SEPTEMBER 15 • 2022 | 43
ARTS&LIFE
DOCUMENTARY
Ken Burns’ PBS documentary ‘The U.S. And The Holocaust’
asks hard questions and looks at how Americans treated
Jews and immigrants during wartime.
Asking
Hard Questions
continued on page 44
ANDREW LAPIN JTA.ORG
O
ne of the first peo-
ple introduced in
Ken Burns’ new
documentary series about the
Holocaust is Otto, a Jewish
man seen in the series’ first
episode who tries to secure
passage to America for his
family but gets stymied by the
country’s fierce anti-immigra-
tion legislation.
It isn’t until the third episode
that viewers learn that Otto’s
daughter is nicknamed Anne,
and the pieces fall into place:
He’s the father of Anne Frank,
the Holocaust’s most famous
victim.
Burns calls the delayed detail
a “hidden ball trick,
” hoping
that an audience with only
passing knowledge of the Frank
family will not immediately
clue into the fact that Otto
was Anne’s father. Burns and
his co-directors, the Jewish
filmmakers Sarah Botstein and
Lynne Novick, wanted their
viewers to ponder the question
of what the U.S. government
felt Anne’s life was worth when
she was still a living, breath-
ing Jewish child and not yet a
world-famous author and mar-
tyr of the human condition.
“It was important to us to
look at a way in which you can
rearrange the familiar tropes
so that you see: This is a family
that is getting the hell out of
Germany and hoping eventually
to put more distance between
them by going to the United
States, which basically for the
majority of the citizens and in
the policy of its government
does not want them,
” Burns told
the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Burns is the foremost docu-
mentarian of American history,
with iconic works such as The
Civil War, Jazz and Baseball,
turning PBS programs into
must-see TV multiple times
over the past four decades.
His latest, The U.S. and the
Holocaust, premieres on the
PBS Sept. 18 and will air over
three nights.
The project took seven years
to complete. In 2015, the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum
reached out to Burns with a
request: Would he consider
making a film about America
during the Holocaust?
EXAMINING AMERICAN
ATTITUDES
Burns and his longtime collab-
orators, Botstein and Novick,
along with writer Geoffrey C.
Ward, had already been consid-
ering such a project. Their 2007
miniseries about World War II
and their 2014 project about
the Roosevelts covered histor-
ical periods that overlapped
with the Holocaust but did not
explore the subject in depth —
and their makers recognized
the gap.
Produced in partnership
with the museum and the USC
Shoah Foundation and drawing
DETAILS
The U.S. and the Holocaust
premieres at 8 p.m., Sept.
18 on PBS Detroit.
Immigrants wait to
be transferred at Ellis
Island, Oct. 30, 1912.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS