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In the Review’s June 22 issue, Ruth Franklin asks, in her review of The US and the Holocaust—a six-hour documentary series directed and produced by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein—“Why did the US turn away the flood of Jewish refugees who sought to escape Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s?”

Franklin argues that, rather than extend Emma Lazarus’s famous invitation to “send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,” the authors of American immigration policy have long taken their cues from “antisemitic, xenophobic, and racist groups.” That is, as the historian Peter Hayes tells it in the film, “exclusion of people and shutting them out has been as American as apple pie.”

Below, alongside Franklin’s essay, we have collected five pieces from our archives about Holocaust refugees and survivors.

Ruth Franklin
The Millions We Failed to Save

The recent documentary The US and the Holocaust is a scathing, even bombastic indictment of US immigration policy over the past 160 years.

Noah Feldman
Could FDR Have Done More to Save the Jews?

“As the war in Europe began, Roosevelt more or less gave up trying to help the Jews in order to pursue his overwhelming goal of getting the United States to overcome neutrality and enter the war.”

Letter: Could FDR Have Done More for the Jews?
Rafael Medoff, reply by Noah Feldman

“If President Roosevelt had the will to help the Jews, ways could have been found—ways that would not have involved tampering with the immigration system or undermining the war effort in any way.”

Susan Dunn
Eleanor in War and Love

“Eleanor Roosevelt had a few small victories—for example, overriding the State Department and securing permission for eighty-odd Jewish passengers, fleeing Europe, to disembark from the SS Quanza in the fall of 1940; and she helped organize Kindertransporten so that vulnerable children, mostly Jewish, could find havens in Britain and North America. But these were only ripples in a desperate tide. Anti-Semites had important positions in the State Department, and President Roosevelt didn’t object to Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long’s policy of slamming the country’s door shut on Jewish refugees.”

Gordon A. Craig
Mission Possible

“This was an exacting, grueling, and dangerous job. Varian Fry and his colleagues had to look after a refugee population that was in constant danger of being arrested by Vichy police and placed in detention camps or jail.”

Harry Mulisch
Death and the Maiden

“We can learn nothing about Auschwitz by calling it hell, but should one want to find out about hell, then Auschwitz is the place to study.”

Hannah Arendt
An Interview

“Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another.”