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 monstrous death camp - the endpoint of a much longer road of horror. From Lithuania to Poland to the Netherlands to, finally, Auschwitz, Schama confronts the enormity of the Holocaust as both historian and 80-year-old Jew, to understand how it happened and in the hopes it will never happen again.