The U.S. and the Holocaust, part 2: "Yearning to Breathe Free" (Florentine Films, WETA, PBs, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 I watched “Yearning to Breathe Free,” the second of Ken Burns’ three-part mini-series The U.S. and the Holocaust, dealing with the years 1938 to 1942. Burns co-directed it with his partner, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein, and like the first part, “The Golden Door” (aired on Sunday. Usually PBS has shown Burns’ mega-documentaries several nights running, but we had to wait two days between parts one and two of this one because Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral took place on Monday and PBS devoted its whole schedule to it, airing the full event – all 10–plus hours of it – live, followed by a two-hour edited version prepared by the BBC, thus living up to the joke first made in the 1970’s that PBS was simply “BBC West.” The U.S. and the Holocauist remains a frightening documentary, at least partly because so little has changed; though the original Nazis are history and they inoculated the world against the virus of racism for two generations or so, our immunity has worn off and we are once again seeing and hearing people in the streets of the U.S. as well as other countries literally hailing what Hitler and his band of thugs tried to do and calling for a return to it. Some of the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 were wearing T-shirts that read “Camp Auschwitz,” “Arbeit Macht Frei” (the notorious inscription on the gates of the original Auschwitz, which means “Work Makes You Free”) and the most horrifying one to me, “6MWE” – which stands for “Six Million Weren’t Enough.”

The story of the U.S.’s response to the Holocaust has its heroes and its villains, and they don’t always turn up where you’d expect. Among the heroes were Varian Fry, an American Protestant Christian who, along with his colleague Homer Bingham (son of a wildly racist U.S. Congressmember), traveled to Vichy in unoccupied France to get out as many Jews as he possibly could. His initial purpose was to rescue Jews who are well known artists, musicians, filmmakers and intellectuals – among the people he helped to get out were Hannah Arendt (author of the later book Eichmann in Jerusalem, which in addition to its controversial portrayal of Adolf Eichmann as essentially amoral rather than immoral is also a concise one-volume history of the Holocaust and how officials in the various occupied nations did their best either to facilitate the Holocaust or to monkey-wrench it), Max Ernst, Max Ophuls (a Belgian/German Jewish film director whose son, Marcel Ophuls, would become a documentarian famous for mega-movies about the Holocaust and the Nazi occupations like The Sorrow and the Pity, The Memory of Justice and Hotel Terminus), sculptor Jazques Lipschitz and avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp. But Fry and Bingham expanded their task and sought to help Jews who weren’t prominent intellectuals or artists get out, too, and eventually Fry was given the Righteous Among the Nations medal by the government of Israel (the same award the Israeli government gave to Oskar Schindler).

Among the villains was Breckenridge Long, whom President Roosevelt inexplicably put in charge of European immigration during the war – his first name alone, also the last name of a famous Confederate general, should have alerted the President and anyone else to his lack of commitment to equal rights – and who used his authority not to open the golden door but to shut it ever tighter. The film tells the story of the St. Louis, the German-owned ocean liner which set sail from Hamburg in 1939 with 1,200 Jews aboard bound for Havana, Cuba, only while the ship was in mid-ocean the Cuban government revoked the visas of everyone on board and refused to let the ship dock in Havana harbor. Eventually the ship returned to Europe; its captain, an anti-Nazi German who had agreed to take down the legally required portrait of Hitler when the Jewish passengers were using the big communal space for Sabath services, had briefly considered deliberately running it aground on the shores of some neutral country so its government would have to take in his passengers according to the laws of the sea, but in the end he made arrangements with various European governments to take in his passengers so at least he wouldn’t have to return them to Germany. The cruel irony is that many of the countries in which he placed them – notably Denmark and The Netherlands – were themselves conquered by the Nazis. In fact, over and over again Burns, Novick, Botstein and their writer, Geoffrey C. Ward, made the point that as Nazi Germany expanded, so did its Jewish population.

The crisis reached its peak when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 and quickly overran western Russia as well as Ukraine and moch of the territory that are now post-Soviet “independent” states. (I put the word “independent” in quotation marks because, as the Ukrainians are learning to their horror, the current government of Russia will not allow any countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, and the Czarist Empire before that, to be truly independent.) Having trusted Hitler and Germany to live up to the non-aggression pact signed between the two countries in August 1939, under which the Nazis and the Soviets had combined to conquer and divvy up Poland between them (a cruel echo of the various partitions of Poland between Russia, Prussia and Austria in the 19th and 19th centuries), Russia had left its western border undefended and allowed the Nazis to advance quickly. It was when Hitler and his troops invaded Russia and easily conquered moch oif its territory that Hitler decided the old ways of getting rid of the German Jews – driving them intostarvation, penury and exile (at one point, according to this program, 25 percent of the German government’s budget was coming from wealth and property expropriated from Jews) weren’t efficient enough.

It was in the summer and fall of 1941 that tne Nazis made it their policy not just to punish the Jews and officially declare them non-citizens, but actually to kill them en masse. Their first thought was to organize squads called the Einsatzgrüppen to shoot them. Later they set up vans with the exhaust fumes reworked to pump carbon monoxide into the vans’ cargo space, thus killing everyone inside. Finally they hit on the idea of mass-producing the slaughter (one of Hitler’s personal heroes was Henry Ford, not only because he was a master of more and more efficient methods of production but because he was himself a notorious anti-Semite whose book, The International Jew, Hitler cited as a source) by building giant gas chambers and filling them, first with carbon monoxide and then, when German companies couldn’t manufacture that gas in sufficient quantities, with a new chemical called Zyklon-B. This episode of The U.S. and the Holocaust ends with an account of how the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park figured out, based on the secret dispatches they were reading from the German codes they had broken, that the Holocaust was going on – but Winston Churchill and the other British government and military leaders decided to let it keep happening because any attempts to target the killilng centers or anywhere else in the Nazis’ elaborate death machinery would reveal to the Germans that the Allies had broken their codes.

I’ve read in other sources about the war and the Holocaust that the Allied military commanders decided early on not to divert military resources to tro to stop the Holocaust because they felt they needed to concentrate on winning the war, and once they did that they could stop the mass murder of Jews and other Nazi targets (Communists, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people, political dissidents and Queers). Meanwhile the Nazis were hurting their own war effort by diverting so many resources from the war to carry out the mass murders, so their inhumanity was not only evil but counterproductive to their own goals. And inevitably the film focuses a great deal on Anne Frank, the world’s most famous Holocaust victim, and her father Otto Frank, who thought he and his family would be safe in the Netherlands because the Dutch had stayed neutral douring World War I and he figured they would be able to do that again in World War II. At one onint toe Franks had actually scored visas to emigrate to the U.S. – only a Nazi air raid on the port of Rotterdam destroyed the American consulate and, with it, the Franks’ legal papers that at least might have enabled them to make their escape.