A new documentary about the Holocaust opens with a photograph of perhaps the best-known face from history’s dark chapter: Anne Frank and her family.
So why does a six-hour film that sheds a fresh light on America’s response to the Holocaust begin with such a well-worn image? It would surprise even those who knew all about the deaths. It is also claimed to be a myth.
as mentioned inUSA and the HolocaustIn Ken Burns’ latest deep-dive into America’s past, Otto Frank desperately seeks sanctuary in America for his family, only to find himself in the hands of countless others fleeing Nazism. So, the narrator says, he just “found” what the Americans didn’t want them in.” Seeing no other option, he built the Franks’ ill-fated hideout in Amsterdam. I made arrangements to
Premiering September 18 and airing over three nights on PBS, “The US and the Holocaust” will defy other long-standing historical assumptions and draw thematic lines that connect tragedies of the past with struggles of the present. purpose.
It highlights the entanglement of racism and anti-Semitism in Germany’s purported democracy and inaction in response to Germany’s persecution of Jews. Modern footage points out how these failures stubbornly endure. This includes clips from his 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The marchers chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” We discussed the Auschwitz camp sweatshirt.
Lynn Novick, who co-directed and produced the film alongside Burns and Sarah Botstein, said, “While making this film, it was very eerie to see the past reverberating louder and louder.
The film also brings to the fore parallels between America’s past and current hostility to immigrants and refugees.
“I remind people that it’s important not to let these impulses get relegated to past historical events,” Barnes said in a telephone interview. It’s important to understand impulse vulnerability.”
Indeed, as documentaries document, for much of its history, the United States has fled millions of Irish people from famine, Jews from pogroms, and Italians from poverty. . But there was a violent backlash against unrestricted immigration in his late 19th century, fueled by the eugenics movement that downgraded entire nationalities and racial groups as potential contaminants of America’s gene pool. rice field.
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The Golden Doors of the Statue of Liberty were closed to Chinese workers in 1882, then to Eastern and Southern Europeans and virtually all Asians by the Immigration Act of 1924. (A leading statistic: 120,000 Jews immigrated in 1921, but five years later the number dropped to 10,000.) Escape the murderous Nazi titans during World War II The first European refugee was denied entry, followed by the skeletal survivor of a concentration camp.
Fragments of this story have been told in books including David S. Wyman’s “Jewish Abandonment.” Daniel Okrent’s “The Guarded Gate,” on the origins and impact of the 1924 Immigration Act. David Nassau’s “Last Million” on the treatment of displaced persons after war. Burns and his team weave these threads into seamless wholes.
The story is enhanced by many trademarks of Ken Burns’ aesthetic. Haunting film clips and photographs, pathetic music, lucid reflections from scholars, fascinating eyewitness testimony, and personal letters read by actors like Meryl and his Streep. The erudite script was written by Jeffrey C. Ward.
The story of a survivor who was a child in the 1930s is particularly poignant, with a lingering atmosphere of incredulity that such horror could occur in the 20th century.
Guy Stern, a 100-year-old German literary scholar, was sent to St. Louis as a teenager by desperate German-Jewish parents.To sponsor the entry of a family member into the country, a requirement of immigration law at the time. One person who agreed to pay the required $5,000 was a gambler, so immigration officials rejected him as financially unstable. At the end of the war, Stern learned that his parents, brother and sister had been deported to his Warsaw ghetto, where they died.
Burns said the filmmakers tried to emphasize the ambiguity and complexity of the story. For one thing, the United States accepted more Jewish refugees than any other country – about 200,000 between 1933 and 1945. Under the leadership of John W. Pehle, the War Refugee Commission meeting.
Inspired by an exhibition on the same topic at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, this documentary turns the unfavorable portrait of President Franklin D. Even if it didn’t, it’s somewhat tempered.
Focusing on two well-known criticisms, quotas enacted by Congress against immigration restricted Roosevelt from accepting more than 900 Jewish refugees aboard the cruise ship MS St. Louis. It is suggested that Also, one historian argues that planning to bomb the railway line to Auschwitz was futile, as the bombing was so inaccurate that the Germans were able to replace damaged tracks overnight. doing.
Despite pleas from his wife Eleanor and Jewish leaders, Roosevelt decided to devote himself to defeating the Axis Powers.
“America and the Holocaust” undermines the overheard rationale that Americans in the 1930s were ignorant of how ugly the persecution of Jews had become. In newsreels and newspaper headlines, how do Americans perceive random attacks by Nazi thugs and punitive laws that target Jewish-owned businesses and deny Jewish citizens access to parks and theaters? track what you have seen or read. It notes that the restrictions emulated Jim Crow race laws in the American South.
But the vast majority of Americans, encouraged by anti-Semitic voices like radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin, car magnate Henry Ford, and lionized aviator Charles Lindbergh, turned to Kristallnacht. I hardly changed my mind after that. 1938 — During that time, 1,400 synagogues were set on fire, hundreds of Jewish businesses were looted, and at least 91 people were killed.
State Department officials, Breckenridge Long in particular, devised or rigorously enforced immigration hurdles that required letters from sponsors, exit and transit visas, and payments of thousands of dollars. Even someone as well-connected as Otto Frank couldn’t get all the paperwork together in time.
In a video interview, Botstein said the survival of those who made it to America confirms the famous words of journalist Dorothy Thompson. Life and death. “
Americans were skeptical even when Hitler overran Europe, forced Jews into ghettos, and turned to so-called Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) and systematic killings by human slaughterhouses like Treblinka. He continued to oppose immigration relaxation.
The film includes a December 1942 radio broadcast by Edward R. Murrow, which describes the campaign in plain language. “What’s happening is this,” he said. “Millions of humans, mostly Jews, are being rounded up and murdered with ruthless efficiency.”
But such a revelation failed to sway most Americans or their governments.2 out of 3 of Europe’s estimated 9 million Jews would die.
Even after the war ended and newsreels showed American liberators stunned at the sight of walking skeletons and piles of corpses, anti-Semites in the State Department and Congress continued to resist. Nazi collaborators in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia were seen as credible anti-communists, so by the 1950s tens of thousands of Jewish survivors were playing in humble refugee camps.
Making the film left the creators with feelings of both anger and sadness. Burns reflected on “all the symphonies that weren’t written, all the great literature that wasn’t written, all the children that weren’t brought up properly with love.”
Botstein is the daughter of Leon Botstein, an orchestra conductor and president of Bard College, whose parents lost most of their relatives to the war. She was surprised that “she knew or understood very little about her family history until she made this film.”
For author Daniel Mendelsohn, who appears in the film, the feeling was even more intimate. He tells the story of his great-uncle Schmiel Jäger, a butcher who left the village of Boreczo, then in eastern Poland, for America in 1912 with Mendelsohn’s grandfather and other brothers. . Jaeger, disillusioned with the hustle and bustle of his East his side, returned within a year. With the rise of anti-Semitism in the 1930s, Jäger tried to return to the United States, but by then Poles for visas had been on his ten-year waiting list, leaving Jäger, his wife, Esther, and four daughters. was involved in the Nazi extermination. Phew.
“All the people you just saw,” Mendelsohn says in the documentary, referring to photographs of his relatives. Some of them would be alive today. And the reason they aren’t alive is because America basically did its absolute best to make it as difficult as possible for Jewish refugees to escape the maelstrom that was engulfing them. is. “