I watched the Ken Burns series on the Holocaust last week and couldn’t turn my eyes away. In the past I have spent quite a bit of time learning and thinking about this dreadful series of events. Yet this viewing brought new experiences, new information that made me even more grateful to my father, George Perl.
A sophisticated, highly cultured Hungarian, he was 43 in 1938 when he made the decision to leave what he later described as a “somewhat luxurious” life in Budapest. He packed up my very reluctant mother, age 31, and my sister, 7, and me, 2, arriving in New York in April of 1939, just months before the outbreak of war. In order to be less conspicuous, the family traveled with only the suitcases they might have taken on a winter vacation.
My parents were secular Jews, nonobservant for several generations, but they had converted to Catholicism in 1934. Hungary had become increasingly unhospitable to Jews and by the late ’30s was passing ever more restrictive laws. Still, few Hungarians seemed to see what my father saw, or weren’t yet acting on it. A visit to his father-in-law in Vienna after the arrival of the Nazis there had made up his mind. He went directly to the U.S. consulate and applied for visas. Without his remarkably clear thinking and quick action, our lives might have been entirely different. We might not have had lives at all, as this documentary makes plain.
As in his previous historical series, Burns floods you with images and analysis, description and narrative. For anyone who has seen Claude Landsmann’s immense documentary, “Shoah,” many of the accounts and images are horribly familiar. But what Burns has done here is to put the horrors into an American context. How the politics worked, how the bureaucrats dragged their, perhaps antisemitic feet, what the newspapers showed and didn’t show. There is the familiar voice of Franklin D. Roosevelt delivering speeches I’d never heard. There was the unfamiliar voice of the Nazi-sympathizing Charles Lindberg, with images of huge pro-German rallies that he led. And of course, there were the many talking heads.
Most impressive to me were the amazingly level and yet highly emotional accounts of several survivors, now in late old age. Along with them were a collection of well-informed historians, including Daniel Mendelson, who had returned to the village in Ukraine from which members of his family were sent to their deaths.
Burns has a point to make: that these events and the impulses that made them a reality do not just exist in the past. Antisemitism along with anti-immigrant and white supremacist sentiments are still strong and dangerous presences, as exemplified in attacks on synagogues and in the chants of the demonstrators in Charlottesville in 2017. Mob rule driven by hatred, lies and propaganda is still alive and well, as Burns showed in images of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
God help us if we don’t find ways to confront this evil.
Marietta Pritchard, of Amherst, is a former Gazette features editor.