Billy Joel sheds light on dark past: ‘Couldn’t even go to school’
Billy Joel has shed light on a deeply personal chapter of his family’s past.
In his lates new two-part HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes, the legendary musician opened up about his paternal family’s harrowing escape from Nazi Germany during World War II, per Daily Mail.
Billy shared that his father, Howard (born Helmut) Joel, was raised in a “well-to-do” Jewish family in Nuremberg, Germany.
Though not religious, they were proudly German, and his grandfather, Karl Joel, owned a successful textile and clothing factory until anti-Semitic persecution upended their lives.
“His business was doing very, very well, until the Nazis came to power,” Joel explained and added, “My dad was 10 when Hitler became chancellor, and things got nasty.”
He described how his father was forced to witness the early stages of Nazi terror firsthand by saying, “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. Eventually, he couldn’t even go to school.”
Realizing the growing danger, Karl Joel made the difficult decision to flee Germany, selling his factory for “pennies on the dollar” and escaping with his family across the border into Switzerland.
“He was lucky. 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,” he added.
The family later journeyed to Cuba in 1939 before eventually resettling in the United States.
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