Tell These Stories, As Difficult As They May Be” – Ken Burns stated on his Documentary, U.S. and the Holocaust, that aired on PBS September 18, 20, 21st. The three episodes featured what America knew during the Holocaust.
The U.S. and the Holocaust explores America’s actions against one of the greatest atrocities in human history. Did the nation fail to live up to its ideals? Learn about America’s arduous journey to create the melting pot we know today.
The U.S. and the Holocaust explores America’s actions against one of the greatest atrocities in human history. Did the nation fail to live up to its ideals? Learn about America’s arduous journey to create the melting pot we know today.
What: “WFSU and HERC Present”: The U.S and the Holocaust Screening Panel When: October 6th, Thursday, 6:30 pm Where: Challenger Learning Center, 200 S. Duval St.
Why We Persist: HERC Program Explores Burns Film
By Bill Berlow, a retired journalist, is a HERC volunteer
for more than 50 years, I’ve read countless books and articles and watched dozens of documentaries on the Holocaust. Like many others, I wondered how the Jews of Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe failed to fully grasp the warning signs and escape Hitler’s killing machine before it swallowed them.
The more I learned, the less sense it seemed to make. Hitler, after all, never concealed his loathing of the Jews. He wore his murderous antisemitism on his sleeve, proudly. Once he came to power and quickly consolidated the authority of the German state, why, I asked, didn’t more Jews take him at his word?
In what preeminent filmmaker Ken Burns has described as his most important work, he and colleagues Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein probe that question, with an emphasis on countervailing U.S. efforts to rescue Jewish refugees and turn them away. The Oct. 6th program on the Burns documentary, co-sponsored by HERC and WFSU, will begin with a 45-minute film highlighting the six-hour film’s three episodes. A panel discussion, led by Tallahassee historian Monte Finkelstein and FSU film professor Paul Cohen, will follow.
“The U.S. and the Holocaust” was broadcast in September on PBS and continues to be accessible on the PBS streaming app. A storytelling masterpiece that synthesizes fact and the personal accounts of several survivors and those among the 6 million who perished, the film makes two things clear:
• It was exceptionally difficult to get out, even before the war in Europe began and especially after – enabled in part by the toxic blend of apathy and prejudice;
• The Holocaust – still so hard to comprehend decades later – was even unimaginable to its victims as they experienced it in real time. “This can’t be happening,” in fact, was.
While the Holocaust refers to Hitler’s attempted genocide of European Jewry, its horrors ensnared many others, as German theologian Martin Niemoller learned. An early supporter of Hitler and professed antisemite, Niemoller opposed the Nazis’ efforts to control German churches, making him an enemy of the Reich.
He wound up in concentration camps for several years but survived the war. “First They Came” is the poetic form of his spoken confessional in 1946. In my view, it captures as succinctly as anything I’ve read the reason that Holocaust education is as critically important today as ever – for every citizen regardless of religion, politics or socioeconomic status.
First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me