Mark your calendars for Sept. 18 when award-winning documentary producer Ken Burns will bring the story of the Holocaust to the screen. THE U.S. AND THE HOLOCAUST is a three-part documentary directed and produced by Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein. The production explores America’s response to the Holocaust.

HERC is pleased to promote this educational program in Northwest Florida that combines first-person accounts of Holocaust witnesses and survivors and interviews with leading historians and writers. THE U.S. AND THE HOLOCAUST dispels competing myths that Americans either were ignorant of the unspeakable persecution that Jews and other targeted minorities faced in Europe or that they looked on with callous indifference.

“History cannot be looked at in isolation,” said Ken Burns. “While we rightly celebrate American ideals of democracy and our history as a nation of immigrants, we must also grapple with the fact that American institutions and policies, like segregation and the brutal treatment of indigenous populations, were influential in Hitler’s Germany. And it cannot be denied that, although we accepted more refugees than any other sovereign nation, America could have done so much more to help the millions of desperate people fleeing Nazi persecution.”