(suspenseful music)
- There are already people who think that every Jew
who died in the Holocaust died at Auschwitz,
died in a concentration camp, died in a gas chamber.
No, there's whole chapters of this story.
- [Narrator] As hard as Shmiel Jager had tried,
he had been unable to get himself, his wife Esther,
and his four daughters out of occupied Poland to America.
German troops had reached his hometown
of Bolechow in the summer of 1941.
Within weeks his daughter Rachela was murdered.
That was only the beginning.
- There was another roundup, which was the biggest roundup
in my family's town, 2,500 people.
And my great aunt Esther and the youngest girl, Bronia,
who was 13 at the time,
they kept them, this huge group of people,
in the square outside of the city hall.
And there were a lot of atrocities that took place,
mostly against children.
There were some Soviet documents that had come to light,
including a report.
And they listed all the children who had been shot.
And actually Bronia was the first child on the list.
This was in September of 1942.
You know, they were throwing children
off the balconies of the city hall, really terrible stuff.
Whoever survived the couple of days of the roundup
were shipped to Belzec,
and that's where my great aunt Esther died
in the gas chambers.
(mournful music)
I was able to find out that Shmiel was hiding
with his second daughter, Fridka.
And that was because there was a Catholic Polish boy
who was in love with her and he was helping to hide her
in the home of this local school teacher.
And that for some unknown amount of time
they were being successfully hidden,
the father and the daughter, in an underground dugout.
Until someone betrayed them,
and they found them and they took them
and they shot them both.
And then they killed the school teacher, too.
The oldest daughter, Lorka, joined a partisan group
that operated with some Polish partisans in a nearby forest.
She was killed when the whole partisan group was wiped out.
Except for my poor great aunt, Esther,
nobody was killed in a camp.
They were killed in all different ways,
in all different manners.
And I think that already is being erased.
The particularity of what happened.
(mournful music)
- Here's the tragedy, millions of people
could not be rescued.
They're in the hands of the Germans.
They're deep into Eastern Europe.
They're in Germany, in Austria, in France,
Belgium, the Netherlands.
But there were people who had gotten to Portugal,
who had gotten to Spain.
There are people who eventually get to North Africa.
If you had taken more people from those places,
maybe more refugees could have come in.
Maybe more people escaping could have come in.
Are we talking of rescues of hundreds of thousands?
No, but if it's your family, it doesn't matter if it's one.
Hi this is Ken Burns.
Thanks for watching that excerpt from
our film "The U.S. and the Holocaust",
which explores the story of how the
American people grappled with one of
the greatest humanitarian crises of the
20th century.
Here are some more clips
from the film and you can watch the
entire series on the PBS Video app or at PBS.org.