Shoah
Tags: cruelty

Plot synopsis:
=== Overview ===
The film is concerned chiefly with four topics: the Chełmno extermination camp, where mobile gas vans were first used by Germans to exterminate Jews; the death camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau; and the Warsaw ghetto, with testimonies from survivors, witnesses and perpetrators.
The sections on Treblinka include testimony from Abraham Bomba, who survived as a barber; Richard Glazar, an inmate; and Franz Suchomel, an SS officer. Bomba breaks down while describing how a barber friend of his came across his wife and sister while cutting hair in an anteroom of the gas chamber. This section includes Henryk Gawkowski, who drove transport trains while intoxicated with vodka. Gawkowski's photograph appears on the poster used for the film's marketing campaign.
Testimonies on Auschwitz are provided by Rudolf Vrba, who escaped from the camp before the end of the war; and Filip Müller, who worked in an incinerator burning the bodies from the gassings. Müller recounts what prisoners said to him, and describes the experience of personally going into the gas chamber: bodies were piled up by the doors "like stones". He breaks down as he recalls the prisoners starting to sing while being forced into the gas chamber. Accounts include some from local villagers, who witnessed trains heading daily to the camp and returning empty; they quickly guessed the fate of those on board.
Lanzmann also interviews bystanders. He asks whether they knew what was going on in the death camps. Their answers reveal that they did, but they justified their inaction by the fear of death. Two survivors of Chełmno are interviewed: Simon Srebnik, who was forced to sing military songs to entertain the Nazis; and Mordechaï Podchlebnik. Lanzmann also has a secretly filmed interview with Franz Schalling, a German security guard, who describes the workings of Chełmno. Walter Stier, a former Nazi bureaucrat, describes the workings of the railways. Stier insists he was too busy managing railroad traffic to notice his trains were transporting Jews to their deaths.
The Warsaw ghetto is described by Jan Karski, a member of the Polish Underground who worked for the Polish government-in-exile, and Franz Grassler, a Nazi administrator in Warsaw who liaised with Jewish leaders. A Christian, Karski sneaked into the Warsaw ghetto and travelled using false documents to England to try to convince the Allied governments to intervene more strongly on behalf of the Jews. Memories from Jewish survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising conclude the documentary. Lanzmann also interviews Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, who discusses the significance of Nazi propaganda against the European Jews and the Nazi development of the Final Solution. The complete text of the film was published in 1985.
=== Franz Suchomel ===
Corporal Franz Suchomel, interviewed by Lanzmann in Germany on 27 April 1976, was an SS officer who had worked at Treblinka. Suchomel agreed to be interviewed for DM 500, but he refused to be filmed, so Lanzmann used hidden recording equipment while assuring Suchomel that he would not use his name. Documentary maker Marcel Ophüls wrote: "I can hardly find the words to express how much I approve of this procedure, how much I sympathize with it."
Suchomel talks in detail about the camp's gas chambers and the disposal of bodies. He states that he did not know about the extermination at Treblinka until he arrived there. On his first day he says he vomited and cried after encountering trenches full of corpses, 6–7 m deep, with the earth around them moving in waves because of the gases. The smell of the bodies carried for kilometres depending on the wind, he said, but local people were scared to act in case they were sent to the work camp, Treblinka 1.
He explained that from arrival at Treblinka to death in the gas chambers took 2–3 hours for a trainload of people. They would undress, the women would have their hair cut, then they would wait naked outside, including during the winter in minus 10–20 C, until there was room in the gas chamber. Suchomel told Lanzmann that he would ask the hairdressers to slow down so that the women would not have to wait so long outside.
=== Man in the poster ===
The publicity poster for the film features Henryk Gawkowski, a Polish train worker from Malkinia, who, in 1942–1943 when he was 20–21 years old, worked on the trains to Treblinka as an "assistant machinist with the right to drive the locomotive". Conducted in Poland in July 1978, the interview with Gawkowski is shown 48 minutes into the film, and is the first to present events from the victims' perspective. Lanzmann hired a steam locomotive similar to the one Gawkowski worked on, and shows the tracks and a sign for Treblinka.
Gawkowski told Lanzmann that every train had a Polish driver and assistant, accompanied by German officers. What happened was not his fault, he said; had he refused to do the job, he would have been sent to a work camp. He would have killed Hitler himself had he been able to, he told Lanzmann. Lanzmann estimated that 18,000 Jews were taken to Treblinka by the trains Gawkowski worked on. Gawkowski said he had driven Polish Jews there in cargo trains in 1942, and Jews from France, Greece, Holland and Yugoslavia in passenger trains in 1943. A train carrying Jews was called a Sonderzug (special train); the "cargo" was given false papers to disguise that humans beings were being hauled. The Germans gave the train workers vodka as a bonus when they drove a Sonderzug; Gawkowski drank liberally to make the job bearable.
Gawkowski drove trains to the Treblinka train station and from the station into the camp itself. He said the smell of burning was unbearable as the train approached the camp. The railcars would be driven into the camp by the locomotive in three stages; as he drove one convoy into Treblinka, he would signal to the ones that were waiting by making a slashing movement across his throat. The gesture would cause chaos in those convoys, he said; passengers would try to jump out or throw their children out. Dominick LaCapra wrote that the expression on Gawkowski's face when he demonstrated the gesture for Lanzmann seemed "somewhat diabolical". Lanzmann grew to like Gawkowski over the course of the interviews, writing in 1990: "He was different from the others. I have sympathy for him because he carries a truly open wound that does not heal."

Review: These details facilitate memory and soon, the subjects open up in the most remarkable way.No matter how you feel, or what you think you know about the Holocaust, this film puts faces to the tragedy in a way few conventional documentaries could.
The emphasis here is on memory and oral history.As one Holocaust victim says early in the film, "It might be good for you to talk about these things.
But for me, no." Eventually however, he realizes he must bear witness.There's one remarkable scene where Lanzmann confronts German settlers in Poland about the previous owner of their home, who were Jewish and sent to Auschwitz after their properties were confiscated.People who don't find this film 'entertaining' or perhaps 'boring' probably feel that way because, outside of the immediate experiences of the subjects being interviewed, there is no wider context to present the events.
A worthwhile companion to this film would be the BBC's Auschwitz: Inside The Nazi State which runs 4 and a half hours, but will help you understand Shoah better.The other thing I found fascinating about this film was how the translations actually helped you absorb what is being said in a way direct subtitling wouldn't.
By being able to look into the eyes of the people speaking, in their own native language, and then read the subtitles, was a very subtle, but very effective tool that deadens the 'shock value' of what is being spoken and gives the viewer more time to absorb the content.Some people have complained also that the film also has many long takes, which are seemingly of nothing.
It's nine and a half hours of travelogue footage and interviews with terribly ordinary middle-aged and senior citizens about events that happened a half-century ago.Except that the sites visited are the scenes of the systematic mass murder of roughly 11 million men, women and children, including some 6 million Jews, and the ordinary grandparents are the survivors and perpetrators of some of the most horrendous atrocities that mankind has committed upon each other.It is a terribly draining movie, hypnotic and disorienting, both in it's length and in the blandness, the matter-of-fact descriptions of things that would make a normal person scream in horror.
It is shocking, insightful, and a very,very important film that forces us to confront our own humanity and decide what that, in fact means.But it's nine and a half hours long.
Almost always I describe these films as important, subjectively speaking, and most of the time the mark they imprint upon me is a thirst for more, all this in the most positive sense one may imagine.And then there's "Shoah" (1985).
But unlike those documentaries, SHOAH seems less about the Holocaust than it is about people, whether they were the commanders who intimidated the Jews, individuals who had small farms or houses near the concentration camps or even the victims themselves.
As one commenter candidly pointed out, there are times when SHOAH is more like a chore than an experience but as Claude Lanzmann orders one interviewee during the film, "We have to do it, you know it." And that's why SHOAH has to be seen: It's a real film about a real tragedy, real events, and real people..
Lanzmann spent six years tracking down and interviewing Jewish survivors, German commanders, and Polish eye-witnesses, reconstructing through oral testimonies – without even a second of archival footage – the horror of the Nazi death camps.
Instead it presents a wide range of perspectives on the time mostly from those who were there when it happened: concentration camp survivors, neighbors of Jews who were deported, and even several important Nazi functionaries.
The documenteur, Monsieur L., envisioned a series of penetrating thinking-aloud segments in which survivors of the holocaust destructions are placed in town squares, neighborhoods where they were dragged in horror during the years of terror and pogrom, and they are just asked to speak aloud regarding their personal experience...Inevitably, villagers and townspeople gather around.
And they speak out about what they saw and heard, and what their parents and relatives and spouses knew about what was happening in the torments and forced resettlements.One of the most amazing facets of this series of filmed interviews is the appearance of several surviving death camp and medical experiment camp workers, and lawyers and SS military commandant personages who were the backbone of the Nazi terror.
Therefore he chose to film these testaments to ensure that all future generations would know of the horrors that transpired during World War 2 needlessly to an entire race of people.
Lanzmann used many long stretching takes as people relieve their stories with no dubbing and only subtitles used so the full emotion of these survivors can be witnessed.
It tells the story about the construction of the extermination camps in Chelmno, Belzec, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor in Poland and Vilna in Lithuania, the specific reasons for why they were built, how they were used, what the conditions were like within them, who they were made for, the undressing rooms, crematoriums and gas chambers within them, the infirmary, the gas vans, the SS men who ruled and carried out the "procedures" there and the Jews from Poland, Bulgaria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Hungary, Greece, Czechoslovakia, France who, in large groups, were placed on and transported with death trains to places where those lights of life and love whose ancestors going back as far as to the 4th century had been told by Christian missionaries that they could not live among them as Jews, by secular leaders of the middle ages that they could not live among them and then by 20th century Nazis that they could not live, were scorned and systematically put where civilized human beings puts lifeless things.
While notable for it's naturalistic and variegated milieu depictions, distinct cinematography by French cinematographers Jimmy Glasberg, Dominique Chapuis and William Lubtchansky and use of sound, this interview-driven and narrative-driven retrospection and invaluable document of history which underlines the importance of documentary filmmaking, examines how paramilitaries called the Schutzstaffel, under the command of their Nazi ideological leader, almost succeeded in their calculated attempt at slaughtering and burning a whole population down into ashes, the experiences of those who were assigned to "work" in the death camps, the relations between the Poles and the Jews before, during and after World War II (1939-1945), the conditions in the European ghettos in Poland, former Soviet Union, Lithuania, Hungary and the German bureaucracy which managed the ghettos, presents an educational depiction of the anti-Semitic, national-socialist-driven, misanthropic, cowardice and heartless genocide of Jews which took place more than seven decades ago, and which is described so graphically and with so much excruciating strive by men and women who were deprived of all their human dignity and by some who either truly supported the Nazi Party or did so thinking that they might be killed if they did not, that it surpasses any form of visual representation.
This logical, open-minded, multi-lingual and conversational epic from the mid-1980s about harrowing human suffering which is set in North America, Asia and mostly in Europe in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which goes on a voyage into the footsteps of the Jewish people which lasts close to nine hours and which contains interviews with villagers from Chelmno and Treblinka in Poland, Grabow in Germany, Corfu in Greece and some thirty-seven interviewees, is impelled and reinforced by it's cogent narrative structure, subtle continuity, scenes of mass murder sites and graveyards which in their silent emptiness has quivering effect, a former train-driver on a train to Treblinka who makes a sign he and others were greeted with by a farmhand when they arrived there and were headed for the concentration camps, poignant scenes of railways and trains, the comments : "It is one thing to know about statistics." and "Perhaps it will shake the conscious of the world." and the remarkably efficient interviewing approach where it at times is like hearing an intelligent child asking : "When was it?, where was it?, what was it like?, what happened there?, why did it happen?
A work of art, a stately warning to future generations, an eternalised record of history, an echoing anti-war statement and an unforgettable testimonial of real events which commendably articulates and envisages grand-scale crimes against humanity through the voices of the people who were there, who witnessed it, who lived it and who survived it..
With it being rare, while also having 6 DVDs, a booklet, big packaging, etc., and being one of the 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, that was totally worth it.Shoah is a documentary that runs for 9.5 HOURS, and it can really feel like that!
It is necessary to make this record before all of those who were witnesses to the Holocaust have died."That is a perfect description of my point.Ebert's partner Gene Siskel called this the best movie of 1985 and the 2nd best film of the 80s.
And it succeeds very well.Like my title says, every human being should see Shoah.(Say that 10 times fast!) It's long and may have to be seen in parts, but this says more about the Holocaust than what could ever be said in a classroom or textbook.It's expensive but is worth the amount.(I know someone who wants to borrow my copy when I finish it!) Shoah is unspeakably fantastic, and no praise I could ever give it can justify it enough!
It provides an easily defined experience of revulsion.Shoah, shot entirely in the "present" of people who lived through the Holocaust as prisoners, Nazis, or witnesses, operates on a more poetic level.
At times, Lanzmann's interviews even seem a bit sadistic, like he is forcing the speakers to reveal their pain, but I think part of what is great about Shoah is that it has no pretension to being a "healing'' work.
Rather, in pointing to how any attempt to understand history, and particularly its disasters, can only be partially successful, partially remembered, Lanzmann does not shield himself, or the viewers of the film from the sense that the helplessness of the Other always strips the self of its own sense of empowerment, its ability to speak to or help or understand the Other.On a historical level, the most interesting point for me was how much time and effort the Nazis devoted to the cover up of their crimes.
One of the men's statement, "Lick my heart, you'd die of poison," is, for me, one of the greatest lines in all cinema, and the words I would use to summarize the experience of watching "Shoah." I must express my one and only displeasure with the film.
No where in its nine and a half hours does Lanzmann interview or even mention any of the non-Jewish categories of people targeted for extermination by the Nazis.
In Claude Lanzmann's 1985 film, "Shoah", we are witnessing a brilliant representation of what happened during the inappropriately named "Holocaust".
Of course, Lanzmann's production choices lead to the creation of one of the most powerful documentary productions in history.As an American, the first thing that I would like to point out is the title of the film.
Lanzmann could have easily titled the film "Holocaust" instead of "Shoah", but he chose not to due to the true meaning of the word.
Instead of Lanzmann using reenactments or archival footage, he continues to allow his film to be read like a book.
Furthermore, combining this understanding with the understanding that no reenactment or archival footage can fully recreate the feelings and emotions and pains that the Jewish victims endured, he simply interviewed Simon and other subjects allowing them to paint the pictures in our minds.Lanzmann used close up shots to intensify the interviewees' emotion.
After viewing the film I imagine forgetting will be near impossible.Claude Lanzmann is a brilliant director, who sacrificed a large portion of his life in creating this documentary.
This film is not rated by the MPAA,but contains graphic & disturbing testimony of Nazi war atrocities that will haunt the viewer for a long time afterward.
I understand that that is the way memory works but at the same time I wish there had been some kind of structure to it all.(I honestly thought I mixed up the DVDs at one point) Is the film worth seeing.
For these reasons, SHOAH is one of the most powerful and important films of all time..
He knew it needed to be talked about so that the new generation would learn about what had happened).Lanzmann began his work on the film not that long after that trial, and it was in response to the excuse that Eichmann used.
"I was just following orders" and to the prevailing attitude about who and what was responsible for the world's first scientifically planned, and methodically executed genocide.The common thread through from then and into the 1980's was that most of the German, Polish, Czech, Ukranian, etc, people were innocent victims of the minority of the Germans that were fanatical Nazis and thus were absolved of responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust.Now, Dwight Eisenhower knew this to be false, which is why he ordered the townspeople surrounding the German camps to be paraded through them by the allied troops and to bury, individually, the victims that had not been incinerated.Lanzman was really the first scholar, and I use that term intentionally, because Shoah is nothing if not a scholarly work, to begin the process of exploding this myth.The complicity of most of the populations of Central and Eastern Europe in this horrid stain on human history was most famously exposed in Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners" (released 12 years after "Shoah")which investigates the endemic antisemitism throughout this part of Europe and how Hitler's rantings were descended upon a more than willing audience.And THAT is Lanzmann's brilliance.
"We didn't know" unfolds until "We knew, and we were involved" is the obvious answer.Lanzmann's work is not only a great film, but it is really a must see in the true definition of that word..
In its long 9 and half hours you're gonna be informed in a way you've never were before, since the film does not make use of archive footage of any kind, and to most of the accounts revealed here you're gonna need to imagine how things were, how things happened and the director gives you time and space to form those desperate moments, thankfully to a slow pace and the presentation of places where part of the genocide happened, abandoned locations that seemed to be doomed to never have another function than of being a crime scene.
In all of those hours and minutes of this experience you're gonna be sad, angered, dry, a little bit tired, intrigued, amazed, whatever reactions you may think of you might feel it watching this film.This is what we get: the movie presents three categories of people: the survivors of concentration camps, Jewish rebels working for the resistance; the perpetrators of the most horrendous crimes of the century, Nazi officers; and eyewitness who witnessed or were forced to pass through the horrors of war.
As one of the interviewed says: "I understand what your movie is trying to do" in the way he knows this is an important document that needs to be documented for future generations who must not be ignorant about what the Holocaust was.Secretly filmed, there's the stories told by Nazi officers and guards of how they conducted their "operations" of exterminating the Jews, how everything was carefully planed in the gas chambers, furnaces, executions, and disposing thousands of bodies.
Somewhat weakly structured and technically mediocre, but thematically powerful and devastating mammoth documentary about the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust.The Nazi's cold and ruthless killing machinery, the total desolation and despair of the victims, the painful act of looking back on all the atrocities, the small details only witnesses can recall concisely; all this aspects and more form a haunting kaleidoscope of a time of unbelievable cruelty.Lanzmann's low-key approach proves to be just the more effective.8 out of 10.
A monumental 9½ hours epic that was 11 years in the making, Shoah is the definitive film about the Holocaust that presents a vital slice of human history without employing a single frame of archived footage in its imagery and paints an extraordinarily grim, utterly devastating & emotionally shattering account of the greatest evil of modern times through the collective testimonies of survivors, witnesses & even German perpetrators to cement its spot amongst the greatest & most essential documentaries to ever grace the film canvas..
It's all done through interviews with real survivors, German/allied soldiers that worked in the camps and other people who lived to tell their stories.
This documentary from director Claude Lanzmann focuses on the horrific events during the Holocaust, where over six million Jewish people were exterminated.
He interviews all the people that are still alive during this time in the Second World War who witnessed parts of if not all of it, including traumatised survivors, people living near the death camps, and very controversially, ex-Nazis who only agreed to be heard but are secretly filmed.
What makes this documentary really interesting besides the stories of the people interviewed, is the fact that not one single frame of archive footage (if any exists) is used to portray the horror of these times.
"Shoah" is a French documentary film from over 30 years ago that runs for over 9.5 hours.
Most educated people know the facts about the Shoah--we learned them in school, we've seen the documentary footage of the liberation of the camps, we've read Wiesel or seen "Schindler's List." I don't think anything prepares us for the devastation we feel watching Lanzmann's remarkable film, a unique and irreplaceable document of the attempted extinction of European Jews by the Nazis during WWII.
Lanzmann refuses to use documentary footage with voice-over--he is not here to reinterpret old information, but to extract testimonies from those people who are here, now, and who experienced the Shoah then.