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on the latest research about the 
time period, the resulting six-
hour series explores the events of 
the Holocaust in granular detail. 
But it also chronicles the xeno-
phobic and antisemitic climate in 
America in the years leading up 
to the Nazi genocide of Europe’s 
Jews: a nation largely hostile to 
any kind of refugee, particu-
larly Jewish ones, and reluctant 
to intervene in a war on their 
behalf.
The series paints a picture of a 
country largely failing the centu-
ry’s greatest moral crisis, through 
a combination of bureaucratic 
ineptitude, political skittishness 
and open bigotry emanating 
from the streets to the most 
vaunted chambers of power 
— while a handful of heroes, 
working mostly on the sidelines, 
succeeded in helping small num-
bers of people.
“There was a way, because we 
were relating it to the U.S., that 
you could get a different and 
perhaps fresher kind of picture,
” 
Burns said. “The United States 
doesn’t do anything, and then 
all of a sudden it does. They’re 
bad guys, and then they’re good 
guys.
”
The filmmakers hope such a 
message will have modern res-
onance, especially as it arrives 
in a very different world from 
the one in which work on it 

began: amid a growing climate 
of authoritarian governments, 
right-wing extremism, Holocaust 
denialism and fierce debates over 
how to frame American history 
in the classroom.
For these reasons and more, 
Burns said, “I will never work on 
a more important film.
”
The film was an especially 
personal journey for Botstein 
and Novick, who are both 
Jewish. Botstein’s father (Bard 
College president Leon Botstein) 
was born in Switzerland in 1946 
to two Polish Jews who had met 
in medical school in Zurich and 
later came to the United States as 
refugees. She is a first-generation 
American and said making the 
film helped her better under-
stand her family’s survival.
“My grandmother used to 
say to me: ‘If someone shook 

you in the middle of the night, 
what would you say? Are you an 
American? Are you a Jew? Are 
you a woman? Are you Sarah?’” 
Botstein said. “Because her 
identity had defined everything 
that ever happened to her, and I 
didn’t have that experience living 
in a fairly liberal part of New 
York State.
”
Novick, meanwhile, was raised 
in the United States, in a secular 
Jewish family that had already 
been here for generations. For 
her, the project was eye-opening 
in a different way.
“I understand better now, 
I think, the world that my 
grandparents, or sometimes 
great-grandparents, grew up in, 
and how antisemitic America 
really was,
” she said.

TELLING THE STORY
Like most projects by Florentine 
Films, Burns’ production compa-
ny, The U.S. And The Holocaust 
tells its story with copious his-
torical documents — in this 
case, photographs, letters and 
newsreel footage — often read 
aloud by celebrities, including 
Meryl Streep, Liam Neeson, 
Hope Davis and Werner Herzog. 
They voice the stories of Frank 
and others like him who sought 
refuge in the United States but 
died in gas chambers and con-
centration camps instead.

It is also supplemented 
by extensive interviews with 
Holocaust survivors and histori-
ans, most prominently Deborah 
Lipstadt, an influential Holocaust 
scholar and currently the U.S. 
State Department’s special envoy 
on antisemitism. Lipstadt deliv-
ers what the directors saw as the 
film’s most haunting conclusion: 
that the Nazis achieved their goal 
of permanently crippling the 
global Jewish population, which 
has not been fully replenished in 
the decades since the Holocaust.
The American focus means 
the film takes 30 minutes to 
arrive in Germany. The timeline 
begins not with Adolf Hitler’s 
rise to power but with the 
Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, an 
American law that set national 
quotas on all immigrants to the 
country and would come to 
factor heavily into U.S. refugee 
policy during Europe’s mass 
expulsion of Jews.
The filmmakers take a wide 
sweep in establishing the 
racist political climate of the 
time, discussing the Chinese 
Exclusion Act of the 19th cen-
tury; Theodore Roosevelt’s love 
of eugenics; Henry Ford’s public 
campaign of antisemitism; and 
Jim Crow laws, which rendered 
Black people second-class cit-
izens and which Hitler would 
eventually draw from when 

ARTS&LIFE
DOCUMENTARY

Members of the 
Sturmabteilung or SA 
— a Nazi paramilitary 
organization

A German 
policeman 
checks the iden-
tification papers 
of Jewish peo-
ple in Krakow, 
Poland, 1941. 

NATIONAL ARCHIVES IN KRAKOW

NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION

