Kenny Epstein remembers the two deeply troubled European youngsters his father helped support in Chicago for many years after World War II. He remembers the unease he felt, at age eight or nine, upon meeting one of them and sensing something horribly wrong with her. His father explained, “She had a hard life.”
He later learned the two had lived through the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.
As Epstein aged, he met other Holocaust survivors, “special, special people” whose descriptions of their horrific experiences left lasting impressions.
“They told me that if you don’t tell everyone about it, it will be forgotten,” Epstein said. “I remembered that.”
Those experiences are among the reasons that Epstein, owner of the El Cortez Hotel-Casino in downtown Las Vegas, helped sponsor the Las Vegas broadcast of the new Ken Burns documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust. The first installment of the three-part six-hour series will air Sept. 18 on PBS stations nationwide. The documentary, co-directed by Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, focuses on the United States’ mixed reactions to the Nazi program of demonizing and subjugating Jews.
Denying entry to many, even Anne Frank
The documentary shows that while America accepted more German refugees than any other country, it tightened immigration rules to deny entry to even more, including Anne Frank and her family before they went into hiding. The discovery and publication of the teenager’s writings during the two years she and her family hid from Nazi occupiers in Amsterdam made her into a potent and poignant symbol of the Holocaust.
In 1939, before the war started in Europe, U.S. officials would not allow more than 900 Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis from Germany to land in Florida.
PBS says the documentary tells of numerous Americans heroically saving individual Jews, boycotting German goods, and protesting Nazism; it also explores global antisemitism and racism of the time, along with the impact of the U.S. eugenics movement, Jim Crow laws in the South, and blatant antisemitism by American luminaries, including Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh.
During the Holocaust, the German government systematically killed six million Jews and about 10 million other people considered “inferior” because of their religion, race, or other factors, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Germany’s state-sanctioned discrimination against Jews began after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, but most of the killings happened between 1941 and 1945.
Because the Holocaust happened 80 years ago, some Americans don’t even know about it, said Epstein, an advisor for CDC Gaming Reports. “That’s why I’m sponsoring the program.” He said he’s frequently donated privately to PBS, but this is the hotel’s first sponsorship of a program. The El Cortez is one of four sponsors for one evening of the documentary.
Local sponsors critical for PBS
Vegas PBS, the only PBS station in southern Nevada, has “a very large footprint” that extends through the middle of Nevada, said Mary Mazur, president and general manager. She described local sponsors as “critical to our lifeblood.”
She said the documentary grew out of research for The War, a 2007 Burns-Novick documentary about World War II. “There was an untold domestic story that he felt really needed the attention and focus,” Mazur said. “It doesn’t reflect our finest hours in every way.” She said Vegas PBS hopes the documentary will serve as a springboard for conversations leading to “resilience and hope and healing throughout southern Nevada.”
Unlike most PBS operations, the Vegas PBS license is held by a school district – Clark County School District, the country’s fifth largest, serving 305,000 students, or 64 percent of the students in the state. Documentaries and other PBS materials come with a variety of curriculum possibilities, Mazur said.
“We’ve created a professional development series that has just exploded within the high schools,” she added. “Teachers will be able to utilize material from this documentary for civics, history, and English courses. So far, we’ve had over 200 teachers sign up to take this professional-development course.”
‘Overcome with emotion’
Epstein recalled his reactions after visiting the 9/11 Memorial in New York City, along with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, both in Washington, D.C. Each generates a sense of loss and reverence from the formal acknowledgement of so many deaths.
“You can’t say you liked it. You can’t say you hated it. There are no words to describe it,” he said. “You get overcome with emotion. I hope people get that same feeling when they watch this (program).”
Epstein recently read a commentary about a non-Holocaust topic that quoted Cicero, a statesman and philosopher in ancient Rome: “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of a human life if it is not woven into the life of our ancestors by the record of history?”
For him, that underscores the necessity of learning about, as well as learning from, the mistakes of our predecessors. He cited a civics class he took around 1960. The subject that day involved Germany’s concentration camps for Jews during the Holocaust, and a Japanese-American student asked, “What about what America did to our people?” He was referring to internment camps where the federal government summarily evacuated and detained more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans from the western United States after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Nearly 70,000 of them were American citizens; the confinement lasted three years or more and the majority lost their homes, farms, businesses, and most of their belongings, according to a summation by the National Archives.
“It was not in (our) history books,” said Epstein, who had never before heard of the U.S. camps. “This is a good example of not telling people what happened.
“You’ve got to tell what happened,” he continued. “You can’t sugarcoat it. You can’t doctor it to make it softer. You’ve got to know what happened.”
