Ken Burns (‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’): ‘I will never work on a more important film than this one’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
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“I will never work on a more important film than this one,” declares Ken Burns of “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” the three-part, six-hour PBS film he co-produced and co-directed (with frequent collaborators Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein) and released last September. Coming from Burns, that’s a mouthful, considering he is perhaps the most celebrated documentarian of our time and the foremost chronicler of the American experience. He’s a filmmaker who is responsible for many of the most treasured nonfiction series and biographies ever put to film, among them “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “Jazz,” “Jackie Robinson” and “The Vietnam War.” A two-time Oscar nominee and five-time Emmy winner, Burns is without peer on the documentary production stage. And he is as proud of “U.S. and the Holocaust” as anything he’s ever done in his four-decade filmmaking career. Watch the exclusive video interview above.
What Burns – a 2022 inductee into the Television Academy Hall of Fame – and his collaboration team discovered in their deep and impeccable research on his latest film was that the long-held assumption that Americans helped save the world from Nazism and totalitarianism and were in fact liberators is true only up to a point. During the late 1930s and ’40s, the United States was as guilty of turning its back on Jewish refugees and their brethren being slaughtered by the millions in Europe during Adolf Hitler’s industrial-scale program of extermination.
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“I think Americans comfort themselves with the myth that we beat back Hitler and discovered the concentration camps, and that’s when we knew,” Burns believes, “when in fact we knew way before and our country was not prepared or willing or wanted to let in any of the refugees. That said, we are not responsible for the Holocaust. We let in more people than any other sovereign nation, 225,000 souls. But you know what? We could have let in at least five times as many, maybe 10 times as many, and then you’re putting a dent in that six million (figure).”
The reason behind Burns’ declaration that “U.S. and the Holocaust” is as important as any film he’s made or will ever make is the reckoning it raises with an American historical narrative too often steeped in quasi-fiction. “We have to come to terms with this,” he stresses. “We spend a good deal of our time and energy with a kind of sanitized, Madison Avenue view of our past – and we’ve got a lot to be proud of. But we also have to be brutally honest about the places where we’ve fallen down, because you can’t be exceptional if you’re not self-critical.”
The film traces America’s steadfast refusal to allow in more Jewish immigrants – at a time when two of every three Jews in Europe were being slaughtered – to the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which set strict quotas on the number of immigrants permitted to emigrate from Europe and Asia. As Burns sums it up, “You can boil down the essence of this whole thing to, ‘How do I get a piece of paper to get out of here?’.” It came as something of a surprise to Burns that the film ultimately felt so intensely personal and “painful” for him “to have to confront one of humanity’s darkest hours. I think we were all surprised by the American indifference and at times outright hostility to saving Jews.
“You know, the phrase ‘six million’ has a kind of opacity that doesn’t mean anything anymore. It doesn’t particularize, and our attempt was to particularize. Once you do, you realize that behind that six million are an equal number of stories. These were real human beings, and you begin to realize the lost potentiality. What symphonies weren’t written? What cures weren’t discovered? What children weren’t raised with love? What gardens weren’t tended? And that resonates in a way the mere phrase ‘six million’ never can.”
“The U.S. and the Holocaust” can be streamed over the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel as well as via PBS.org and the PBS Video app.
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