NEED TO KNOW
Billy Joel detailed his father’s family’s harrowing escape from Germany during World War II in the two-part HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes
“If my grandparents had been found on the train with the documents that said Jew, they would’ve been sent immediately to a concentration camp. They got out. A miracle,” the singer said
Billy said learning about his family’s painful history during the war inspired him to wear a yellow star while performing onstage in 2017, to protest Donald Trump’s comment about the violence that erupted at the Unite the Right white supremacist rally
Billy Joel is opening up about a painful piece of his family history.
In the two-part HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes, the 76-year-old musician detailed his Jewish paternal family’s harrowing journey out of Germany during World War II.
Billy described how his father, Howard (born Helmut) Joel, grew up in a “well-to-do” family who were “very proud to be German” and not “practicing Jews.” His grandfather, Karl Joel, meanwhile, operated a successful factory in Nuremberg that made textiles and clothing. “His business was doing very, very well, until the Nazis came to power,” Billy said, explaining that his father was 10 when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany and “things got nasty.”
“My dad would look over the fence while they were doing all these anti-Semitic speeches. I can’t imagine the trauma of watching the SS parade espousing these principles,” he continued. “Eventually, he couldn’t even go to school.”
Billy’s grandfather Karl soon “realized, ‘This is it, I better leave while I can,’ ” and sold his factory “for pennies on the dollar.”
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Billy Joel with his father, Howard Joel, in 1986
The family managed to cross the border into Switzerland without incident. “He was lucky,” Billy said. “If my grandparents had been found on the train with the documents that said Jew, they would’ve been sent immediately to a concentration camp. They got out. A miracle.”
His family eventually made their way to Cuba in 1939, and then to the United States.
Billy recalled learning the disturbing detail that the man who took over his grandfather’s Nuremberg factory began using it to produce the uniforms the Nazi prisoners wore.
“I didn’t know any of that until I was in my mid-20s. There’s still a lot I don’t know,” the singer said. “I didn’t know my father at all, from the time I was about 8 years old until I was in my mid-20s. Tried to figure out where he was, how I could contact him, but nobody knew.”
Billy’s parents divorced when he was 8, and his father subsequently moved to Europe. Billy, who was born in the Bronx, N.Y., and grew up on Long Island, said he played in lots of European clubs early in his career in the hopes of tracking down his father.
Emma McIntyre/Getty
Billy Joel
Eventually, Billy learned that his father was living in Vienna and went to visit him at his apartment. There, he found out he had a half-brother. Billy tried to get his father to talk about his past, but he was reluctant.
“He had a very strange life. He fought in the U.S. Army under General Patton. They liberated Dachau,” he recounted in the documentary. “I tried to get him to talk about it, but he didn’t really want to talk about his past, and I heard most of it from my brother.”
Billy then found out about his father’s family, who did not leave Germany during the war. “They were hunted. I visited the graveyard where the Joel family is buried. And I didn’t even know I had that many relatives,” he said.
“They wiped out my family,” Billy continued. “I would’ve liked to have known some of these people.”
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Uncovering his family’s experience during the war moved Billy to make a rare political statement. In August 2017, following the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., the “Piano Man” singer wore a yellow star on his jacket during a concert at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.
Billy explained in the documentary that wearing the star was his way of hitting back against President Donald Trump’s response to the violent clashes that erupted at the rally.
During a press conference, Trump, 79, said, “You also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
“I was angry. And I had to do something,” Billy recalled. “But I didn’t want to get up on a soapbox onstage and say this is wrong, so I wore the star, basically, to say, no matter what, I will always be a Jew. I am a Jew.”
Billy Joel: And So It Goes is available to stream on HBO Max.
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