In HBO’s Billy Joel: And So It Goes, the legendary musician shares the heartbreaking story of his family’s escape from Nazi Germany—a tale he only began to uncover in adulthood.
Joel, now 76, opens up about his father Howard (born Helmut), who grew up in a well-off but non-practicing Jewish family in Nuremberg. Life shifted dramatically when Hitler came to power. Billy recounts how his grandfather, Karl Joel, ran a thriving textile factory—until the Nazis forced him to sell it for “pennies on the dollar.” The factory would later manufacture uniforms for Nazi prisoners.
The Joels narrowly escaped, fleeing to Switzerland, then Cuba, and finally the United States. “It was a miracle,” Billy reflects in the film. “If they’d been caught with papers marked ‘Jew,’ they would’ve been sent to a concentration camp.”
The documentary also explores Billy’s estranged relationship with his father, whom he reconnected with in Vienna decades later—learning he had a half-brother and that many family members left behind were killed in the Holocaust.
In 2017, Joel silently protested rising antisemitism by wearing a yellow star during a Madison Square Garden show. “I will always be a Jew,” he says in the documentary.
Billy Joel: And So It Goes is streaming now on HBO Max.
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