Joel, 76, also takes issue with Donald Trump’s famous “very fine people on both sides” comment about the rally. “He should have come out and said, ‘Those are bad people’,” he says, “there is no qualifying it. The Nazis are not good people. Period.”
[Missing Credit]Billy Joel wears a yellow Star of David during a performance in Madison Square Garden, New York City a few days after white supremacists marched through Charlottesville chanting 'Jews will not replace us', August 2017
With a career spanning over half a century, the Piano Man singer is one of the world’s best-selling music artists, and his Jewish roots have had a profound and long-lasting impact on his life.
Billy Joel was born in 1949 in the Bronx in New York City to a Brooklyn native mother, Rosalind, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from England. Joel’s father, Helmut Joel, himself a classically trained pianist, was born in Nuremberg, Germany, to a wealthy Jewish family that owned a textile factory.
Portrait of American singer and songwriter Billy Joel, circa 1978. (Credit: Express Newspapers/Getty Images)Getty Images
Helmut, who was 10 when Hitler became chancellor, remembers watching Nazi rallies taking place in a park near his home, just before antisemitic policies forced his family to flee Germany.
“My dad would look over the fence while they were doing all these antisemitic speeches, and see this going on,” Joel once recounted in Mark Bego’s 2007 biography about him. “I can’t imagine the trauma to watch the SS parade espousing these principles.”
Despite the family being Jewish, Joel’s upbringing was areligious – once joking that his circumcision was “as Jewish as [his parents] got” – and they rarely went to synagogue. “But in Germany, if your family was Jewish, you were a Jew,” he said.
Billy Joel performs at Madison Square Garden, January 7, 2016 (Credit: Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images)Getty Images
His father was, like all Jewish children at the time, forced out of school and his family stripped of their rights. The family’s thriving textile business was sold to a German for a fraction of its worth in order to fund their escape over the border to Switzerland carrying forged passports, before travelling to New York via England and Cuba.
Joel said: “If my grandparents had been found on the train with the documents that said ‘Jew’, they would have been sent immediately to a concentration camp. They got out. A miracle.”
After their escape, the business his parents formerly owned began making the infamous striped pyjamas that the concentration camp prisoners had to wear.
When Joel was eight years old, his parents divorced and his father left the family and returned to Europe. Touring the continent in his 20s – following the release of his 1973 iconic debut album Piano Man – Joel went looking for Helmut and found him in Vienna.
In his father’s apartment, he met his five-year-old half-brother, Alexander, who later became a pianist and conductor and through whom Joel later learned about his father’s side of the family, most of whom were murdered at Auschwitz.
Helmut had joined the United States military and, serving in the army under General George S. Patton, returned to Europe and went on to liberate Dachau concentration camp – which Joel later learned was an deeply traumatic experience for him.
Joel’s relationship with his father, who died in 2011, was never a close one, but their reunion did spark the inspiration for Joel to write his song Vienna.
The two-part HBO original Billy Joel: And So It Goes, directed by Susan Lacey and Jessica Levin, premiered on July 18 on HBO and HBO Max.
For UK viewers, the documentary is likely to be available on Sky Atlantic and NOW within a few weeks of the US release.
