Opinion/Harold: Burns' Holocaust film chronicles our failure to help Jews fleeing genocide

Brent Harold

Columnist

Published Oct. 9, 2022

Americans have long trusted Ken Burns to tell our stories: The Civil War, baseball, jazz, national parks, the Vietnam War and country music.

This trust in Burns in this moment of universal mistrust is an important part of what we bring to his latest PBS series “The U.S. and the Holocaust”. He has focused on hard stories before such as the Civil War and Vietnam. But this is perhaps the hardest to hear, especially for worshippers of the so-called Greatest Generation and American exceptionalists in general.

The story we like to remember of that terrible era, what most of us grew up thinking, the story told in so many movies in the years after World War II, is how we saved the world from the horrors of Hitler and fascism. The Nazis were the bad guys and we were the good guys. It is that self-congratulatory story that Burns' story is meant to correct.

Yes, once we entered the war after Pearl Harbor, we were crucial in winning it and saving what was left of Europe's Jews. But the story is not nearly so clear-cut. As Burns makes clear, for years we refused to allow the immigration of refugees fleeing Hitler's genocide and left them to their fate.

Despite newspaper reports making clear much of what Hitler was doing to Jews in the 1930s and even as the Final Solution began to take shape, antisemitism was as widespread here as anywhere, as evidenced in polls opposing immigration and showing that the majority of Americans thought the Jews had it coming.

Prestigious Americans such as Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and his sweet wife, Anne Morrow, and Catholic Father Coughlin's hugely popular radio broadcasts, were supportive of Hitler's rise in the 1930s and even into the war.

Burns' story is much the same told in Philip Roth's novel “Plot Against America” (2004). In Roth's counter-factual novel popular hero Lindbergh actually wins the 1941 election over Franklin Delano Roosevelt and widespread antisemitism has America looking a lot like Germany of the 1930s until we are saved by the bell, as it were, by the Pearl Harbor attack.

Since we know the real history of the period, what actually happened — that Roosevelt won that 1941 presidential election and kept pushing for the U.S. to come to the aid of our allies and defeat the fascists  — why bother telling the counter history?

The answer is: because the counter history is in many important respects truer history than the version we, as victors, have told. (“'History is written by the winners.” – Winston Churchill.)

We have long been used to being told the importance of remembering the story of the Holocaust as a cautionary tale, “lest we forget” the depth of depravity in theory all humans are capable of. Holocaust denial is a crime in many countries.

But Burns' story is not just of what they did, an ocean away, but of what we did, our failure. Our role in the Holocaust.

It's a very hard story to hear, to watch. In fact, I'm surprised the extremist GOP, our white supremacists, Tucker Carlson and the rest of the Right in this country have not loudly boycotted or attempted to ban “The U.S. and the Holocaust.”

Why have the anti-Critical Race Theory people not been out in force declaring the series, like the truth about the slavery chapter of our story, unacceptably bad for our morale? Or just dismissed as “fake news”? (My foray online turned up nothing of the sort on the first couple of Google search results pages.)

It speaks reassuringly of the health of what's left of our troubled democracy that Burns' series has taken front and center for a few days to be watched by millions.

Burns is not content to leave implicit the parallels between his story and our current drift toward fascism. The series ends with 2017 footage of the torch-carrying Charlottesville mob shouting, "Jews will not replace us," and of the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. A clip of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol shows a man in a "Camp Auschwitz" sweatshirt.

The history of this time has not been written. There are no foregone conclusions. In the middle of it, still creating it (part of the problem or part of the solution, as Eldridge Cleaver famously put it), without the benefit of hindsight, we don't know how this will turn out.

But with an election coming up that may well play a huge role in establishing the next chapter in this story, the timing of Burns' series could not be more appropriate.

Brent Harold, a Cape Cod Times columnist and former English professor, lives in Wellfleet. Email him at kinnacum@gmail.com.