Why Ken Burns Considers “The U.S. and the Holocaust” His Most Important Film

“We can't imagine working on a film more important than The U.S. and the Holocaust,” documentary filmmaker extraordinaire Ken Burns said during a TCA press conference for the three part PBS event, premiering tonight at 8:00 pm. The project came about after two other films about the same era, The War and The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, sparked questions about our delayed response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of our time. “We were constantly besieged and we were so grateful when our friends of the Holocaust Museum were doing their exhibition and asked us if we would consider doing a film that echoed or mirrored or accompanied that. And, of course, it was a whole-hearted yes. And we benefited from their access to new scholarship and pointing us in the direction of the archives we might use and survivors whose stories we might engage.”

“The thing that really struck me was the sense of the American public and how the American public felt about how the crisis was unfolding,” Sarah Botstein added, co-director and co-producer on the film. “I certainly had inherited the trope that we didn't know, and therefore, that's why we didn't take action. But the Holocaust Museum’s research and our own research and the research of all of the scholars showed that there was extensive media coverage. There was a lot of information. There weren't photographs, it's true, but it really was not a secret how perilous the situation was for the Jews of Europe. And the thing that makes me the most distressed as an America is to see the polling data, year after year after year, the American people — and this polling was new at this time — should we be letting in more refugees. And the answer was always a resounding no, even after the war.”

Among the experts included in the film is Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. “One has to be able to imagine oneself in the shoes of these people,” Daniel explained. “Something the film does is give you a sense of people, like my great-uncle, and other people in the film, these are people like us; they are no different. And I think that's very important to keep in mind that there's a tendency to imagine the black and white, so to speak, the people in the past, and that's kind of a distancing effect that allows us to comfortably not imagine these things happening to us. And the parallels make it very clear that these things can happen, and people, then, said, ‘Oh, it's never going to happen.’ These are the conversations we're having around dinner tables.”

“We're talking about a kind of othering of people; us and them,” the third director and producer on the project, Lynn Novick, shared. “The ‘them’ could be Jews, it could be people of color, it could be Native people, it could be immigrants. You can put whoever you want in that box, and that's part of the American story. It's part of the human story, for sure, but since we're talking about American history, we have to call it what it is before we can really address it… There is a mainstream of this kind of way of seeing the world, us and them, who is in the good character, who are the bad people and that drives a lot of what is happening right now. And that's what we observed taken from this film and at least understanding the dynamics of this in history and in our own history, it helps. It can't change minds, but at least we see what's going on for what it is.”

In production for nearly seven years, the world looked a little different when Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein first started working on The U.S. and the Holocaust. “In all of our films, we've always had our minds focused on telling the story, and always confident that once it's done, and we lift our heads up, it will be resonating; it will be echoing in the present,” Ken Burns shared. “What is so perhaps disturbing but perhaps illuminating, is the fact that this is, in almost every sentence of this story, resonating in a very fraught and very complicated and very fragile present moment. So, it's not anything by design, but as we found with The Civil War in the past, in different films we've made, that it seems to be made as if we knew what was going to happen when it came out, which, of course, we cannot do. Even amateur historians make very lousy prognosticators.”

Don’t miss the six-hour, three-part event The U.S. and the Holocaust on PBS.

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