Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein Present ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’ Three-Part Documentary

PBS

Premieres: Sept. 18, 20-21 at 8pm ET/PT (check local listings — Episodes 2 and 3 were rescheduled due to coverage of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral)

What’s It All About? Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein directed and produced this remarkable and unflinching three-part documentary film that explores America’s response to the Holocaust, shedding light on what the U.S. government and the American people knew and did, or didn’t do, as the catastrophe unfolded in Europe. It also examines the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany in the context of global antisemitism and racism, the eugenics movement in the United States and race laws in the American South.

“History cannot be looked at in isolation,” Burns explains. “While we rightly celebrate American ideals of democracy and our history as a nation of immigrants, we must also grapple with the fact that American institutions and policies, like segregation and the brutal treatment of Indigenous populations, were influential in Hitler’s Germany. And it cannot be denied that, although we accepted more refugees than any other sovereign nation, America could have done so much more to help the millions of desperate people fleeing Nazi persecution.”

The stories the filmmakers spotlight underscore an American connection to the Holocaust that helps make the atrocity feel less like some far-off, long-ago event that most of the public either did not know about or were callously indifferent to. This not only adds perspective to the history of the time, but also effectively links it to modern America, where we are still confronted with issues of racism, antisemitism and questions of who should be welcomed into the country. One example the film offers that will be new to many viewers is how Anne Frank and her family applied for, but were denied, visas to the U.S. before they went into hiding, and ultimately died.

Helping relate such stories are noted historians and witnesses to, and survivors of, the Holocaust, a population that grows smaller with each passing year — another reason that Burns feels this film, among other efforts to keep such stories alive, is important.

“The Holocaust is still going on,” he says, “and it is like an amputated limb that is still felt, still aches, still itches, still pains us to this day. … We hope that somehow we [can] create some mechanisms of memory, and perhaps our film [will help] give new life to those lives that will not be around forever.”