Ken Burns (‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’) on the need to be ‘brutally honest about the places where we’ve fallen down’ [Complete Interview transcript]
During a recent Gold Derby video interview, news and features editor Ray Richmond spoke in-depth with Ken Burns about the three-part, six-hour documentary film he co-produced and co-directed for PBS, “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” which is eligible at the 2023 Emmy Awards. Watch the full video above and read the complete interview transcript below.
“I will never work on a more important film than this one,” declares Burns of “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” the film documentary 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.
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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.
Here is the full transcript of that interview.
Ray Richmond: “Hi, I’m Gold Derby News and Features Editor Ray Richmond, and I have the privilege today of speaking with Ken Burns, the esteemed Co-Producer and Co-Director of the three-part PBS documentary film, ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust.’ Ken, welcome. And as a Jew, I thought I knew everything there was to know about the Holocaust, and I found myself surprised at how much I learned from this film. What did you learn in your research that surprised you?”
Ken Burns: “Well, as a non-Jew almost everything was new. I thought, I guess in some recess that we had done it in our film, ‘The War,’ that Lynn Novick and I made in 2007. I thought that Geoffrey Ward, who was the writer of this, and I had done it with ‘The Roosevelts’ back in 2014, but when we began this, I think it was a relearning process. We knew that Americans comfort themselves with the myth that they beat back Hitler and discovered the concentration camps. And that’s when we knew, when, in fact, we knew way before and our country was not prepared or willing or wanted to let in any of the refugees.
“And so while the United States isn’t responsible for the Holocaust, and we did let in more than any other sovereign nation, we could have let in so many more, but the prevalent anti-Semitism deserved a kind of treatment to set the table about where we were, not just with that anti-Semitism and xenophobia, but with racism and dispossession of native lands and the eugenics and the way in which people manipulated the depression into convincing people that if we let anybody in, they’d be taking your job. All that sort of stuff.
“We knew we’d have to do that and it would be uncomfortable and difficult. What I didn’t realize is that because of new scholarship and because of the way the film was structured, we were going to have to just reinvent the wheel about what actually happened in the Holocaust. And in that I think we were as surprised as we were by the American indifference, and at times outright hostility to saving Jews.
“So that new scholarship helped make it new. But I just think as we had to do a kind of cinematic respiration between being in the United States and then being in Europe, being in the United States, and then being in Europe, we began to realize how woefully inadequate our initial understandings of what actually took place in the Holocaust. And we had to really go over that. And thank goodness we worked with the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and many of their scholars and others helped us really get up to speed on this. And I think that’s one of the reasons why it is surprising for people.
RR: “Did you come away from the film with thinking about what the U.S. could or should have done in the face of what was going on in Europe?”
KB: “Yeah, it’s very painful for me. The phrase ‘Six Million’ has a kind of opacity. It doesn’t mean anything anymore. Two out of three Jews in Europe were killed, but it doesn’t particularize as the writer Daniel Mendelsohn says in our film, and our attempt was to try to particularize. And once you do that, once you begin to realize that behind the phrase Six Million, there’s individual stories, six million of them, that these are real human beings, you begin to realize the loss potentiality: what symphonies weren’t written, what cures weren’t discovered, what children weren’t raised with love, what gardens weren’t tended. It’s very, very painful to have to confront humanity’s darkest or one of its darkest hours.”
RR: “What made you decide to tackle the story before you got started and why now? Was there a timing aspect to it?”
KB: “Well, there’s no now for us. We take so many years to do it. We began it in 2015, a very, very different time than when we released it in the fall of ’22. And the rhymes, which are present in every film with the present, were even more so by the time we got done with it, I’m sorry to say, because we’re in a time when there’s more anti-Semitic activity in the United States than the ADL has ever recorded. We finished our film on World War II called ‘The War’ in 2007, and we were surprised that with a fairly robust scene on the Holocaust, that people would come out of the woodwork to tell us their favorite conspiracy theory. Why did this happen? Franklin Roosevelt was an anti-Semite. Why did we turn away the St. Louis? A lot of stuff. Why didn’t we bomb the rail lines at Auschwitz?
“And beneath a lot of misinformation and disinformation were some real genuine questions that we felt we needed to try to answer. And so we began to think about it. And then again, after ‘The Roosevelts,’ the same thing happened. And then the Holocaust Museum in D.C. was mounting an exhibition and they approached us a few years before it was opened saying, ‘We’re doing this, are you interested in maybe working on a film? And maybe we could collaborate.’ It was like, yes. And so we made the time, we assumed it would be a one-off standalone, therefore kind of two-hour thing. And of course, the second we dove into it, we realized that we just had way more than a single episode could contain and that it was a deep and dark and troubling story. Look, you can boil down the essence to what this whole thing is about: how do I get a piece of paper to get out of here? Right?”
RR: “Absolutely.”
KB: “The thing is that the bad ideas, along with the good ideas, don’t need any piece of paper. And so these things are traveling back and forth, and it really hurts to know that Hitler applauded our extermination as he put it, of the Native Americans and the corralling of the rest into reservations, what he would later call concentration camps that German jurors came and studied our Jim Crow laws to fashion the mid-1930s discrimination laws against the Jews. And you begin to realize that the ideas both bad and good are like tides. They rise and fall. When an anti-immigration act was passed in 1924, which was ostensibly the reason why we couldn’t let anybody in 16, 17, 18 years later, the Ku Klux Klan rejoiced. Thirty-thousand descended on Washington D.C., full robes all, up and over the steps of the Capitol, unfurling American flags. I mean, it was the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan.
“And so once you scratch a little bit, you scratch a lot, and then all of a sudden the familiar bromides of history, the comforting stories that we like to tell ourselves, don’t obtain. And you’ve really got to do some very serious reckoning with our past and with ourselves as filmmakers to tell a story that is at times incredibly difficult. Having said that, we are not responsible for the Holocaust. We let in more 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, maybe we’re not talking about six million, if we had done what our hearts and our own self-PR says we do as a people.”
RR: “And we take it as a matter of faith almost in the Jewish community in this country that FDR was an anti-Semite, but you didn’t find that.”
KB: “No, he grew up in an atmosphere of anti-Semitism. Most Americans did. I mean, some of the most popular figures from obviously Charles Lindbergh, but back to Henry Ford, were promulgating viciously anti-Semitism. He bought a newspaper. Ford bought a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, that became the second-highest circulation paper in the country. And they’re reprinting the protocols of the elders of Zion, this Russian hoax, which is virulently anti-Semitic. And many people were like that. FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt grew up in that environment, but they were in New York politics. He named more Jews to his administration than anybody else. He also understood, I think, that the magnitude of the Holocaust wants us to find a villain kind of not on the par of Hitler, that’s impossible. But we need to find somebody big. That’s why there are conspiracies about assassinations because we can’t imagine somebody like this could take away somebody like that.
“So I think that FDR becomes a convenient villain. He’s reflective of the country, the Congress and many aspects of his administration are virulently anti-Semitic. He knows this. And so he’s working behind the scenes. Sometimes he’s so clearly not doing enough, and you can hold his feet to the fire for that. And other times he gives the approval for the creation of the War Refugee Board that does more than any other single organization in saving human lives from the Holocaust. And so that’s in his corner. What happens is, I think in our binary society, we want to paint everything either black or white. It’s complicated. As the neon sign in my editing room says, ‘It’s complicated.’ And so we want to paint complicated portraits of people, and FDR deserves a complicated portrait. And so when we can’t let him off the hook, we don’t. And when we can, we do, and should.”
RR: “You seem especially passionate about this film, Ken? It seems almost like it’s personal for you.”
KB: “Oh, I mean all the films are personal and heartfelt, but I’ll tell you this and people have misunderstood it. I’ll say it really carefully. I will not work on a more important film than this one. I hope films I’ve made in the past are as important. I hope the ones I’m working on now and will work on will be, but I will not work on a film that’s more important than this one. We have to come to terms, 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, as the historian Nell Painter says in this film.
“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. And that’s why all of this manipulation of history today is so disturbing. It permits the very thing that the Holocaust was, and we have to be on guard against it. We have to be self-critical and we have to understand where we’ve done the right thing and where we’ve not. And in the Holocaust, it is not our finest moment.”
RR: “No. And certainly the current times we’re living in will never be viewed by future generations as our finest moment. And when you began making this film in 2015, boy, it was a different America.”
KB: “It was a different America. When we started in 2015, we assumed where we’d probably end the film. We were debating among ourselves in the editing room. Do you do it when they discover the concentration camps? Do you do it with the Nuremberg Trials? Do you do it with (Adolf) Eichmann’s trial? Do you do it when they change the anti-immigration laws in ’65 when (President Lyndon) Johnson does it? Sort of right there. But as we worked on the film, as we got into writing and shooting and then editing, we began to realize there were too many echoes with the present. And so the last three minutes of the film, we sort of bring it up to the present in very disturbing ways. And you hear back in Episode One about replacement theory. And all of a sudden you’re hearing about replacement theory again. You’re hearing that the worry that these immigrants will replace us and you see in Charlottesville, Jews will not replace us.
“You see someone attacking one of the insurrectionists on January 6th wearing a Camp Auschwitz t-shirt, and you begin to say, this stuff is always present. And at various times it sort of rises up and speaks loudly to us and we’ve got an obligation to just put it down, to remind people what this leads to the fragility of our institutions. We’re in the middle of a great crisis. The previous ones, the Civil War, the Depression, the Second World War, nobody was worried about free and fair elections or the peaceful transfer of power or the independence of the judiciary.
“Everybody’s sure worried about that now. And so it ought to give us pause. And stories like this, I hope can be instructive insofar as we are required as citizens to be vigilant and to make sure the kinds of things that happened don’t happen. Listen, if you wanted to be in the hippest, most cosmopolitan place in the world in 1932 where everything’s happening in music, in cinema, in architecture, in music, painting, you would do no better than to be in Berlin. The next year, 1933, not so much.”
RR: “I guess this is why, though, when you’re looking at what’s going on here today and all these things we once took for granted in terms of democracy, Ken, they say that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. And boy, is there a lot of rhyming going on right now.”
KN: “That’s the problem. History doesn’t repeat itself. We’re not condemned to repeat what we don’t remember. I understand that lovely thought, that poetic thought is often associated with the Holocaust. Mark Twain is supposed to said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. And if he said it, man, he’s absolutely right. Human nature doesn’t change. It superimposes itself over the random chaos of events. So we see those patterns, we see those echoes, we see the ghosts, we see the rhymes. And as we worked on this one, it got more and more and more disturbing for us and those of us we were working with to produce the film.
“And I’m sorry to have to say that, I don’t want to say that. I want to say that this is safely in the past or when we made a film on ‘The Central Park Five,’ that it was a one-off thing. It’s not. And this is what is required of human beings. And I think art is one of the places that it has to be a fervent reminder of our possibilities, but also the pitfalls. And if we don’t yell this loudly enough and say to us, this is unacceptable, then we do run the risk of putting ourselves in the same downward spiral that we saw. It may not turn out exactly the same way, but we don’t have the luxury of being able to risk even one 100th of what happened.
RR: “Is that what you ultimately hope audiences take away from watching this film, is that the relevance to today is immediate?”
KB: “I’m a storyteller. We’re storytellers. Lynn and Sarah and I are storytellers. Geoff Ward is a storyteller, our writer. So we just want to tell a good story. And we know as the novelist Richard Powers said, ‘The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story.’ So we don’t go with objectives, that we want the film to do this, this or that. We want to tell a good story. When it’s done, we’re back to being civilians and we want people to do stuff. We want to look and say, yes, well, whoever made that, we need to sound the alarm.
Sarah Botstein speaks quite passionately and movingly just about citizenship and the responsibilities of getting involved at a local level, the school board, start being involved. What are our responsibilities as citizens to make sure that this can never happen or a version or a variation on this doesn’t happen again here, when we see all the signs, the flirtation with authoritarianism, the actual outright love and fascination of it increased in anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant activities. All of this, every alarm bell within everyone’s conscience ought to be sounding.
“And if the film can play a small part in galvanizing action and reaction to this, then I’m for it. We set out just to tell a difficult, complicated story. I think it was certainly surprising to me to learn about it. We didn’t know about it in advance. We don’t tell you what you ought to know. And it’s like homework. We share with you our process of discovery, and this was personal, this hurt. This is my country and I love my country, and we didn’t do what we should have done.”
RR: “Just to switch gears for a moment, Ken, what did it mean to you to be inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame last year? Well-deserved, by the way.”
KB: “Thank you. It’s hard to do that. I live in rural New Hampshire and I’ve been here for 44 years, and I’ve been had my head down and kind of trying to make the films. They’re very labor intensive. They take a long time to make. A couple of them have taken over 10 years to make. This was several years in the making, and it just seems so wonderful. At the same time it seems kind of anthropologically absurd when all of a sudden you’re in Hollywood and you’re looking around and going, oh, I know who that person is, and people are putting you in the same category of people that I admire so much. It was a terrific honor.”
RR: “What are you working on now?”
KB: “So we’re working on several things. We just finished a film and are doing the finishing touches, sound editing of a two-part film called ‘The American Buffalo’ that unfortunately will revisit some of the same things about eugenics and racism and dispossession of native peoples in their lands as we dealt with in the first episode of ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust.’ We’re working on our first non-American topic on the life of Leonardo Da Vinci. I’m been working almost every day on a mammoth history, a big, huge series to connect with the Civil War and World War II and the Vietnam War on the history of the American Revolution, which we hope to have done in time before the 250th anniversary of Lexington and Concord in 2025.
“So it’s a lot of stuff. And there are two other films that are also in the works that we’re shooting called ‘Emancipation to Exodus’ about what happened to African Americans in the period known as Reconstruction, a little bit before that and significantly after it. And we’re also doing a story of the flip side of LBJ from our Vietnam film, his domestic apologies. So it’s ‘LBJ and the Great Society,’ and if that weren’t enough, there’s a few other pet projects that we’re just sort of collecting interviews on. So no moss growing here, but pretty much of a dull boy all work and no play.”
RR: “Wow. Well, it’s just amazing, the rich tapestry of the American experience that you bring to the screen through Florentine Films and I’m a huge admirer of everything you do, and I know so many Americans and so many people worldwide are, and thank you for everything you have done.”
KB: “I’m really grateful for the use of the word tapestry. Quite often, sentences that we’ve used in a film on the Shakers will turn up again in a film on the Civil War and periods that we pass through 10 or 15 times in the 40 or so films that we’ve made. We see the era from a new perspective. And so I think we’re just weaving together the American experience and on balance it’s a good story, but the other part has to be told as well, the darker aspects. Otherwise we don’t get better.”
RR: “No question.”
KB: “We don’t move forward.”
RR: “We’re out of time with that, Ken Burns. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us about such an important film as ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust,’ and best of luck with all of the things keeping you busy in New Hampshire.”
KB: “Thank you very much.”
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