In his recent two-part HBO documentary, Billy Joel: And So It Goes, the 76-year-old American singer-songwriter and pianist, who is Jewish, candidly spoke about the tragic loss of his paternal relatives in the Holocaust. Joel revealed how he came to understand the profound impact of World War II on his family, particularly those he never had the chance to meet.
Joel disclosed that the extent of his family’s suffering during World War II became clear to him in his late twenties, when he met his half-brother in Vienna. Prior to this encounter, he knew little about his father, Howard, or his family history.
The “Piano Man” hitmaker recounted that his half-brother “fought in the U.S. Army under General Patton. They liberated Dachau.” Joel admitted, “I tried to get him to talk about it, but he didn’t really want to talk about his past. I heard most of it from my brother. And then I found out about my father’s family. They were hunted.”
Through this meeting, Joel learned that many of their family members had been sent to Auschwitz, and most of them perished there.
“I visited the graveyard where the Joel family’s buried, and I didn’t even know I had that many relatives,” the six-time Grammy winner noted.
Joel expressed a deep-seated emotional impact from this discovery: “There is an underlying rage that comes out sometimes — ‘What are you getting all mad about? Nobody did anything to you.’ But they wiped out my family. I would’ve liked to have known some of these people.”
