"Not Idly By: Peter Bergson and the Holocaust" (documentary short)

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NOT IDLY BY Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust
a documentary short by Pierre Sauvage (40 min., Varian Fry Institute, 2010)

WORLD PREMIERE: Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival, Jerusalem Cinematheque
NEW YORK PREMIERE: Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York
Winner, documentary award, Toronto Jewish Film Festival

We said we didn't know.
We said we couldn't have done anything even if we had known.

Peter Bergson, a militant Jew from Palestine,
led a controversial American effort to fight the Holocaust.

This is his testimony.

Comments about Not Idly By

Peter Bergson in Not Idly By :

"We cannot resurrect the dead. Eighty-five or ninety percent of those that Hitler wanted to kill were killed. What we can do and what we must do is reexamine ourselves.

I am the last one on earth to condone the passivity of the political leadership of the United States—with President Roosevelt at the head—and of Great Britain, and of the Soviet Union, itself in a state of occupation by a tyrant.

But the people who should have dramatized, shook up, awakened the... otherwise busy, like Ben Hecht's ballad [see above and below]—'the world is busy with other news'—the otherwise 'unrealizing' world leadership to what's going on should have been the Jewish leaders. They knew the Jews were being killed. But the grasp wasn't there.

You couldn’t have stopped the massacre. You could have slowed the massacre. You could have made it an inefficient massacre. The people who made it efficient were the Allies who didn’t interfere. And the people who didn’t urge them to interfere were the [American] Jews.

Jews should begin not by screaming, 'While they're murdering six million Jews, the Gentiles stood idly by.' They should say, 'We stood idly by.'"

Most Americans—even many American Jews—believe that we didn’t know. Many assume that we couldn’t have done anything even if we had known. Meet Peter Bergson!

Until 1941 Nazi Germany had persecuted and sought to expel the Jews. But the doors of the West had remained closed to them. It was only then that the free nations of the world had faced a new Nazi policy: mass murder of the Jews of Europe.

A Palestinian Jew who had served with the nationalist Irgun organization in pre-Israel Palestine, Peter Bergson (born Hillel Kook, 1915-2001), had come to the U.S. in 1940. In America, this firebrand led what came to be known as the Bergson Group, whose strenuous efforts from 1942 to 1945 underscore just how much was known—and how much was attempted during those difficult years.

Vilified at the time—American Jewish leader Rabbi Stephen Wise reportedly characterized him as “equally as great an enemy of the Jews as Hitler,” while others castigated the group as fascist or terrorist—Bergson remains a controversial yet relatively obscure figure in the history of America and the Holocaust.

Not Idly By—currently nearing release and available for film festival screenings—provides the riveting first-hand testimony of the charismatic and eloquent Bergson, who comments on the response to the crisis by non-European Jews and describes his determined efforts to fight the Holocaust: the innovative and provocative full-page political ads in major newspapers, the poignant, assertive 1943 Ben Hecht/Kurt Weill pageant We Will Never Die, the rabbis’ march in Washington before Yom Kippur 1943, the creation of various activist committees and the energetic and productive lobbying of American government officials that ultimately helped lead to the establishment at last of a U.S. rescue agency.

This is a one-sided view of those times: Peter Bergson’s.

Bergson is also the posthumous star of the 2009 Simon Wiesenthal Center feature documentary, Against the Tide. Has Peter Bergson's time come at last? With his help, can we break through the taboos that shroud the American experience—and the American Jewish experience—of that challenging time in history? Do Americans—Jewish and non-Jewish—not need to consider and probe further our share of responsibility in the massacre of the Jews of Europe? How can we expect to meet tomorrow’s challenges effectively if we don’t probe our related failures in the past?

Both Bergson documentaries (Sauvage’s has been in the works since 2007) draw on the unused interview shot by Claude Lanzmann in 1978 for his epic 1985 Shoah. In addition, Not Idly By exclusively benefits from the passionate and detailed interview Bergson granted to filmmaker Laurence Jarvik for the latter’s ground-breaking 1982 documentary Who Shall Live and Who shall Die? Also featured in Not Idly By are extensive audio excerpts from the Hollywood Bowl production of the historic 1943 "pageant" We Will Never Die, heard extensively for the first time since 1943.

An Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker (Yiddish: the Mother Tongue, to be released in a 30th anniversary DVD edition in 2010), Pierre Sauvage, himself a child survivor of the Holocaust, is the president of the Chambon Foundation (www.chambon.org), which includes the Varian Fry Institute. Upcoming in 2011 is Sauvage’s long-in-the-making feature documentary about American rescuers during the refugee crisis of 1940-41, And Crown Thy Good: Varian Fry in Marseille.

Sauvage is best known for his acclaimed feature documentary Weapons of the Spirit. The film tells the story of a unique “conspiracy of goodness” during the Holocaust: in and around the Christian village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France, 5,000 Jews found shelter, including Pierre, who was born there. At the Holocaust commemoration at the U.S. Capitol on April 23, 2009, President Barack Obama invoked the example of Le Chambon to encourage Americans to "strive each day, both individually and as a nation, to be among the righteous (see www.chambon.org.)

Believing that it would help to know more about the Righteous, for over twenty-five years the Chambon Foundation's mission has been "to communicate and explore the necessary lessons of hope intertwined with the Holocaust's unavoidable lessons of despair." The Varian Fry Institute was founded as a division of the Chambon Foundation to explore and communicate the American experience of the Holocaust. Pierre Sauvage seeks to implement these ambitious goals both both through his documentary work and through his popular video-accompanied presentations, The Challenge To Us of Holocaust Rescuers and Did Americans Fight the Holocaust?

a Varian Fry Institute production

On Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust

a few of the advertisements taken out in major newspapers by the "Bergson Group":

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