It's a terrible moment when the second in command of the occupation, Boehmcker, writes to his superior that, "As a result of the registration of Jews, the ID cards, and the dot map, we have the Jews in the bag."

♪♪ ♪♪ Street by street, Dutch Jews were required to report for transportation to what they thought and hoped would be a work camp.

Those who refused, or who were found in hiding, were picked up in raids by the Dutch police, forced to leave with only the possessions they could carry.

Their homes were then plundered.

"From all sides, a destruction creeps up on us, and soon, the ring will be closed and no one will be able to come to our aid."

This is incredibly upsetting because here are the names of the Jews living in the houses across the canal, so you can read where they were and where they died.

This is a family called the Goldschmidt-Franks.

It's a young couple and they have a little daughter.

They all die on the same day, together, so they're obviously sent straight to the gas chamber.

And I think the shocking thing, as you can see, their life there, and their death there.

200 people, where we're standing here, don't make it through the war.

♪♪ The institutions of government, in the Netherlands, made the Germans' work less difficult.

And if Hitler had made it over the Channel, there is absolutely no doubt it would've gone the same way.

And I think sort of the dumbfounding thing is that then an entire world of Dutch Jews, more than 100,000, could be made to disappear with institutional passiveness.

You know, Eastern Europe and Auschwitz seems like the Holocaust, but the Holocaust can also come with gloves on.

With gloves on, until they're taken off.

And that's as horrifying, in its own way.

♪♪ ♪♪ -In the death mills, cremation was the chief means of disposal.

Auschwitz alone had four of them going night and day.

Like the blast furnaces of Pittsburgh.

-It's finally time to face the monster.

♪♪ By the spring of 1943, the majority of Jews in the Holocaust had already been murdered.

Yet it was only at this point that Auschwitz-Birkenau is transformed into the industrial killing machine we all know.

♪♪ The outreach of the Holocaust is just uncontainable.

They want Jews from France, from Belgium, from Croatia, from Greece, from Crete, from absolutely bloody well everywhere, and of course, from Holland.

The big population of Holland.

So this is the Holocaust going continental.

And that's when Auschwitz, train after train after train, becomes extermination central.

[ Train chugging ] It's incredibly moving to see the boxcar there.

They were packed in terrible conditions.

Impossibly standing, you know, impossibly crushed together.

And at this moment, when they got here, the infamous selection happened.

So the able-bodied, who were going to be slave laborers, were turned to the right.

But women who were not thought of as being capable of doing slave labor, and the elderly and small children, were selected to go to the left.

And that meant they were going to be immediately gassed.

Humans about to be ash and smoke.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Speaking foreign language ] ♪♪ -What a place to die.

Ugly, horrible, evil.

Evil, disgusting, sordid, vile, depraved place.

I never want to see it in my dreams or ever see it again after today.

♪♪ ♪♪ In order to accommodate this immense expansion of mass death, four state-of-the-art crematoria had been built at the very perimeter of -- of Birkenau.

They were exploded when Auschwitz-Birkenau was being abandoned.

But it takes no imagination to reconstruct these monstrous structures into these hideous places of slaughter.

♪♪ This is such a, you know, sylvan place now.

It could be a place where an artist might set up an easel and paint a landscape picture, you know.

But this was the holding place before they went in to be gassed and incinerated in crematorium five.

♪♪ No birds singing in this particular bit of the woods.

So, by the late spring and early summer of 1944, here, between 60,000 and 70.000 people were being killed, gassed, every seven days.

60,000 to 70,000 people.

At the time, when the Germans are losing the war, you would suppose this was not top of their agenda.

But it was.

And the Holocaust is choking on its own disgusting logic, physically the material fabric can't cope with the number of transport that are rolling in.

There are too many bodies, and the furnaces just are gagging on what they have to do.

And they back up with fat, in particular.

You know, even great industrial systems go wrong.

So the whole system really comes to a kind of traffic jam of extermination.

So, dead bodies, the gassed bodies, are where we're standing, and over there.

They're all over the grass, piles of these pathetic, terrible, tragic victims.

And then the Sonderkommando have to heave them into fire pits, and set light to it.

♪♪ One of the most horrifying aspects of the entire Holocaust is that it's Jewish people, called Sonderkommando, that they're forcing to do the job of actually pushing their own people into the gas chambers, extracting the bodies, ripping out their teeth, delivering them to the furnaces.

So, the most horrific job in history you have to think.

And it doesn't get more sadistic, in a way, than that.

♪♪ One of the Sonderkommandos is a truly extraordinary figure, called Zalmen Gradowski, and for two years, Gradowski has been writing about what he sees and what he experiences, and he's doing it in secret, and he buries these extraordinary documents, hoping that, even though he was doomed, his writings would be discovered.

Which they were, miraculously, after Auschwitz was liberated.

Like no other writer, Gradowski says, "How much can we decently describe?"

and then concludes by saying, "It is more indecent to flinch before the description," that a user-friendly Holocaust is cowardly and forgetful and disrespectful.

And a respectful thing to do is to do exactly what Gradowski does, tell you what he saw.

And he takes you right into the heart of the gas chamber and he will say, "Don't look away."

♪♪ "With force, we tug and pull the bodies from the tangled ball.

One by a leg, one by an arm, whichever is more convenient.

The frozen eyes look at you as if to ask, 'Brother, what will you do with me now?'"

♪♪ "They are laid out two by two at the mouth of every oven."

"A hellish fire sticks out its tongues like open arms."

"And swallows up the body, like a treasure.

First to catch fire is the hair, the skin swells with blisters which burst in a matter of seconds, the arms and legs begin to twitch.

The stomach explodes quickly.

What burns longest is the head.

From its eyes, blue flames now sparkle.

The whole procedure takes twenty minutes.

And a body that was once a world, is now turned in to ash."

♪♪ The furnaces really are the end point of everything, and then you just feel a tidal wave of monstrous fury, at everyone, not just the SS, not just the Germans.

Everyone.

Because it took hundreds of years of absolute bitter, dehumanizing hatred, one end of Europe to the other, to actually make it conceivable that that could happen.

And just a whole civilization ends up in smoke.

You know, pity is what others who aren't Jews feel.

Screw the pity.

♪♪ ♪♪ The Holocaust is absolutely overwhelming.

Even as a historian, there's only so much you can read and understand.

And to really grasp it, you need to talk to somebody who lived it.

So I went back to Warsaw to talk to someone who did experience everything, the ghetto, Auschwitz, and two death marches.

His name is Marian Turski.

And I wanted him, one of the last survivors, to have the last word.

-Ah.

♪♪ -What message would you like to give to the world now?

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ (music playing through credits) NARRATOR: This program is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.

(music continues through credits)