The US and the Holocaust, BBC4 review — harrowing account of national shame

In The Plot Against America, Philip Roth presented an alternative history in which the antiwar, anti-Semitic president Charles Lindbergh led the US down a dark, unconscionable path in the 1940s. But even more disquieting than this meditation on what might have been is a new comprehensive account of what actually was.

In an outstanding documentary mini-series directed by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, The US and the Holocaust confronts the national shame lost in narratives of military victory and belated moral triumph. Over three parts it tells the devastating story of Nazi evil and American apathy; of a “nation of immigrants” who failed to help Jewish refugees; and of a genocide which was eventually fought against but might have been prevented.

The near-seven-hour PBS original is a work of daunting scale, arresting detail and immense emotional weight. Spanning the early 20th century to the aftermath of the second world war, it offers both an authoritatively narrated survey of events leading up to the Holocaust and a close examination of the social, economic and even psychological factors that caused a majority of Americans to oppose refugee immigration at home and intervention abroad.

At almost every juncture, the US chose to stifle rather than aid, to build bureaucratic walls rather than tear them down — essentially handing out a death sentence with every denied visa. Individual and influential anti-Semites are identified as having pushed for various persecutory restrictions, but the aim of the series is not to apportion blame to specific policies or people. Instead it persuasively presents the inadequacy of response as the product of a pervasive culture of intolerance, paranoia and exceptionalism. “It’s on a lot of people, it’s on everyone,” surmises historian Deborah Lipstadt.

But in tacit rebuke of those years of American isolationism, the series ensures that it not only looks inwards at the US, but outwards to the victims of the Holocaust. Throughout the three films, we hear the childhood recollections of a handful of survivors, who lived through Kristallnacht, deportation, family separation and the camps. Their testimonies provide an essential, tangible sense of the human toll that can become lost amid the incomputable statistics.

These accounts are difficult to process and the accompanying footage of ghettos, executions and mass graves are often too much to stomach. The instinct might be to switch off in overwhelming moments, but we’re compelled to bear witness to the horrors, rather than evade as so many did at the time.

Like the best documentaries this one asks us not just to remember the past but to consider how we’d do things differently in the future. An impactful coda with scenes of recent synagogue shootings, white supremacist marches and the attack on Congress reminds us that it could always happen again.

★★★★★

Airing weekly on BBC4 from Monday at 10pm and on BBC iPlayer; on PBS in the US