Billy Joel shares painful truth that erased his lineage

Billy Joel recently opened up about how he got to know his relatives lost their lives in Auschwitz.

In his two-part HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes, the 76-year-old American singer-songwriter and pianist, who is Jewish, mourned the loss of his father's side relatives, whom he never met, recalling how he discovered what his family had to go through in World War II.

Joel revealed he found out how badly World War II hurt his family when he met his half-brother in Vienna in his late 20s, as before that meeting, he did not know much about his father, Howard, or his family history.

The Piano Man hitmaker said of his half-brother, "He fought in the U.S. Army under General Patton. They liberated Dachau. 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 meeting his half-brother, he came to know that many of their family members were sent to Auschwitz, and most of them were killed.

"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.

"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,” Billy Joel quipped.