“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 musician said
Erin Clack is a Staff Editor for PEOPLE. She has been writing about fashion, parenting and pop culture for more than 15 years.
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“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 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.”
