Enduring lessons of the past

At a panel discussion at the Holocaust museum in New York this week for his forthcoming film, “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” Ken Burns said that instead of the planned 2023 debut, he intentionally moved up the six-hour PBS broadcast date of the documentary to this September so it would air before the midterm elections. He is not endorsing any candidate or any party, but he wants the lessons of the past to be taught.

It was then pointed out that in the 1922 midterms, during Warren Harding’s presidency, Democrat Manny Celler was first elected from Brooklyn to the House. As Burns tells in his film, Celler waged a lonely, losing fight against the restrictive immigration law imposed in 1924 to keep out Italians and Jews and others from Southern and Eastern Europe. Those quotas would prove deadly as Jews would find the door to America closed when Hitler and the Nazis came to power and the State Department threw up roadblocks.

In 1972, after 50 years in the office, Celler lost his seat to Liz Holtzman. She would author the 1978 Holtzman Amendment, barring admission to any immigrants who acted as Nazi persecutors and tasking the Justice Department to find and deport such war criminals.

The current congressman representing downtown, Jerry Nadler, last fall wrote a letter to Secretary of State Tony Blinken demanding answers about why his department had failed for many years to deport proven Nazis, including death camp guards, unearthed by the Department of Justice. There has only been silence from State.

As Burns shows, in the 1930s and 1940s, the State Department’s intransigence to admitting Jewish refugees cost lives. Now, State Department intransigence is trying to protect their own horrible record of protecting Nazis. Lay bare the whole truth.