Shoah is a 1985 French documentary film about the Holocaust (known as "Shoah" in Hebrew since the 1940sFor the term Shoah and Lanzmann's decision to use it, see Stuart Liebman, "Introduction", in Stuart Liebman (ed.), Claude Lanzmann's Shoah: Key Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 7.), directed by Claude Lanzmann. Over nine hours long and eleven years in the making, the film presents Lanzmann's interviews with survivors, witnesses and perpetrators during visits to German Holocaust sites across Poland, including extermination camps.J. Hoberman, "Shoah: The Being of Nothingness", in Jonathan Kahana (ed.), The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 776–783. Also see Claude Lanzmann with Marc Chevrie and Hervé le Roux, "Site and Speech: An Interview with Claude Lanzmann about Shoah", in Kahana (ed.) 2016, 784–793.
Released in Paris in April 1985, Shoah is frequently cited as one of the greatest documentaries ever made. It won critical acclaim and several prominent awards, including the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Non-Fiction Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary. Simone de Beauvoir hailed it as a "sheer masterpiece", while documentarian Marcel Ophüls called it "the greatest documentary about contemporary history ever made".Liebman 2007, 4. Conversely, it was not well received in Poland, wherein the government argued that it accused Poland of "complicity in Nazi genocide".Lawrence Baron, "Cinema in the Crossfire of Jewish-Polish Polemics: Wajda's Korczak and Polanski's The Pianist", in Cherry and Orla-Bukowska 2007, 44.
Shoah premiered in New York at the Cinema Studio in October 1985 and was broadcast in the United States by PBS over four nights in 1987.
Synopsis Overview
The film is concerned chiefly with three 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 he came across the wife and sister of a barber friend of his while cutting hair in 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;"Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, Interview with Rudolf Vrba", Washington, D.C.: Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 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 their 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 simply managing railroad traffic and was not aware that he was transporting Jews directly to their deaths, though he admits to being aware that the destinations were concentration camps.
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."Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, Interview with Jan Karski", Washington, D.C.: Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Also see Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World, Georgetown University Press, 2014 .
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 and a detailed analysis of railroad documents showing the transport routes to the death camps. 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."Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, Interview with Franz Suchomel", Washington, D.C.: Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Suchomel agreed to be interviewed for 500 Deutschmarks, but refused to be filmed, so Lanzmann used hidden recording equipment while assuring Suchomel that he would not use his name.Marcel Ophüls, "Closely Watched Trains", in Liebman (ed.) 2007, 84.
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 seeping from the decomposing bodies. 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 I."Transcript of the Shoah interview with Franz Suchomel", Washington, D.C.: Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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.
Compared to the size and complexity of Auschwitz, Suchomel calls Treblinka "primitive. But a well-functioning assembly line of death."
Man in the poster
The publicity poster for the film features Henryk Gawkowski, a Polish railway worker from Malkinia, who, in 1942–1943 when he was 20–21 years old,For his age, "Transcript of the Shoah interview with Henryk Gawkowski and Treblinka railway workers", Washington, D.C.: Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (hereinafter Gawkowski transcript), 15. Also see "Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection: Henryk Gawkowski and Treblinka railway workers", Washington, D.C.: Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. worked on the trains to Treblinka as an "assistant machinist with the right to drive the locomotive".Gawkowski transcript, 1. 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.Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary, Routledge, 2006, 99–100.
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.Gawkowski transcript, 12, 38. Lanzmann estimated that 18,000 Jews were taken to Treblinka by the trains Gawkowski worked on.Gawkowski transcript, 4. Gawkowski said he had driven Polish Jews there in cargo trains in 1942, and Jews from France, Greece, the Netherlands 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 were being hauled.Gawkowski transcript, 8. The Germans gave the train workers vodka as a bonus when they drove a Sonderzug; Gawkowski drank liberally to make the job bearable.Gawkowski transcript, 9–10.
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.Gawkowski transcript, 9, also see 14–15. 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.Gawkowski transcript, 5–6. Dominick LaCapra wrote that the expression on Gawkowski's face when he demonstrated the gesture for Lanzmann seemed "somewhat diabolical".Dominick LaCapra, "Lanzmann's Shoah: 'Here There Is No Why'", in Liebman (ed.) 2007, 213. 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."Claude Lanzmann, "Les Non-lieux de la memoire", in Michel Deguy (ed.), Au sujet de "Shoah": Le Film de Claude Lanzman, Paris: Belin, 1990, 282, cited by LaCapra in Liebman (ed.) 2007, 213.
Production
Lanzmann was initially commissioned by Israeli officials to make what they thought would be a two-hour film, delivered in 18 months, about the Holocaust from "the viewpoint of the Jews". As time went on, Israeli officials withdrew as his original backers, but Lanzmann persevered, eventually taking eleven years to complete Shoah. The film was plagued by financial problems, difficulties tracking down interviewees, and threats to Lanzmann's life. The film was unusual in that it did not include any historical or archival footage,Claude Lanzmann on Shoah - criterioncollection on YouTube relying instead on interviews with witnesses and footage of the locations of the extermination camps.
Many German interviewees were reluctant to talk or refused to be filmed, so Lanzmann used a hidden camera, producing a grainy, black-and-white appearance. The interviewees in these scenes are sometimes obscured or distinguished by technicians watching the recording. During one interview, with Heinz Schubert, the covert recording was discovered by Schubert's family, and Lanzmann was physically attacked. He was hospitalized for a month and charged by the authorities with "unauthorized use of the German airwaves".
Lanzmann arranged many of the scenes, but not the testimony, before filming witnesses. For example, Bomba was interviewed while cutting his friend's hair in a working barbershop; a steam locomotive was hired to recreate the journey the death train conductor had taken while transporting Jews; and the opening scene shows Srebnik singing in a rowboat, similarly to how he had "serenaded his captors".