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"No one can describe it. No one can recreate what happened here. Impossible. And no one can understand it. Even I, here, now." - Simon Srebnik, Holocaust Survivor.
As Simon Srebnik speaks these words he is sauntering pensively through a tranquil and peaceful countryside landscape. Surrounded by thick forests and the sounds of chirping birds, the story he tells is eerily unbefitting. Visible beneath the low-cut grass are the traces of some expansive edifice, the foundations of a huge, brick structure. This was Chełmno concentration camp. This is where 400,000 Jews were exterminated; their bodies burned to hide the story. Srebnik describes the killings, the incineration of humans, the flames reaching to the sky. His recollections infuse the serenity of the countryside with the ghosts of a murdered population. This place is haunted. And this is where ‘Shoah’, Claude Lanzmann’s epic investigation of the holocaust, begins.
At nine and a half hours in length and eleven years in the making, ‘Shoah’ examines the Nazi extermination of the Jews in precise and horrific detail. In his introduction, Lanzmann writes that making the film was “a long and difficult battle”, and its comprehensiveness is nothing short of what such an unfathomable event deserves. Lanzmann builds his creation on the disturbing testimonies of dozens of witnesses. We hear detailed personal accounts from the victims and their families; from the bystanders who, to a lesser or greater degree, saw (and heard) the tragedy unfold; and from the perpetrators of the crimes and their collaborators. In Part One, Lanzmann focuses predominantly on the people and events connected with the Nazi concentration camps at Chełmno, Auschwitz and Treblinka, and briefly with the camp at Sobibor and the killings in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. The film’s narrative generally uses a free-flowing structure, as Lanzmann does not seek to give a linear, historical account of the holocaust. Connections between events and locations are loose; Lanzmann intentionally flits backwards and forward in time, building an exceedingly complex tapestry of episodes and incidents. Lanzmann has repeatedly claimed that ‘Shoah’ is “not a historical film…it is a work of art”; and this is almost certainly what saturates the film with its tough, emotional impact. There is no mention of Hitler or National Socialist policy towards the Jews. ‘Shoah’ sets out to leave an impression on the viewer, not to systematically relate facts; its aim is to affect the viewer emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, not to engage us in a tedious examination of times, dates, names, etc, etc. This is also what gives the film its epic dimensions; the impression that there is neither a beginning nor an end; neither a reason nor an explanation. The holocaust cannot be considered logically, neatly, conclusively; we can only begin to understand it through an instinctive and emotional connection with the events, be it shock, revulsion, horror, pity, despair, or anything else. Lanzmann engraves the film with a biblical extract which defines ‘Shoah’s’ premise – “I will give them an everlasting name” (Isaiah 56:5). The film is a collection of testimonies designed to bear witness to the events of the holocaust in all their incomprehensibility. It seeks to burrow underneath the stories and to connect them with a philosophical universality which will etch the tragedy into the collective minds of all humanity and to ensure that such a catastrophe is never repeated.
Lanzmann’s interview technique is that of an expert. An experienced journalist, he has developed subtly coercive methods of extracting the detailed information he needs for his films. His role as investigator is fundamental to the quality and content of the witnesses’ testimonies. In the first fifteen minutes of the film alone, there are three clear indications of the importance of Lanzmann as an investigator. In the film’s textual preface, Lanzmann confesses to having had to “persuade” Simon Srebnik to return to Chełmno to relive his experiences of the camp. The only other survivor from the Chełmno camp, Michael Podchlebnik, states that the reason he is discussing the past is because Lanzmann “insists” upon it. Similarly, the daughter of a Vilnius survivor claims that she heard her father discuss his experiences of the holocaust for only the second time when Lanzmann requested him to narrate them. Lanzmann is an interrogator with sophisticated methods of inquiry. He asks his participants to repeat specific words or statements and the results of his methods are twofold. Firstly, he reassures the speaker that he is attentive and interested in what they are saying, thereby securing their trust in him; and secondly, he manages to direct the speaker’s thought process and to elicit greater detail from them, thereby drawing out richer, more elaborate, and complete testimonies. Lanzmann seems to adopt a consequentialist approach to interrogating his participants, i.e., that it is morally justifiable to intrude upon private and/or personal experiences (including on raw emotion) for the greater good of humanity. For Lanzmann, furnishing the viewer with a more complete representation of the lingering effects of the holocaust is more important than the tears of a single individual.
The majority of the participants who appear in the first part of ‘Shoah’ can be roughly categorised as being either a Jewish survivor, a Polish eyewitness or a German perpetrator. Itzhak Dugin, a Lithuanian Jew, recounts a particularly unsettling episode which occurred when he was ordered to exhume the bodies of murdered Jews so that they could be burnt. Whilst digging into the mass graves with nothing but his hands, he came across the bodies of his mother and sisters. Lanzmann prods for more detail. Remaining collected, Dugin says that he recognised their clothing and their facial features because the ground had been cold, and the bodies were not badly decomposed. Dugin, surrounded by friends and family, is not overtly pressured into revealing these details and, despite Lanzmann’s direct questioning, the scene is charged with emotion and sympathy. Conversely, when Lanzmann secretly films an interview with a German concentration camp guard, the atmosphere is tense and unnerving. Naturally, Lanzmann takes a different approach to each interview. Although he maintains a direct address when questioning all his participants, the victims are shown compassion and understanding, while the perpetrators are treated with restrained contempt.
This is to be expected. But it is Lanzmann’s treatment of the Polish witnesses which is most intriguing. Lanzmann chastises the Polish bystanders who did nothing to intervene in the events that were taking place around them; for him they are to be condemned as immoral, if not as anti-Semites and Nazi collaborators. Indeed, some Poles facilitated the deportation of Jews to the camps; others ignored what was happening to the Jews, while others claim not to have known anything of the atrocities. But Lanzmann’s condemnation of them is nothing but moral philosophising. He goes to great lengths to show how, before the war, Polish towns and villages had a significant number of Jewish inhabitants. The population of Auschwitz (the town) was roughly 80% Jewish, while the centre of Włodowa was made up exclusively of Jewish homes and businesses. Jewish households controlled the local economy of many of Poland’s urban areas, often marginalising the local Poles and pushing them to the cheaper areas on the outskirts of town. With poor education and the social constrictions of poverty, it is unsurprising that there would have been resentment towards the Jewish sections of the community. Perhaps the Poles were happy to see the Jews leave their communities but suggesting that they condoned the extermination of the Jews is absurd. The Poles witnessed Nazi SS officers shooting Jewish women and children for as much as begging for a bowl of water. No matter how desirable it may be for Lanzmann, ordinary human beings do not instinctively behave according to philosophical ideals; they do not typically risk their lives because it is morally “the right thing to do”; they act out of preservation, survival. What power, either physical or intellectual, did disorganised, uneducated Polish peasants have to resist and rise up against the German occupying forces? Only after the war did the true scale of the atrocities begin to emerge and the role of the Poles examined. Lanzmann confronts the Poles with his educated, middle-class, western European sensibility and his sense of intellectual and moral superiority. He attempts to understand the Polish perspective only so far as it confirms his predetermined philosophic ideals on how human beings should behave. He attempts to indict an uncaring and cruel human society but, in the face of the ordinary Polish peasants, he appears conceited and vainglorious.
Regardless, ‘Shoah’s’ greatest success is its depiction of the enormity of the holocaust, its scale and senselessness. It is long and complex – a reflection of the suffering experienced by the Jews during the German occupation. Unlike Alain Resnais’s ‘Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard)’ (1955), what gives ‘Shoah’ its unique perspective is the absence of archive footage, newsreels, re-enactments, documents or photographs. Lanzmann has said that the “image kills imagination”, and therefore he bestows no limits on the mind’s capacity to contemplate the horror of the witnesses’ testimonies. The tragic stories haunt the grounds of the concentration camps; they are chiselled onto the weathered faces of the witnesses. This evidence cannot be hidden, covered up, tampered with or destroyed. ‘Shoah’ itself is a celluloid witness to the remnants of the holocaust. It has uncovered and preserved the suffering, the insanity, the incomprehensible. It refuses to let the stories die with the people and, for this reason, is rightfully regarded as a tour de force of cinematic art.
Country: France
Budget: £
Length: 147mins
Pub/2008
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