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

