Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The U.S. and the Holocaust with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

On today’s episode of Here's Where It Gets Interesting, we are thrilled to sit down with documentary filmmakers Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein. Their new docuseries, The U.S. and the Holocaust, airs on PBS on Friday, September 18th, 2022 and highlights the nuances of America’s response to the Holucaust. Ken and Sarah talk about their work, and about how it can often be the little known, everyday people–citizens and desk-sitting bureaucrats–who can make a lasting impact on history. Heroism does not mean absolute perfection, and many historical leaders struggled with making decisions, sometimes wrongly or too late. But as Americans, we are often at our best when we commit to considering and acting on behalf of our fellow human neighbors. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Buy from dysoncanada.ca. With ANC on, performance may vary based on environmental conditions and usage. Accessories sold separately. Hello, friends. Welcome. Delighted to have you here today. And I could not be more thrilled to be sharing a conversation with the legendary filmmaker Ken Burns and his collaborator, Sarah Botstein. We are talking today about a new film that they have made called The U.S. and the Holocaust. And this conversation could not be more pertinent to America today. So let's dive in because here's where it gets interesting. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast.

I am extremely delighted to be joined today by Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein, who have created and collaborated on such an important film about America and the Holocaust. Thank you both for joining me. Thank you for having us. If people are not already familiar with your prolific bodies of work, I would love to have you just give us a very brief overview of who you are and what you do. And I'll start with you, Ken. Yeah. So my name is Ken Burns. I have been making historical documentaries about the United States for almost 50 years. I have been interested in not just the kind of

dry facts and dates of the past, but also a kind of emotional archaeology that brings it together. And also speaking directly to this idea of unum, the Latin motto of the United States is e pluribus unum out of many one. Sometimes there's too much pluribus and not enough unum. The Latin motto of the United States is e pluribus unum out of many one. Sometimes there's too much pluribus and not enough unum. And I think the works have been an attempt to be about that. And they've been about the US, but they've also been about us, all the intimacy of that two-letter lowercase plural pronoun and all of the majesty and the complexity and the contradiction and even the controversy of the U.S. That's the beat that I've worked in for nearly half a century.

How about you, Sarah? Well, I'm Sarah Botstein, and I have been lucky enough to work for Ken for the last 26 years and have been able to be in the editing room and be on the producing team and watch as we've made films together on subjects ranging from jazz to the Vietnam War to Prohibition to Hemingway to the Second World War and now this. So I feel very lucky to work for him and in this incredible world that he has created, largely known as Florentine Films, it's an extraordinary group of people. I wake up really lucky I get to go to work with them. I would love to hear about why this project, why now? Now that we have, you know, had quite a bit of distance from the Holocaust, quite a bit of distance from World War II. You've worked on other World War II projects.

Why this subject and why now? Well, for us, the now part is always funny because we said yes to this project. We got down on one knee and asked the project to marry us seven years ago in 2015. It takes that long to tell these complicated stories. We had done a film together, Sarah and I and Lynn and Jeff Ward, our writer on the Second World War. And after that, and had significant amount of the Holocaust within it, but people would come up to us with questions, but also presumptions and conventional wisdom that we knew wasn't right. And so we kind of were checking a box inside of us saying we need to pursue this.

And then Jeff and I, apart from Sarah and Lynn, made a film on the history of the Roosevelts covering some of the same territory. And people came out to us asking those same questions again, presumptions about whether the United States had turned away the ship called the St. Louis, whether FDR was an anti-Semite, whether we should have bombed the rail lines to Auschwitz, some of them kind of specific, others presumptuous questions. And we sort of thought this would be important. And coincidentally, the National Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. approached us and said, we're launching an exhibition called Americans and the Holocaust, and we think it would be a good film. Can we help you make it? And we said, yes, will you help us? And they spent the next seven years being nothing but helpful, introducing us to survivors and scholars and the archival record. I would just say that because we are where we are, we're at the cusp where the survivors are dying out.

They're not going to be around that much longer. And while most of them have been recorded in some way by Steven Spielberg and his magnificent Shoah Foundation or in other forms like our film, A Handful of People, we are at a particularly fraught moment in our history where we're challenging basic assumptions. It's really important that we not forget what happened here or that we permit the perniciousness of the lies that seem to multiply like the broomsticks in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, from swamping what actually happened. And so we're very much into the truth, what actually happened, and under coming terms with the scholarship. So this is The U.S. and the Holocaust. It's three episodes. It's six and a half hours, and will premiere on PBS starting

September 18th. Sarah, I noticed at the beginning of this film, there was a statement that really stuck with me, and I think it absolutely pertained to the period of the Holocaust, absolutely pertains today, which was Americans have a difficult time deciding what kind of country they want to have. And I wonder if you can expand on that a little bit. Well, I think that's the central thesis to the film. It's the central thesis to so much of Ken's work and the work that I have done with him. And when we were figuring out how to start the film, and I think one of the most interesting times in the narrative work that we

do is the beginning and the end, how we get in and how we get out of a subject and how we started this film. We can talk a lot about today, but I think the juxtaposition between the Emma Lazarus poem and the Thomas Bailey Aldrich poem of are we a nation of immigrants? Do we have open borders? Do we want to make this a country of many varied voices, or do we want to protect ourselves and have a more monolithic, nativist, racist, anti-Semitic country? And we have seen those tensions and that dynamic play out every generation in different ways. feeling it now, as Ken was saying, in different ways than we were feeling it in 2015, and in different ways than we were feeling it in 1900, and in 1921, and in 1924, and then from 1933 on. And so I think it is the beginning of the film in those poems and the wonderful ideas

that the scholars presented to us in those early interviews about why this subject, why look at this again? And they all had that question in a slightly different way. And I think that is, you've hit the nail on the head. That's why we made the film. Yeah, I would say so. It's funny, all my professional life, people have asked me what the films are about. And I've said, in a way, we've made the same film over and over again. And each film asks a deceptively simple question. Who are we? Who are those strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans?

And while I don't think you ever answer it definitively, you sound the question. You ask it and you create a space in which people are allowed to engage that question free of the kind of animosity that Sarah was describing earlier, free of the kind of animosity that Sarah was describing earlier, free of the kind of uncivil discourse that seems to populate almost all of our conversations. And so we're looking for a place where facts are paramount, but more importantly, we understand that things are complicated. There's lots of undertow. There could be one thing and another thing that seems the opposite happening at the same time. And so our editing room has a very simple neon sign in cursive lowercase that says, it's complicated. And we want to celebrate that complexity, celebrate the undertow, celebrate the fact that as the

trumpeter Wynton Marsalis said in our jazz film, sometimes the thing and the opposite of the thing are true at the same time. I also loved how you said in the film that part of our national mythology is that we're the good people. And in some ways, that is beautifully celebrated in this film. There are so many good people who go to extraordinary lengths and say tens of thousands of people, and yet there are many, many times where government officials or popular figures actually work against that and actively demonstrate the opposite, that we're not the good people that we think we are. One of the most poignant parts of this film to me was the recordings of Charles Lindbergh. I mean, I've heard of him, you know, read about him many

times about his belief system, but to hear his actual recordings and the kind of rhetoric that he was engaged in, Charles Lindbergh being, of course, one of the most famous Americans, hands down, one of the most famous during this time period. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about Lindbergh's position and how he influenced America, perhaps to be against the better angels of our nature. That's a really good way of putting it, Sharon. That's a really good way. You know, at that time in the 1930s, the only person more famous than Charles Lindbergh was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the President of the United States. And he used his

position, Lindbergh used his position to promote first an isolationist stance with regard to the developing problems in Germany, but then actually to sort of betray his own virulent anti-Semitism in the course of it. And it is a reprehensible moment in a life that is, in many other ways, distinguished by the heroism of this first solo transatlantic airplane flight and a kind of symbolism of American grit and resolve. And this speaks again to the complexity of a history that you have to tell, that you cannot throw the baby out with the bathwater the second you find something wrong. One person asked the journalist, I have Stone, how he could possibly admire Thomas Jefferson. And Stone said, because history is tragedy,

not melodrama. In melodrama, every villain is perfectly villainous. Every hero is perfectly virtuous. In tragedy, we have, as the Greeks were telling us, heroism is not perfection, but in fact, someone at war with themselves over various aspects. Achilles has his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strengths. The kind of history we've tried to tell, that Jeff Ward has tried to write about, that Lynn Novick helps us tell, is one that is willing to tolerate those contradictions and try to understand that we are a very, very good people. As the historian Nell Painter says, we are an exceptional people, and at times we aren't.

And it behooves us, if we all believe that, and I think most Americans do, that we are harder on ourselves than we would be on anybody else. Because the only way you are exceptional and the only way you stay exceptional is to be rigorous in your own self-examination and self-criticism. And our works celebrate all of those points of light that you talk about, all of the extraordinary human beings that risk their life, but also the kind of uglier undertow and underside to the story of us, both the US Capitol and us as individuals. I kept coming back to how many of the themes throughout this film ring just as true today as they did in the 1930s and

40s. I'm like, well, that's still true. You know what I mean? Even down to a lot of the language that's used, I think a lot of Americans might be surprised to find out that Charles Lindbergh was the spokesperson for a very anti-Semitic America First public interest group, or very isolationist, and had a lot of anti-Semitic rhetoric that Americans were consuming in large numbers. History, you know, doesn't repeat itself, but as Mark Twain is supposed to have said, it rhymes. And when we began this project in a kind of a different moment in 2015, we knew that there would be lots of rhymes. The interesting and at times scary thing is how much it rhymes, how much big lies were present then, how much there was misinformation, how much people consumed and digested and believed with every fiber of their being sincerely that up was down and down was up. And it's really important to try to find some

stabilized basis, some place where we can tell the stories of us in a way that's dispassionate and feels fair. And that's the way we've always approached it. And also, I think to try to understand those positions, right? We're coming out of the Great Depression. There's a huge domestic crisis here. Being an isolationist country after the First World War wasn't a terrible idea to have. Why should we entangle ourselves in crises around the world? It's hard to put yourself back in the moment of history to understand where this rhetoric comes from on the one hand. And on the other hand, these are themes that I think we need to, I personally think we need to press against and have more nuanced, fulsome conversations as events are happening because they can feel

overwhelming. And you can get involved and do things on the most tiny little local level. It's your local school board election. It's what's happening in your hometown, big or small. And you don't have to take on the whole crisis of the entire world, but you can start small. And I think that's where those themes, as you're saying, in every page of the script, we could probably find one, right, Ken? But how to think about it, as Jeff Ward always reminds us, history is a conversation. how much the Nazis were inspired by the United States. And you said in the film, when Nazis were reproached for discrimination against Jews in Germany, their first answer was Mississippi. And you say that we should not treat these people whom we regard as inferior badly, but you do it. You have lynchings. You make it difficult for them to vote. So how dare you? It's just a horrible aspect of this. We are not responsible as Americans for the Holocaust. We

did not commit it. And yet these ideas that Sarah is talking about permeate everyone. And the Germans did study our Jim Crow, exclusionary Jim Crow laws to pass their exclusionary laws against the Jews in the early 30s. That's a fact of it. And I think we just have to come to terms with it. Hitler admired the fact that we'd exterminated or at least isolated onto reservations our native population. He thought that was a terrifically good thing. He was thrilled that we'd passed the immigration law of 1921 and 24, which established in 24 quotas for people from nations, higher quotas for the Northern Europeans and less number of people for Central and Southern, meaning Catholic and then Jews and others in Eastern Europe. So you kind of look around and you can acknowledge, as we do in the opening moments of the film, that our country did more than any other sovereign nation to bring people in. But if we had done 10 times that amount, we still would have failed,

in my estimation, given our richness, given our power, given the space that we have, the sheer bigness of our geography, and also what we think of ourselves as a good people, as an open people, as a generous people. We like to say this is a Christian nation. The whole tenet of Christianity is to give up for the other. And that did not happen in as many instances as it should with regards to the US and the Holocaust. And I think it also goes, we've been talking a lot about this notion that humans feel this need to rank and other each other. I'm better than you. You're more this than that. This kind of fictionalized notion that we talk about in the film, that is the construction of race generally,

that our immigrant populations, one upping each other, one succeeds and puts another one down? How is it that humanity seems to go against this Christian idea and continually betray and other ourselves? One of the things I was really struck by is sort of this forgotten history of the role of diplomats. And, you know, we hear heroic stories coming out of Europe all the time. We hear, you know, about Corrie Ten Boom. We hear about Oskar Schindler. We hear about individuals who went to great lengths of heroism to save 1, 2, 5, 100 individuals. But we rarely hear about the actions of American diplomats in saving, in many cases, tens of thousands of people from death in the Holocaust. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that. It's a really good story. You begin to realize very early on, and the scholar Timothy Snyder reminds us, that being a citizen

of a country, having a passport, is really the first step in an international sense, as well as a national sense, of having an identity and having somebody there to protect you. And that becomes very, very important when Hitler treats the areas that he overruns, first Poland and then into Belarus and Lithuania and Ukraine, as nowheresville. The people don't exist. It's just going to be breathing room for his Aryan race. So what you have are instances of where diplomats are impeding the helping of refugees, but you have moments where there are Hiram Bingham III out of the consular in Southern France is working with a writer from New York who just ups and comes there, both of them Protestants, and starts saving Jews by the armloads, right? Or you have this

low-level bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. in the Treasury Department named John Paley, who actually helps create the War Refugee Board, the single most important thing that the United States of America, the most powerful country on earth, did and helped more people than anybody else, essentially funding Raoul Wallenberg in Hungary. And he saw himself, though he was a Swedish diplomat, as performing an American mission. And so all of these places, you know, the bureaucrat, which is the most boring thing you could possibly imagine, turns out to be someone, the guy who's stamping this and says, yes, you're moving on.

Yes, you can leave France and go to Spain and then to Portugal and get a boat. Yes, we will take you in here. Yes, you may come. Yes, we will take you in here. Yes, you may come. Yes, you are somebody. And the opposite is also true, that when consulates are bombed or closed off, you know, the Germans bomb Rotterdam. There are 300,000 applications from mostly Jews wanting to get to the United States up in flames. Do they exist anymore? According to the people who are pursuing them? No. According to us and to any sort of big hearted human being, of course they do. We say frequently that this is in some ways a film about paperwork, right? What papers do you have? Can someone forge them? Are the papers with you?

Did you lose them? Who's going to help you with the paperwork that you need to do X, Y, or Z? As Ken just said, what happens if your paperwork is lost? It seems silly and it is a bureaucrat at a desk, again, at the most local level and at the highest level that's dealing with paperwork of an entire people. But it could save your life. It could be the difference between life and death. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve!

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podcasts. Sarah, I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about something you just mentioned, which was the impact of individual actions versus government actions. By the time the United States enters the war, of course, you know, very reticent to do so, it enters the war and it begins this strategy of the best way that we can help save people is to win the war. And all of these rescue attempts that people are asking from us are going to distract from our central mission of winning the war. the war. But if that had been the only strategy, many, many, many, perhaps hundreds of thousands more people would have died. I would love to hear more about your thoughts on individual action versus governmental action. Well, I think one of the things that we mythologize around this history, what Ken was saying earlier was about FDR and was he an anti-Semite or was he not? And he had this huge military crisis on

his hands and he had a humanitarian crisis on his hands. And because of anti-Semitism, both here in America and around the world, he had to be very, very careful with what that military message was. So you're saving the world for fascism, but not to save the Jews of Europe. So that is just already a complicated way to think about this history that we're not used to. And then what do the individuals who we've never heard from in a history book, have you ever heard of John Paley? Have you ever heard of Barry and Fry? Did you know the Quakers did more in every state in the country? I mean, it's, again, I think in every moment of American history and in world history and in human history,

it starts with an individual. It starts at home. It starts in your local level. You can do something. You can help. And celebrating that, I think, is important. And everybody who did make it here has a story of how they got here because it was that hard. And so I think Ken's right. It's, you know, Daniel Mendelsohn's cousins, and he often reminds us, if my cousins, who would totally be alive today, what would they do? How would they have contributed to society? How't hear of. We should look to their actions to inspire us in the present. And also just remind ourselves that you can have an impact even when it feels like we're seeing now around the world overwhelming to do something. So true that an individual in America or anywhere would have been like, listen, I cannot fix it. I can't fix it. Nothing I do will fix it. So I guess I'll do nothing. The problem is insurmountable.

I can do nothing. But we don't truly even know the impact of our small actions. They're impossible to quantify. And they're huge. That's right. That's exactly right. And I think what happens is that everything about history, and particularly this subject, the Holocaust, gets abstracted. It's 6 million. And what does that mean? It means nothing anymore. It's just an opaque number that you can knock on it and it won't answer. But if you begin to sort of particularize it, as the writer Daniel Mendelson says in our films, and you get to know his great uncle and great aunt and his therefore children and what happened to them, all of them perishing in different ways, six of the six million, you've done something else. You've opened it up. You've made it more human and you've made it dimensional. And it reminds you, not just in the

tragic dimensions of the loss, say, of them, but in the other ways in which individuals making one little gesture here, sometimes it's just giving some money in your disk up to help the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee or the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society or the Unitarian Friends Service or whatever it might be that helps get somebody else. Or maybe you've volunteered and you've gone to Portugal to help people get onto the boats. Or maybe you've gone to Southern France and you're risking a lot more to get people out. Or maybe you're Raoul Wallenberg risking life and limb to get. All of these things matter.

And maybe you're a soldier who's suddenly been escorted into a liberated concentration camp in Germany. And you go, now I know why I was here. Now I know what I've been fighting against. And Eisenhower came and saw it and he basically ordered people to come and see so they would understand. stand. He said to one GI, he said, still having trouble aiding them. And it was important that we bring to justice and we did those people, but more important as one GI writes back to his dad, that we stamp out the philosophy that promoted this, that somewhere along the line, that we could make abstract the value of human life, which is at the cornerstone of our existence in all of the religions, certainly in the creation of the United States, who we are as individuals. And that could be cheapened in some way to the extent where you could just decide that 6 million people attempting to eliminate 9 million, but you got six, two out of three human beings. That means

as we look at each other, the three of us, two of us disappear in the Holocaust and we're not here. There's only one of us left. That moment in the third installment of this film where Eisenhower orders, American officials and US editors, like news editors, come here and see for yourself. And those, the images and that was just, that was a lot. Yeah. No, it's, as one of our survivors, Guy Stern says in the film, it's the nadir of civilization. It's really nadir of civilization. It's really, really bad story. And we've carefully calibrated. There's not too much of that bad stuff, but enough to, I think, prick the conscience, enough to stir the heart, enough to realize, if I sit back and say, I can't do anything, therefore I'm not doing anything, you have

I can't do anything, therefore I'm not doing anything, you have abdicated to the forces that actually will be our undoing in whatever age it might be. It's the cliche that liberty requires eternal vigilance. It's absolutely true. Otherwise, somebody will figure out a way, like in George Orwell's Animal Farm, that some animals are more equal than others. that some animals are more equal than others. And you've undone the American experiment, which is a hierarchy of equals instead of the traditional hierarchy. One of the things I also really appreciated about the film was how it doesn't attempt to just tie everything up with a nice little bow and be like, well, here's what we should have done instead. Because those questions we still must profoundly wrestle with. I really appreciated how you left the viewer to wrestle with these questions along with everyone else in the film. That's one of my favorite scenes in the film for exactly that reason. And, you know, one of the

things we love to talk about is how closely we work with the advisors and academic scholars from the very beginning of deciding to make a film to the very last fact-checking thing that I was bugging Ken about last night. We are constantly trying to get it right so that the films last for generations as a way for people to understand our history. And that scene, which is one of the central things that people ask us about when they hear that we're doing this subject, they want to know about the St. Louis, they want to know about FDR and Stephen Wise, they want to know about the rail lines at Auschwitz. Deborah Lipstadt and Rebecca Erbelding were sitting right where Ken is in a rough cut of that film right next to each other. Two generations of historians, one Jewish, one not, one newly into this subject, one the leading dean of it for the world, if you could argue.

talk to us about it and then have dinner together. And they both walked away so proud to know the other and to think it through with the other. And I think that just is, to me, symbolizes everything we were trying to do, not only in that episode and in the film, but in that scene. And it is, these questions are unanswerable and pinning it on these kinds of questions keep us stuck. I love this statement, too, from Eleanor Roosevelt, where she said, we let our consciences realize too late the need of standing up against something we knew was wrong. And I hope that in the future that there can be no compromise with anything we know to be wrong. In what ways do you see that kind of idea echoing, rhyming for today, if at all? You know, there are lots of rhymes in what's going on right now. There's just a disturbing

spike in anti-Semitic violence against human beings, against synagogues, defacing of cemeteries. There's a huge increased nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment, real xenophobia that's rising. Racism, we have always been here. The notion that we're in some post-racial society is, of course, ridiculous. All of the things are always there. And I think that because the Holocaust stands as one of these horrible events, we don't mean to in any way equate anything that's gone on before or after as that. But as Deborah Lipset says, sort of echoing

Eleanor Roosevelt, the time to stop a Holocaust is before it happens. So at what point do you just sit around kind of watching the events going, oh, that's bad. Oh, that's really bad. Oh, that's horrible. Oops, I'm in a world war. And I can't actually deal with that because I've got to win that world war before I can find the way to stop it. And by then it's almost too late. So it becomes incumbent upon us to basically enjoin an active citizenship, right? One that's just involved, as Sarah is saying so well, you know, just in the moment, in wherever you have leverage in the service of what's right and true and good. You also say in the film that the temper of the Congress is the temper of the country. Yeah. And I was like, well, that's bad news.

Yes, it is. Yeah. It's not always exactly a one-to-one. It tends sometimes to lag behind other things or because of these, how shall we put them delicately, extra democratic maneuvering doesn't often represent the majority opinions of people in the United States and doesn't always reflect that. It's a very complex thing. But with regard to the Holocaust, it's really clear that the Congress represents fairly accurately a country that is so happy to have the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. And is very happy to have slammed the door on those other type of people who had been streaming in from 1870 to 1920. And to make it only, let's only let in people like us that are Protestant and white and Northern European. And let's just pretend that what had happened, we can make up for. And it's a funny sort of thing, because it breeds stupidity. It breeds a kind of ignorance,

a willful ignorance, which is what stupidity is. There's nothing wrong with not knowing. It's just when you deliberately not know that you cause so much problems and you do so much damage. And so I think that what happens is FDR is often blamed for aspects of it, but he knows what he can and he can't do. He's got a good heart. His heart's in the right place. And his wife is even more spectacular as you've already acknowledged, but he knows the reality of the politics of the situation. If he does this, he's going to run into this avalanche of stuff. And as one of our consultants says on camera, Peter Hayes, you know, we now think, you know, you should have been doing more for this, but he's focusing on getting the neutrality acts revoked. And if he hadn't gotten them to revoke, we'd be in just unbelievable deep doo-doo and this other stuff would seem less material to it. So there's a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking that takes place in history and you have to be very careful to see through it

and understand people as being of their times. And somebody once told me that good history is sitting on the edge of your chair thinking it might not turn out the way you know it did. And that's good storytelling. But also the work that you do to just how important it is to constantly remind an American citizenry of the dynamics of Washington, of the responsibility that the president has to his electorate, to the Congress, to how that functions federally and on a state level. And you can't understand the choices that everyone's making without knowing the basics of civics and the basics of democracy. And you've done an amazing job in what you do of bringing that more to the forefront. And you say in the film that we have to have an accurate view of ourselves

in the past so that we can become something different in the future. And that speaks to that same notion that we have to know the truth of who we are, what we've done, what the good things are so we can repeat them, the bad things are so we don't do that anymore. Incredibly important moving forward. One of the other things are, so we don't do that anymore. Incredibly important moving forward. One of the other things that I thought was incredibly interesting was how you trace public opinion throughout this entire film. It's referenced many times, all the polls that were done, and how much public opinion influenced America's response to the Holocaust, to the humanitarian crisis. And I wonder if you could trace a little bit more of how public opinion changed over time.

It's really important. I mean, after Kristallnacht in 1938, 86% of American Protestants, 85% of American Catholics, and 25% of American Jews didn't want to let anybody in despite the evidence of this thing coming. Within a few years, as you're beginning to awaken to the Nazi tragedies, Americans are now fully in favor of doing something to stop the Nazis. But they're still, even at the end of the war, when the full evidence of what took place is there in pictures in the newsreel houses, only 5% of Americans want to bring in more refugees. And that just begins to tell you it was very important. And one of our scholars, Daniel Green, has done a lot about trying to take the temperature

of Americans at any given point, because then you can understand where people are operating from. Why didn't this happen? Well, you can understand why it didn't happen. Why didn't this politician do this? Well, if you can find out what his constituents think, it's not enough to blame it all. It's all, you know, the great man theory says, well, it's Roosevelt did this. It's the entire country theory that we sort of subscribe to. And I think to Sarah's point, and what you do too, is that the othering is so critical to understanding what happened. And it goes back to my thing, that, you know, it's all about us. And what I realized is there's only us, period. There's no

them. And anytime you see anybody making a them, run away from them. Because we're all in this together. And are we different political views? Yeah. Are we different religions? Yeah. Are we different heights? Yes. Are we different weights? Yes. Are we different sexes? Yes. You know, all of the different things that we are is still us. Know them. I think polling is so important in this part of 20th century history because it's relatively new as Danny Green explains to us in the film. And we're always going to those polls to try to understand precisely what your question is getting at,

which is what were Americans really thinking and what did they really know? So the polling coupled with, I think, where the reporting was happening, because the other thing we like to think is that we didn't know what was happening. We like to think that generally about ourselves, right? Well, I didn't know that.

Well, if you're an engaged person and you read the newspaper, you knew it was going on much earlier than most Americans understand that we knew that the Jews were being persecuted and it was getting harder and harder to get here and that we were closing our doors and making it harder and harder rather than making it easier. So the polling is interesting for that too, although it was new and you always have to be both suspicious and lean into a poll the way we do now, it was extremely helpful tool. And if anyone listening is interested in the exhibition at the Holocaust Museum did, which

is now a traveling exhibition and they have a really amazing educational resource online, you can go there and understand exactly what the polling was showing at every given moment, some of which we highlight, as Ken was just saying in the film, and some of which was a little bit ancillary to what we were doing in the film. But polling and reporting in American newspapers are really important to this topic. Yeah, you mentioned in the film about how difficult it was for an ordinary American to get their arms around this idea that even when they begin to accept that like Hitler was really mistreating, not just Jews, but also other ethnic groups, other religions, et cetera, they could not get their arms around the scale, the scope. Because how could you? In fact, Daniel Mendelsohn describes talking to a

survivor and he said, we couldn't believe it while it was happening. So how could our relatives in the United States even perceive it, let alone the general public with no direct connection to this could understand it. You hear reports that it's 1 million killed or 2 million killed, or you now believe that maybe it's 2 million, but it can't possibly be 4, though it's 5 already, stuff like that. And it's just the industrial scale. So for us, it was really important and not, this is the US and the Holocaust, what we knew and what we didn't know, what we should have known, what we did, what we didn't do, what we should have done, I suppose. But it's also what actually happened, because we have to prove it to ourselves, the filmmakers and the audience, as we watch American reporters and American politicians

interpret data, and then down the line, what the American public, how it is in interpreting the data that's coming in. And that's where it gets so complex and so, I think in retrospect, frustrating and interesting too. I mean, it's just how that thing goes on. One of the central takeaways that I had was this quote, and I would love to hear from each of you what you hope the viewer of this film takes away. But one of the things that I took away was, of this film takes away. But one of the things that I took away was it's not enough to indulge in horrified humanitarianism, empty resolutions, and pious words. That's not enough. And I would love to hear from each of you. What do you hope the viewer takes away from this? You know, I think you hit the nail on the head again, Sharon. As storytellers,

when we finish something, it really becomes the viewers. It's no longer ours. And we don't want to set any specific thing that viewers will take away because we know that each person will come to it. You cried at a different point than I did, that Sarah did, or that someone else who sees the film will, or be moved by something else, or say, I didn't know that, or whatever. So what we want is just for people to be aware of where we've been in order to know a little bit better where we are, in order to make sure that the future is better than what now is. But that is true of every film that we've made, you know, but it's no more urgent than it is now with this film and where we are now, where we find ourselves as a country and as a people.

So the story, you know, coming from a different era, all of a sudden speaks in a much more amplified voice to the moment we find it in. And so we would be not good storytellers if we said, oh, you should do this and then do this, this, this, and this. Everybody will respond. But I think it's in your question and in the way you frame that, that it can't be empty, right? It can't be abstracted. It can't just be an intellectual exercise. It has to do, as Sarah's been saying over and over again, it has to do about what you're going to do. It requires being, doing something and making something happen and making the world a better place. And it doesn't have to be on a grand

global scale. You can't wait and stay outside of the game until you see how you can affect everything. You just go down to your library or go down to your school or go down to the town hall and start doing something, right? That's it. Something that makes it better for everybody, not the people who vote the way you vote, but everybody. I think to highlight the fact that we are privileged to live in a place where we can vote, where our voice does matter, as Ken is saying, on the smallest level, which is your local library, your local school board election, your local senator, your local politicians that represent the community you live in. And it is really shocking when Americans learn how few people actually vote. Forget in a big election where we think everyone's listening all the time, the number is pathetically small. But on these smaller elections where the beginnings of these conversations, everyone shouts really,

really loud, but they don't drive the 10 minutes to make their voice heard and they don't listen to the opposing side. So for me, I think it's about having a conversation as a country, realizing whatever our position is, we're privileged to be here and we should respect that privilege by literally voting. And listening to the other, because right now, one of the other things that's happening is that we are assaulting the institutions that we used to take for granted, regardless of your political persuasion. And that is the greatest danger. That's what happened in Germany. When you falsely blamed somebody else for election result, it then allowed you to take over and make

it one-sided. And then it was no longer, your vote no longer mattered. It was whatever the state said. And that's the scary thing. Our political rhetoric gets so overheated that we say stuff that isn't true. And by saying it often enough, it becomes true. So that just requires everybody to be good, is what I say. Be good and do good and be truthful and honest. I love at the end how you highlight the fragility of civilized behavior. Then we tend to speak to what you were saying, Ken. We tend to think of the sepia colored pictures as them. There is no them. There is only us. And those people, and one of the people you spoke to in the film says, those people in the sepia colored pictures,

they are the people you see at the dry cleaner. They're the people you see at the market. They're not them. They are no different than us. Where can people watch this film? Where can educators access the materials? I can't stress enough how valuable I found it, how moved I was, how much I learned, even as a pretty well-educated woman on this topic. Us too. We go in telling you what you should know, what we know. We share with you our process of discovery. We have learned so much. We are privileged to have this position. And as Sarah said, we're privileged to be with public broadcasting that gives us the time and the space free of commercial interruption. It will be on starting September

18th and 19th and the 20th. It'll be available for free streaming for several weeks. But most important, as Sarah alluded to, and I'll let her speak to it, we have worked not just with the Holocaust Museum and their longstanding educational, but with PBS that has the ability to reach every classroom in America to have a very robust educational outreach so that this film, as many of our other previous films that are decades old, enjoy a place in that. Sarah? Yeah. So the PBS Learning Media, which is any teacher can go onto PBS Learning Media and register. There are lesson plans. We made six special lesson plans for this film that range in topics from the symbol of the Statue of Liberty to media literacy,

understanding imagery, what's happening in the image, who took the picture, who's dying in the picture, who's perpetrating the, what's happening in any piece of documentary evidence. Those lesson plans are all available. Ken, Lynn, and I will be doing seminars for teachers throughout the school year. We're partnering with organizations around the country from the Shoah Foundation to Facing Histories, Echoes and Reflections, and all of those materials are available to any teacher that wants them on PBS Learning Media in the Ken Burns Classroom, which is one of our most favorite places to go. And we love the teachers that we've worked with.

We've worked with teachers, again, from around the country who are not Holocaust scholars. They teach in language, arts, and history, and they're trying to get students to think about this subject in different and new ways as are we. So, thanks to PBS and Learning Media. I hope all the teachers will see us, meet us on some webinar, and that our students like the materials, and we always look at feedback that we get from the classroom. So thank you so much. Thank you for being here today and thank you for your work. Thank you.

Thank you for your work. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson,

edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.