By Leonard Chan

Did you see the Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust? If you didn’t see it, why not?

Are you a supporter of movements such as “Stop AAPI Hate” or other anti-racism movements and didn’t watch this program? Here’s why you should.

In the opening of the documentary, it is March of 1933 and we are introduced to Otto Frank and his family – his wife Edith, and his two daughters, seven-year-old Margot and three-year-old Annelies (better known as Anne Frank and for her famous diary). We are told that the Frank family could trace their ancestry in Germany back to the 16th Century and that Otto had fought for Germany in the First World War. Even though Otto considered himself a patriotic German, many of his fellow countrymen saw him as anything but.

On that sunny March day when the Franks took their stroll in downtown Frankfurt, they were still relatively free to go about like any other German citizens, but within around 12 years, Otto Frank’s family (except for Otto, who had managed to survive) and over six million European Jews would be killed merely for being who they were. It had gone from thug beatings and vandalizing to mass murder in gas vans and chambers, and shootings in pits in approximately eight years.

As being among the minorities of America that are often seen as “perpetual foreigners,” this message resonated with me. Even after hundreds of years of living in Germany, the Franks were still not seen as Germans. They were made into scapegoats, persecuted, and ultimately stripped of their humanity. Even leaving to a neighboring country could not save them.

In the very next scene of The U.S. and the Holocaust, we hear Emma Lazarus’ sonnet “The New Colossus” (the well know poem on a plaque inside the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”) followed by a poem by Thomas Bailey Aldrich called “Unguarded Gates” (which was a rebuttal to Emma Lazarus’ poem: “O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well to leave the gates unguarded?...”).

Even though this is a documentary about the Holocaust, The U.S. and the Holocaust devotes much to the telling of the United States’ history on racism, xenophobia, and nativism, especially as it applies to immigration policy. This is how the Holocaust most connects to Asian Americans and everyone living in the US.

Through this documentary we see the other pieces of the puzzle that help to give context to some things like the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese Internment, and anti-Asian attitudes and immigration policies.

One of the things that sticks out in my memory is an incident I observed while attending a lecture  about Angel Island. There was a Chinese man in the audience that objected to Angel Island being called the Ellis Island of the West. From his perspective, Angel Island was more of a detention facility meant to keep Asian immigrants out. Upon seeing another documentary about Ellis Island, I began to see that he was mistaken. The US immigration policy on Ellis Island and the East Coast was similar. It just didn’t happen right away.

For forty plus years after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Europeans were still allowed to come in very large numbers (I think over 25 million was the figure I heard in The U.S. and the Holocaust). But that did not mean that attitudes were a lot better towards those immigrants. By 1924, immigration quota limits began to severely limit immigration by non-Northern Europeans too, especially Jews. By that time, nearly all Asians were being excluded.

These quota limits and the overly zealous enforcement of these policies by anti-Semites in the Roosevelt administration would later prevent many more refugee Jews from coming to America at their greatest time of need. Sadly, this documentary also tells of how the Franks were among those that had applied and were not allowed in.

I don’t know if these anti-Semites in the Roosevelt administration were the same individuals that helped to convince Roosevelt of the need to lock up Japanese Americans during World War II, but they were probably from the same cloth of people that had the President’s ear.

Although I and some of you may be familiar with aspects of the history of racism in the United States, The U.S. and the Holocaust gives more details on anti-Semitism and some of the famous people that supported those views. It even delves into how Hitler was inspired by the racist views of people like Henry Ford, by America’s enactment of Jim Crow Laws to disenfranchise African Americans, and by US’s ethnic cleansing of Native Americans. I never knew of the direct connection of Hitler’s ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe and America’s removal of Native Americans until I saw The U.S. and the Holocaust.

Perhaps what is most important to this documentary is that it is a cautionary alarm that warns of the increasing racism and authoritarianism in America and around the world.

Here is small bit of what Ken Burns said in a panel discussion about their new documentary (from the discussion The Holocaust and Authoritarianism Today):

“Every film that we’ve made, has in some ways resonated in the present moment. Human nature doesn’t change. Mark Twain is supposed to have said that ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.’ Our discipline as film makers is to make sure that we attend to telling our story of the past, trusting that those rhymes will be self-evident, that we don’t need to isolate them and put neon signs or big arrows pointing to ‘look, isn’t this so much like today.’ But almost everything that takes place is very much like today. Human behavior remains the same in all its good and all its bad ways. With this film in particular, I think we were stunned over the course of making it at just the extent to which it was resonating with the present. And I think nowhere than in the rise of anti-Semitism and racism, xenophobia, and nativism around the world, but also as a kind of flirtation with or direct interest in authoritarianism. And so I think that brings us to this moment.”

When I was in grammar school, I remember having to get parental permission to watch a documentary on the Holocaust. The visuals from that documentary are forever burned into my mind. What that documentary didn’t seem to leave in my memory was the how and why of the Holocaust and its connection with America.

The U.S. and the Holocaust was much more than a telling of the direct horrors. It filled in many of these unanswered questions and gives context to the times when it all happened.

Please watch The U.S. and the Holocaust. If viewing the horrors of the Holocaust are too much for you to bear, then at least watch Episode 1 of this documentary (which doesn’t show that much of the worst parts of the atrocities) and the accompanied extra discussions about it (The Holocaust and Authoritarianism Today and The Holocaust and Refugees, Lessons for Today).

They are well worth your time.