Opinion/Harold: PBS Holocaust film chronicles our failure to help Jews fleeing genocide

Editor's Note: This column has been updated to include Sarah Botstein and Lynn Novick as co-creators and directors of the PBS documentary “The U.S. and the Holocaust”. 

Americans have long trusted Ken Burns to tell our stories: The Civil War, baseball, jazz, national parks, the Vietnam War and country music.

This trust in Burns in this moment of universal mistrust is an important part of what we bring to the PBS series “The U.S. and the Holocaust”, which Burns co-created and directed with Sarah Botstein and Lynn Novick. Burns has focused on hard stories before such as the Civil War and Vietnam. But this is perhaps the hardest to hear, especially for worshippers of the so-called Greatest Generation and American exceptionalists in general.

The story we like to remember of that terrible era, what most of us grew up thinking, the story told in so many movies in the years after World War II, is how we saved the world from the horrors of Hitler and fascism. The Nazis were the bad guys and we were the good guys. It is that self-congratulatory story that Burns, Novick and Botstein's film is meant to correct.

Yes, once we entered the war after Pearl Harbor, we were crucial in winning it and saving what was left of Europe's Jews. But the story is not nearly so clear-cut. As Burns, Novick and Botstein make clear, for years we refused to allow the immigration of refugees fleeing Hitler's genocide and left them to their fate.

Immigration: Lawyers for Civil Rights explain lawsuit filed on behalf of Martha's Vineyard migrants

Despite newspaper reports making clear much of what Hitler was doing to Jews in the 1930s and even as the Final Solution began to take shape, antisemitism was as widespread here as anywhere, as evidenced in polls opposing immigration and showing that the majority of Americans thought the Jews had it coming.

Prestigious Americans such as Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and his sweet wife, Anne Morrow, and Catholic Father Coughlin's hugely popular radio broadcasts, were supportive of Hitler's rise in the 1930s and even into the war.

The PBS Holocaust documentary is much the same told in Philip Roth's novel “Plot Against America” (2004). In Roth's counter-factual novel popular hero Lindbergh actually wins the 1941 election over Franklin Delano Roosevelt and widespread antisemitism has America looking a lot like Germany of the 1930s until we are saved by the bell, as it were, by the Pearl Harbor attack.

Stalemate: Why immigration reform has been so elusive over the years

Since we know the real history of the period, what actually happened — that Roosevelt won that 1941 presidential election and kept pushing for the U.S. to come to the aid of our allies and defeat the fascists  — why bother telling the counter-history?

The answer is: because the counter-history is in many important respects truer history than the version we, as victors, have told. (“'History is written by the winners.” – Winston Churchill.)

We have long been used to being told the importance of remembering the story of the Holocaust as a cautionary tale, “lest we forget” the depth of depravity in theory all humans are capable of. Holocaust denial is a crime in many countries.

Forbidden fruit?: Here's a way to join Cape Codders in reading banned books

But the documentary is not just about what they did, an ocean away, but of what we did, our failure. Our role in the Holocaust.

It's a very hard story to hear, to watch. In fact, I'm surprised the extremist GOP, our white supremacists, Tucker Carlson and the rest of the Right in this country have not loudly boycotted or attempted to ban “The U.S. and the Holocaust.”

Why have the anti-Critical Race Theory people not been out in force declaring the series, like the truth about the slavery chapter of our story, unacceptably bad for our morale? Or just dismissed as “fake news”? (My foray online turned up nothing of the sort on the first couple of Google search results pages.)

Radioactive water: Why a nuclear waste by-product has people upset with the Pilgrim power station

It speaks reassuringly of the health of what's left of our troubled democracy that the PBS series has taken front and center for a few days to be watched by millions.

Burns, Novick and Botstein are not content to leave implicit the parallels between their story and our current drift toward fascism. The series ends with 2017 footage of the torch-carrying Charlottesville mob shouting, "Jews will not replace us," and of the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. A clip of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol shows a man in a "Camp Auschwitz" sweatshirt.

Housing crisis: Where are the most affordable homes for purchase on Cape Cod? Geography plays a role

The history of this time has not been written. There are no foregone conclusions. In the middle of it, still creating it (part of the problem or part of the solution, as Eldridge Cleaver, famously put it), without the benefit of hindsight, we don't know how this will turn out.

But with an election coming up that may well play a huge role in establishing the next chapter in this story, the timing of the PBS Holocaust series could not be more appropriate.

Brent Harold, a Cape Cod Times columnist and former English professor, lives in Wellfleet. Email him at kinnacum@gmail.com. 

Gain access to premium Cape Cod Times content by subscribing. Check out our subscription offers.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: PBS Holocaust film tells of the U.S. failure to help Jews