How to prevent a Holocaust

On "The U.S. and the Holocaust," Tom Stoppard's "Leopoldstadt," and living with—and without—history.

When people talk about whether the United States could have intervened to stop the Holocaust, the question is usually a military one: should we have bombed the supply routes to Auschwitz, for instance. But in The U.S. and the Holocaust, the documentary that aired on PBS last fall and is now streaming, Ken Burns and his team ask it differently. What if America had prevented the mass murder of the Jews of Europe before it happened—by welcoming the thousands of refugees who tried to flee Hitler?

In six hours of television that range from detailed analyses of U.S. immigration policy to the emotional stories of those who escaped, the documentary makes it clear that the Statue of Liberty’s “golden door” is a myth. As historian Peter Hayes quips, shutting out would-be immigrants is “as American as apple pie.” Starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act and continuing through the quota system of the 1920s and 1930s, The U.S. and the Holocaust argues that racist and xenophobic State Department officials were instrumental in keeping desperate European Jews from entering this country—and that part of the culpability for their genocide rests on American shoulders.

Four of those Jews were Anne Frank and her family. As an employee at YIVO discovered in 2005 while sorting through files, in 1941 Otto Frank asked his longtime friend Nathan Straus, then the director of the federal Housing Authority, to help him procure a U.S. visa. “I am forced to look out for emigration and as far as I can see U.S.A. is the only country we could go to,” Otto wrote. But even Straus and his wife, wealthy American Jews who were friends with the Roosevelts, could not come up with the necessary payments and affidavits before the U.S. entry into the war made emigration impossible. Multiply Anne Frank by 1.5 million—the number of children murdered by the Nazis—and we start to have a small sense of what was lost.

Anne, Edith, and Margot Frank on the main square in Frankfurt, 1933. Courtesy Anne Frank Fonds.

I discuss the Franks’ emigration attempt, as well as the documentary, in much more detail in this essay in the latest New York Review of Books. Here I want to share a few paragraphs that didn’t make it into the final draft, about the new Tom Stoppard play Leopoldstadt, the story of a family that didn’t try to get out. The play, which Stoppard wrote in the wake of his discovery of his own Jewish origins, follows a large Viennese Jewish family that resembles the one in which Otto Frank grew up in Germany: well-to-do, assimilated, and mostly in denial about the impending disaster. In the opening scene, set at a sumptuous Christmas party in 1899, two brothers-in-law argue about the burgeoning Zionist movement. “Don’t fall for this Judenstaat idiocy,” Hermann Merz says to Ludwig Jacobowicz, referencing Theodor Herzl’s recently published pamphlet envisioning a Jewish state. “Do you want to do mathematics in the desert? … We’re Austrians.” Fifty years earlier, Jews couldn’t travel without a permit or live outside Vienna’s Jewish quarter, known as Leopoldstadt. Now they hobnob with the upper crust of Austrian society. But Ludwig sounds a note of caution: “A Jew can be a great composer. He can be the toast of the town. But he can’t not be a Jew. In the end, if it doesn’t catch up on him, it will catch up on his children.”

The Christmas party scene in Leopoldstadt. Photo: Joan Marcus.

As the years progress, the characters alter, but the problem remains the same. “I want to go to America!” announces a member of the younger generation in 1924, dressed as a flapper. Her cousin Rosa has managed to emigrate. But the rest are both stubbornly committed to their life in Vienna and still debating whether they really belong there. Nellie, sewing a red flag, argues for socialism: with fascism “only a step away,” there are “more important things now than being a Jew.” A cousin cautions her that socialist or not, “Jews will get blamed anyway—strikes, inflation, bank failures, bolshevism, the black market, modern art.”

By 1938, the family apartment is no longer luxurious: unheated, stripped of its ornaments, it has become little more than a squat for those who remain. A British journalist, now engaged to Nellie, reports sardonically on the Evian conference: “President Roosevelt’s invitation to the countries taking part was at pains to make it understood that no country would be expected or asked to take in more Jews than was permitted under its existing legislation. So they weren’t and they didn’t.” Palestine isn’t an option: the British, now in charge, are restricting entry, and anyway, “the Arabs don’t want you,” as Nellie tells her mother. Cousin Rosa, who made it to America, is trying to get visas for those who remain, but they will have to surrender virtually all their possessions in order to leave. The debate is interrupted by the arrival of a Nazi, who informs all present that they must vacate the apartment by the next day. “Did you think you were Austrians, you parasite bitch?” he asks Nellie’s mother.

Representatives of 32 countries attended the Evian Conference to discuss the international refugee problem. Only the Dominican Republic offered to take in more refugees. Courtesy Yad Vashem Archives.

After the war, Leo (formerly Leopold), Nellie’s son—adopted by the British journalist and, like Stoppard, brought up to think of himself as English—learns the painful truth about what happened to the family he barely remembers. The promised U.S. visas came through on the day Germany invaded Poland, closing all frontiers. “After that, not a single Jew left Austria except in a cattle car.” Despite their wealth, their culture, their intermarriage, even their conversions, the ghetto Leopoldstadt was where they ended up. But the name—literally, “Leopold’s city”— is also a kind of code for Vienna. It was Leo’s home all along, though he didn’t know it.

Most American Jews don’t need Leopoldstadt, or The U.S. and the Holocaust, to tell us what happened to the Jews who were left behind. Many of us have a Leopoldstadt of our own: mine is Łódź, Poland, from which my grandparents fled in the first days of the war. But the tension between these two works has been troubling me.

Burns and his colleagues clearly intend their show to serve as a warning about the seeds of authoritarianism in present-day America. The similarities between the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust and the contemporary treatment of undocumented immigrants in the United States are indeed discomfiting; meanwhile, the problem of finding safe haven for the world’s refugees—whether they come from Latin America, Syria, Ukraine, or the increasing number of regions becoming uninhabitable due to climate change—is not going to go away. As I argue in my essay, “The world’s more fortunate nations, including but not limited to the United States, are morally obligated to enact fair and consistent policies for the treatment of migrants, which too often has been characterized by unconscionable inhumanity.”

At the same time, while much about the Holocaust is today understood as having universal implications—including, of course, Anne’s Diary and especially the play adapted from it—its particular lessons about the dangers of antisemitism may remain unlearned. A survey conducted in 2021 by the American Jewish Committee revealed that one in four Jews had been the target of antisemitism in the previous year, while more than half the members of the general public surveyed said they either “hadn’t heard much” or “had heard nothing at all” about the rise in antisemitic attacks.

“You live as if without history,” Nathan tells Leo at the end of Leopoldstadt. I wondered if the play’s audience—which included many American Jews, judging from the laughter at the circumcision jokes and the voices chiming in to sing “Ma Nishtana” during the Passover seder scene—grasped the full implications of what he meant. Shouldn’t it make us nervous to watch Hermann Merz boasting of his Austrian bona fides, knowing how little they would matter? And if Hermann was not as assimilated as he believed, can we be certain that the same isn’t true for us?

Where I’ll be

At home, trying to finish my book about Anne Frank! My deadline is at the end of this month. But on June 12, which would have been Anne’s 94th birthday, 92Y is airing a prerecorded conversation between me and Dina Kraft, who ghost-wrote Hannah Pick-Goslar’s wonderful new memoir, My Friend Anne Frank, reviewed here by Francine Prose. (My newsletter about Pick-Goslar, published after she died last fall, is one of my most popular posts.) Even if you already know a lot about Anne’s story—and, as a reader of this newsletter, you probably do—this book is not to be missed for its insights into Hannah’s generous, caring nature and her own remarkable story of imprisonment and survival in Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen. Sign up here.

What I’m reading, watching, etc.

I’m almost finished with Means of Ascent, the second volume of Robert A. Caro’s (projected) five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. There’s nothing but admiration for Caro among biographers these days, but to be honest, I’m finding this one a little too bogged down in the details. The entire volume is devoted to the 1948 election that put LBJ in the Senate, and the ways in which he manipulated voters and votes to steal it. I’m still tweeting about it with the hashtag #caroin2023.

And like everyone else, I was there for the Succession finale—although I can’t help feeling, now that it’s over, that the heart of this show was essentially empty. Yes, the performances and the writing were great, but in the end, was it actually about anything, other than a dysfunctional family and their corrupt empire? Comments are open; convince me otherwise.

As ever,

Ruth

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are considered, by some, to dream.”—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House