In the year marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the last concentration camps, renowned historian Sir Simon Schama confronts the history of the Holocaust as not just a Nazi obsession, but as a European-wide crime. In the most personal and unflinching film of his career, Simon visits mass killing sites in Lithuania, the home of his mother₂s family. He travels to the Netherlands, a nation famed for its long history of tolerance and where he lived and worked as a young historian, to answer the question of why fewer Jews survived here than in any other Western occupied country. And despite a lifetime dedicated to documenting Jewish history, this film also captures the emotional toll of Simon's first ever visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau.