“I will not work on a more important Film,” says Ken Burns about The U.S. and the Holocaust, a three-part, six-hour documentary (Sept. 18, PBS) about America’s response to the Nazis’ genocide. A comprehensive examination of both President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s actions and the anti-Semitic and anti-immigration climate in which he operated, Burns’ latest—co-directed by long-time collaborators Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein—seeks to grasp why we chose to admit so few Jewish refugees in the 1930s and 1940s, and whether we could have done more to stop, or at least slow down, Hitler’s “Final Solution.” The answers it comes up with are not always flattering, complicating our understanding of the country’s WWII legacy. Yet per Burns tradition, they’re handled with enlightening and affecting nuance and empathy.
A detailed study of fascism and intolerance and the push-pull between ideals/political/social realities, The U.S. & the Holocaust is bolstered with testimonials from scholars and Holocaust survivors. It’s both informative and heartbreaking. For Novick, it’s also an inquiry that’s apt to shock many.
“I think this will be, for the general public, somewhat surprising and a little hard to ingest,” she says. “That we could be both the liberators of freeing the world from tyranny and fascism, and unwilling—as Daniel Greene says in the film—to do much to rescue the victims of fascism.”
Inspired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s “Americans and the Holocaust” exhibition, it’s a film filled with individual heroes and tragic victims. Moreover, it’s an analysis of the 20th century’s darkest chapter from a distinctly American point of view, investigating the nation’s bigoted roots in order to comprehend the decisions that were made (or, often, not made) to welcome more Jews to our shores, and to oppose Hitler’s grand designs for slaughter and conquest.
To Novick, who’s worked with Burns since 1989, The U.S. and the Holocaust “is in the wheelhouse of the things we’ve been interested in, which is: Who are we as a country? For this topic: Are you a nation of immigrants. Do we welcome people? Why haven’t we sometimes been more welcoming? What is our national identity? This question of America’s response to the Holocaust gets right into that, and it’s enormously relevant to this day.”
Watching the documentary, it’s impossible not to notice echoes of MAGA fascism in the words of Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin, in the anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant sentiments that justified exclusionary policies, and in the refusal by many to confront the mounting domestic authoritarian threat out of naïveté, self-interest and/or prejudice.
“We’ve been aware, with every film we’ve made, how much each film—as Mark Twain might say—rhymes in the present,” offers Burns. “Because human nature doesn’t change.”
Ahead of The U.S. and the Holocaust’s premiere, we chatted at length with the illustrious director about past American failures and triumphs, and the way in which they inform—and continue to resonate in—the present.
[This conversation has been edited for length]
The U.S. Holocaust and Anti-Semitism is about intolerance, anti-Semitism and immigration, all of which are extremely relevant topics. Is that the motivation?
Not at all. We try to avoid this kind of current motivation. Although we believe that the past can be a great teacher, we were able to get down on our knees in 2015 and propose this project, even before Donald Trump announced that he would be running for office. We had no idea of what was to come. We’ve been aware, with every film we’ve made, how much each film—as Mark Twain might say—rhymes in the present. Because human nature doesn’t change. All of these are still part of our system, though they may be louder at times than others.
I promise you, it’s really hard to make a documentary film. I’ve never made a feature film, and I’m sure it’s hard to make one of them too, but it’s hard to find out the natural Veristitalian poetics—the storytelling—in a documentary. In a feature film, you can just make stuff up and bake into that drama, even if it’s based on historical events. But here, there’s no place where you have the luxury to say, “Hey, isn’t this so much like the present!” unless you make a decision, as we did, to just bring it right up to the present, whatever that present is. For a while, that present didn’t include January 6 because we were so far in editing before January 6 happened. We made it to Charlottesville.
Ellis Island, October 30, 1912.
Library of Congress
It is important to realize that stories can change people. If you make arguments, you don’t. I’m totally plagiarizing from the novelist Richard Powers, who said the best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view; the only thing that can do that is a good story. We’d rather tell a story. Our episode’s first act is to establish American precedents and antecedents in the treatment of indigenous peoples. This includes racism, nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment. It is easy to see how American society was predisposed to adopt anti-immigration legislation and be open to the pseudoscience of eugenics. It becomes clear that these are not just sui-genis impulses in Germany. In fact, Germany uses our Jim Crow exclusionary law to help it base its first anti-Jewish laws. There’s not a complicity that we have, but there’s a human interconnectedness that we wanted to show.
Then as we emerge from our narrative into the present, there’s so much going on, and that current has only gotten stronger. The anti-Semitism movement has grown in number. The proto-fascist—or what Biden calls “semi-fascist”—tendencies have only increased lately, and have been given voice, mainly because permission was given as never before in the history of the United States by someone in the highest office of the land. We’ve had racist presidents, but we’ve never had them express the kind of anti-governmental and anti-institutional views—along with that racism and anti-Semitism—so profoundly and so loudly, and with the ability to carry so far and wide, which is having terrible consequences. I’ve made films about the Civil War, I’ve made films that covered the Depression, and I’ve made films about WWII—those are the great crises. This [present-day] one is as important a crisis as any we’ve ever had, if not the most consequential.
The film shows how appeasing dictators can be seen as weakness. Do you think that’s true with Trump—and, also, with Putin?
And [Hungary’s] Viktor Orbán. It’s absolutely true. I’m so happy you saw this. Deborah Lipstadt, one of the most important Holocaust scholars, said that the best time to stop a Holocaust from starting is before it begins. But what you have, as you see painfully: there’s public opinion, there’s political realities, there’s elections to be won, there’s entrenched bureaucracy, and all sorts of reasons why we don’t act, collectively and as individuals. And there’s no one person to blame. You can’t say it’s all Roosevelt’s fault. It’s much more complicated and, to me, much more interesting.
When do we wake up and say, I’ve learned that when there’s smoke coming out of a house, there’s fire, and when can we call the fire department? “You can’t call the fire department until it’s on fire; you’re just seeing smoke”—that’s what happened. This is human nature. The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act with quotas, Roosevelt can’t do things, people have progressive ideas, but they withdraw them. Why? Because they believe that by putting this bill up, all those other bills that seek to limit immigration even more will pass. And you just go, holy Toledo, doesn’t that seem like almost everything we’re talking about now—or even ten years ago?
The film shrewdly looks at the Holocaust via the context of the time…
That’s why I answered your first question exactly the way I did. We are married to this. We prefer to be conservative than trying to point fingers or wink-wink at anything. We say Hitler would travel around Germany promising to restore Germany’s greatness, right? We could have just as easily said, “Promising to make Germany great again,” which is another translation. I did, for a point, and then we all looked at it and said, yeah, it’s a little bit too much, let’s pull that out [laughs].
One big question in The U.S. and the Holocaust—raised, in part, by Deborah Lipstadt—is when we knew what was happening, and when and how we should have acted. In hindsight, do you think there was a specific moment when we might have responded differently/faster/better?
We did more than any other sovereign nation—which to say, let in more refugees than any other sovereign nation. It’s important to say, “sovereign nation,” because people escaped to other places, like Palestine. But we could have done much more. In my eyes, and this is me personally speaking, the film doesn’t say this anywhere, and I’m just telling you after the fact: we were a failure. But I agree completely—you picked up on another great thing. Deborah suggested that maybe we could have brought more people to those ports that would have allowed them in more. More importantly, we could have yelled louder about what was going on; publicized it a lot more so that, yes, we’re not interrupting the war effort, but we could have just made the world more outraged by it. We didn’t do that either. This is a failing grade which doesn’t, as she says in the introduction, redound to our benefit.
You also discuss how movie studios did business with Hitler’s Germany throughout the ‘30s, prioritizing profit above all else.
Can you imagine that the German vice consul in L.A. had green-light power over scripts that had anything to do with Germany, and what got made or didn’t get made as a result of that? It’s mind-boggling. But you think about the kinds of ways in which we capitulate to the Chinese, because they’re paying for it or their market is big, and you begin to see the way Human Beings compromise in things that are central to our humanity. That’s really important. It is a central part of their humanity that human beings will compromise. What is the root cause of their vulnerability? Fear of “the other.” Making people “the other.” Grievances. Money. All of this stuff is just the stuff that blocks you from your goals. Power—I won’t be reelected if I’m suddenly interested in bringing in poor Jewish people because my constituents will think they’ll take their jobs in the middle of the Depression. That’s very understandable political calculus 101.
“Human beings compromise things that are central to their humanity. What is the root cause of their vulnerability? Fear of “the other.””
The film is full of heroes, as you can see. These organizations never get enough credit. The Jewish Joint Distribution Committee—let’s write and talk about and celebrate them! The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society—they did so much. People helped save human beings. Then you’ve got the War Refugee Board started by John Pehle, and that funds Raoul Wallenberg and all these efforts to forge documents and go beyond the red tape and bureaucracy, once we leap over the anti-Semites at State Department. These are excellent stories. Varian Fry, a writer in New York, who goes with Hiram Bingham III—about as WASP-y and non-Jewish as you can get—and saves Max Clay, Piet Mondrian, Wanda Landowska, Max Ophüls and lots of so-called “ordinary” people, human beings just trying to escape murder because they are of a particular faith.
Do we need to look at the Holocaust from the perspective of the U.S. with its attitudes toward Jews and immigrants? Or a wider, holistic approach?
We could have done it, and it would’ve been valid. I think it would have made sense. I actually think, paradoxically, focusing it through America not only made the American story important, but it actually focused—in great detail, precisely—what actually took place in the Holocaust. It forced us to be truthful and not just talk about the British or Pope. It’s just us and this thing that happened. We refer to the USA and we refer to individuals.
We finished a film in 2007 on the history of the second World War, and we did a huge section on the Holocaust—obviously not enough, since a huge section of a seven-part series is just a section—and it was very moving. People would then come up to us and tell us that FDR was anti-Semitic. And you’d go, okay, tell me why you think so. Or they’d say, how come we turned away the St. Louis? And I’d say, it’s a really complicated story. They’d say, why didn’t we bomb the rail lines in Auschwitz? We’d get that over and over again. We began to talk among ourselves and realized that we must do something about America’s Holocaust. We skip ahead and Geoff appears. [Ward]We make another film together about the Roosevelts. It will be out in 2014. The same questions keep coming up. We looked at each others and said, “We have to do that.”
The next year, the Holocaust Museum in D.C. came to us and said, we just mounted an exhibition called “Americans and the Holocaust,” and would you be interested in doing a film about this? We said yes because we had been thinking about coming to you. We could also count on an association with your organization to find scholars, archives, and survivors. They answered, “Yes, yes, and yes.” We got to work. It wasn’t an attempt to answer those questions, but those questions are in some ways addressed, in some cases answered, and in some cases perhaps not to the satisfaction of anyone who’s certain that they know. Everything is complicated and there’s undertow to everything.
Long benches for immigrants, Main Hall, U.S. Immigration Station, Ellis Island, 1902-1913
Courtesy The New York Public Library
We got so into it that I think Geoff Ward would say this, and I know Lynn and Sarah would say this, and I’ve been saying this: I will not work on a more important film. Maybe the Civil War, Jazz, Baseball, Vietnam and The Roosevelts and other things we’ve done are equal to it. Maybe—I hope—films that I’m working on now about the American Revolution and the history of Reconstruction in the United States are equal to it. But I’ll never work on a more important film than this. And we just suddenly found ourselves caring—as we do with all films—with this intensity to get it right. To find out what scholarship is. Our operating scripts have so many footnotes. Is there a citation? Who is the scholar who said that? Let’s err on the conservative side and take the lower number; let’s not be sensationalistic. Let’s calibrate the footage and the pictures that we show. Let’s not indulge in any Holocaust porn, like rubbernecking at an accident.
Although people have been upset at you for not addressing certain contentious topics in the past, The U.S. Holocaust is an important work that arrives 2022 in a world where certain right-wing domestic forces want to erase American history. Did they worry that you might be subject to a backlash for this complex portrait of our Holocaust response?
No. I think this is a terrible, terrible thing, and the precedents are always with totalitarian societies: you limit the media, you rewrite your history, you sanitize it, you don’t talk about complicated stuff. Democracy thrives, like many things—such as sports—on the truth. If the coach comes out and says, “I know we got beat 52-0, but we were great today,” your coach does not last. In Texas and Florida football is considered a religion. No coach can get away with such shit. So we’re just sort of shaking our head, thinking, how come your Pop Warner guys can take criticism, but you can’t learn that we had a past that had slavery and treated Native Americans about as bad as you can treat other human beings? All people can accept contradiction.
If you’re going to be the most exceptional country on Earth, then you have to hold yourself to the highest possible standard. If you don’t do this, you will quickly lose your place as the best country on Earth. I can’t control anything a Texas or Florida school board does, but I can continue to make the films that we make, and they’re big stories, and they live in schools for decades after.
“If you’re going to be the most exceptional country on Earth, then you have to hold yourself to the highest possible standard. You will very quickly not be the greatest country on Earth if you do not do that.”
Also, it wasn’t criticism [from others]. It was more, why didn’t you go into this? And it’s often a conspiracy theory. FDR is a sexist anti-Semite, and he did something secretly. We have the proof! Then you go and it turns out, there’s no proof, and the “scholars” who promote this are just beating dead horses. It’s why we have conspiracy theories about all assassinations: because the person who did it seems so puny compared to the person who was taken away that you obviously have to build up one side to equal the story. Roosevelt isn’t a king. This is impossible for him. He’s got the Johnson-Reed Act and he cannot do anything about it. Congress must act on this. He knows what Congress will and won’t do. Could he have done even more? Yes, indeed. Could he have yelled more? It’s possible. But as Peter Hayes so brilliantly says in the film, FDR could have been focused on this humanitarian stuff, and in retrospect, it seems to us, why didn’t he focus more attention on this? But he’s spending all his political capital trying to revoke the neutrality act! And if he hadn’t been able to revoke the neutrality act, we might feel a lot different today. Perhaps we’re speaking German. The stakes could not be higher. It is time to stop the Holocaust from happening.
Your work balances the big picture with intimate, first-person stories. What’s the key to making that macro-micro dynamic work?
First, the tent stakes can be viewed as intimate stories. While the Big Top pole may be elevated, which may reflect the geopolitical view of the Big Top, it is still anchored by individual stories. The problem with Holocaust storytelling is that “6 million” means nothing. It has the opacity of the most impenetrable substance, and it just goes by, tripping off people’s tongues. Daniel Mendelsohn, he took six of those six million—his great uncle Shmiel Jager, his wife and their four daughters—and he particularized them. Only one of the six survived in a gas chamber, it turned out. Many died in terrible circumstances in the Shoah, including by bullets or in other horrendous circumstances. However, this can be used to reduce the transparency of the number 6,000,000.
Our opening features beautiful footage of a young woman, looking out of a window in Berlin. Then she’s joined in the window by what look like parents, and they lean in and they’re smiling, and we say, by 1945, two out of three European Jews were dead. That means that two of the three people in question are dead. Although it is not necessarily those three people, two-thirds must be taken from every picture. All that potentiality lost. The cure for cancer was never discovered. The symphony has not been written. The garden has not been tended to. The child that isn’t loved. That’s why you have to particularize.
Ellis Island, The Statue of Liberty.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
Many of the stories we have heard come from German and Austrian Jews. More than half of them escaped because of their connections to the West and were more wealthy. But the 3.3 million Polish Jews, and the millions of Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Latvians, Hungarians, Romanians—not so much. It is important to remember them. Their lives are just as important as ours. That’s why this film was so important for us. We had to learn how to recognize that we were all people. Like an amputated limb that is still felt long after it’s gone, we can’t not still feel them.
Given how long these projects take—and considering their momentous subject matter—do any of them ever feel daunting?
I’ll tell you right now, the very first one—Brooklyn Bridge—was as daunting as anything. It was a daunting task to walk for an hour around a bridge. You’re figuring out how to do it. Filmmaking is just as easy for a comedy film or a celebration. There are ones that are particularly complicated, but they’re not daunting. It’s easy to just relax and let go of that.
We’re making a film right now on the American Buffalo, which is a parable about extinction. We almost killed this animal, but we managed to bring it back. Bison are able to face the storm with this remarkable ability. They don’t turn away from it; they face it. That’s what we do as filmmakers. It’s not like you’re welcoming it, or that it’s something prideful. It’s just that you’re drawn to something organically, and it’s emotional. There’s no intellectual calculation. It’s like, yes! That’s why I said, we got down on our knees and proposed.
Geoff Ward’s script is beyond brilliant. It made me cry as the scratch narrator, and I’ve never in my life on any film broken down and cried in the narration booth, just reading what I know I’ll read ten or twenty more times before [narrator] Peter Coyote comes in and reads it, because we don’t bring him in until we’re 98% of the way through. It was so moving to me. The efforts that Lynn and Sarah and our team made to find the pictures and footage, and to correct stuff and to talk to survivors and the Holocaust museum every single day, and to speak with Rebecca Erbelding and Daniel Greene—we talked to them almost every single day. It’s that kind of critical study that we do. So yes, it’s tough, tough, tough to get it right. But man, that’s what we’re here for! That’s our job. I feel like I’ve got the best job in the country.
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