The Land of the Free and the Brave

"He [Anne Frank's father Otto Frank] had means, he had contacts, he crossed every 't', he dotted every 'i', and he still couldn't get in."

"What if [Anne] had got in? Would she be alive now?"

"I always know that I'm going to be reminded of what I don't know. We share with the audience our process of discovery."

"We let in 225,000 refugees from Nazi terror. That's more than any other sovereign nation. Good? Yeah. But even if we'd filled out the minuscule quotas we'd have got in five times as many. So the grade is an F. We failed."

"We locked the film and then unlocked it 150 times to pull out an adjective that felt like a thumb on a scale, to add a qualifying 'perhaps' or 'some said'."

Ken Burns, U.S. historical documentarian

 

"There is a sense that we liberated the camps, we defeated the Nazis, so we helped do something about the Holocaust."

"Or if we didn't do more, it's because we had no idea what was happening. And we found that to be completely not the case."

"I was surprised by the scope and depth of antisemitism in America. I shouldn't have been, but I was. In a crisis, one would like to think there would be an outcry: forget the quotas, let people come in, it's now or never.. But that's definitely not what happened."

"There are events that have happened since 2015 that give us a deeper understanding of the history. When it comes to authoritarianism, white supremacy, bigotry and xenophobia, we're trending in the wrong direction, and the pace is accelerating in a truly disturbing way."

Lynn Novick, co-director of three-part, six-hour documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust

The largest diaspora of Jewry worldwide resides in the United States. Only Israel itself, the ancient homeland of the world's Jewish population reclaimed, has a greater population of Jews. Other large populations are scattered throughout Europe and Canada in Western democracies, while Jews continue to live in smaller numbers in more obscure parts of the world's geography. Many have integrated with their host populations, but almost everywhere Jews face discrimination. A bigotry peculiar to a hostile attitude reserved for Jews and Jews alone. 

That Jew-centric bigotry had undergone a mute period directly following the Holocaust. With the modern re-creation of the State of Israel and its ingathering of Jews fleeing persecution in their places of birth that never quite came to terms with the presence of Jews among them whose human rights were not quite entitled in the opinion of the prevailing majority, including those who were expelled in their hundreds of thousands from Arab lands where they had lived for a thousand years and more. Jew-hate is on a roll, surfacing and swelling in our modern era of the 21st Century.

The United States has always been fond of portraying itself as a nation comprised of refugees, proud to open its generous arms to people fleeing their homelands as a result of persecution, of war, endemic poverty and government neglect and hostility. Jews have lived in the United States and flourished there for centuries, despite a vibrant scene of suspicion and outright bigotry. It occurred to American documentary-producer Ken Burns that he would accept a 2015 invitation extended to him by the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington for a film documenting America's Holocaust response.

Ken Burns has a well-established and admired reputation for his deeply researched films about historical events in the United States. He was named "Mr. America" in recognition of his lifelong feature productions, viewed as an unofficial national historian whose work tens of millions of viewers are familiar with, in scrupulously researched backgrounders on The Civil War, Hemingway, Benjamin Franklin, Prohibition, Baseball, Jazz, Country Music and the Vietnam War, among others. At age 69 the New Yorker remains involved and active in his trade.

Voyage of the M.S. St.Louis

The emblematic, symbolic Statue of Liberty with its dedicatory poetic invitation: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free", is the America that its citizens have huge pride in, themselves coming from generations of refugee entrants to the great United States of America. In the research and portrayal of the role of America in the Holocaust, a grimly ironic invitation, given reality -- in its presence as a presiding image of the three-part series.

The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 led to strict and racist immigration quotas favouring western Europeans. The Act a result of a xenophobic wave and anti-Communist paranoia. The U.S. State Department peopled then as now by discreet, elite antisemites, took pains, when Hitler came to power to ensure that quotas for refugees out of Germany and Italy would be unfilled. Congress defeated a 1939 bill to save 20,000 German Jewish children. "We do rally as a nation to defeat fascism. We just don't rally as a nation to rescue the victims of fascism", one historian in the series declares.

 

America in the Holocaust

Of 32 nations represented at the 1938 conference on refugees that took place in Evian, France, the Dominican Republic stood out as having singularly pledged to admit a greater number of refugees. Tens of millions of Americans silently applauded statements reeking of antisemitism uttered by Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, American heroes that could say no wrong. The refusal to allow in Jewish refugees hoping to escape fascist Germany and what inevitably lay in store for them, was applauded by a huge segment of the American population. A Fortune magazine poll dated July 1938 saw fewer than one in 20 favouring an increase in immigration quotas to allow refugees from Nazism to come to America.

According to an even larger demographic, Jews exercised too much power in the United States. The Holocaust and its reality was downplayed with deliberation in fear that once President Roosevelt brought America into the Second World Wear, American troops would refuse to risk their lives to save those of Jews. "The first time I was doing it [delivering the voiceover script] I was breaking down and sobbing at some of the things", admits Ken Burns. 

 

America in the Holocaust