SHOAH (1985)

“Don’t be sore at me. You want history. I’m giving you history”.

FRANZ SUCHOMEL (SS Officer - Treblinka Extermination camp)

To summarise Claude Lanzmann’s immense nine-and-a-half hour epic documentary Shoah (1985) is a reductive undertaking that simply cannot do justice to its monumental scope. Filmed and edited over 11 years across 14 countries, it presents the viewer with an account of the Nazi Holocaust focusing on three Polish extermination camps and the Warsaw ghetto. Split into four parts, it is delivered entirely as on-camera interviews with Jewish survivors, officers and resident local witnesses.

Lanzmann was originally hired by Israeli officials to make a much shorter film of around two hours focusing on the Jewish viewpoint. Later, their funding was taken away, resulting in a colossal 350 hours of footage for Lanzmann and his editor Ziva Postec. They spent five years working to shape the material, initially not knowing what the over-riding theme would now be. Eventually, it became clear that death would be the main focus. This may seem obvious but it wasn’t simply the appalling murder of the victims, but how death is faced or denied. There is the death of hope for those camp prisoners who saw no salvation coming to rescue them, the death of conscience demonstrated by Nazi officers, or locals whose self-preservation blinded them to what they knew was happening in their midst. There is also the gradual death, the erosion of previously good souls, those German prisoners-turned-work detail soldiers (‘Sonderkommandoes’) like Filip Müller who realised that they were killing their own inner humanity along with their fellow Jews by being complicit in the disposal of gas chamber victims: “Your feeling disappeared. You were dead.”

Part of the power of Shoah is in its simplicity. Unlike many documentaries, it doesn’t use any archive footage, a linking narrator, or any dramatised scenes (a distracting and slightly questionable technique that can undermine attempted veracity by using artistic interpretation). Everything we learn comes entirely from the mouths of those who experienced and bore witness to the horrific atrocities perpetrated in the worst of human history.

This is not to say that the film is an artless collage – far from it. Lanzmann and Postec carefully crafted a structure that allows emotionally charged, intense scenes to be interspersed with calmer travelogue-like footage of Corfu, Poland, and America, allowing us to decompress and explore somewhat lighter interviews – at least on the surface. The opening scene for example is immediately beguiling in its set-up, showing us Simon Srebnik, one of only two survivors of the notorious Chelmno death camp. He is shown being boated peacefully down a Polish river. He sings a light song as he goes along. We then learn that this little ditty was taught to him by the Nazi officers, who ordered him to sing for their relaxation. His still-charming voice may be what helped to save his life. The boat is not taking him for pleasure, but back in time to the area of Chelmno wasteland upon which “They burned people here” he simply utters. Throughout the film, he maintains an eerie impassive poise, all the more touching for what he must have been through to reach that state.

There are moral and ethical questions galore within Shoah and not just shown by the subjects. Degrees of complicity are addressed. Early in the first of the four parts, Lanzmann and his translator question the local farmhands of Chelmno through whose neighbourhood the trains travelled, crammed with prisoners on their way to barbaric extermination. Rather than pretend any retrospective concern, some men still distanced themselves out of self-preservation. One man, relating it to his neighbour said: “Well, it’s this way…If l cut my finger, it doesn't hurt him”.

The most famous scene and one that touches on the issue of complicity by Jewish prisoners is the interview with Jewish barber Abraham Bomba. He survived Treblinka by leading a team of sixteen barbers; their job was to cut the hair of each batch of victims within the gas chamber itself (many of them female and children) whilst never letting on that they would never leave that room alive. Lanzmann drew criticism for the contrived staging of the interview as it depicts Bomba cutting a friend’s hair in a Tel Aviv barbershop years after his retirement as he recalls his role. This seems unjust and misses the point. Firstly, the most vital aspect is surely the content of the hideous story Bomba unpacks before our eyes, not the circumstances of the telling. After all, we are not being presented with fake or staged eyewitness evidence. Secondly, as the barber recounts his experience, the startling composure he can maintain whilst working and talking suddenly breaks down. He is confronted with reliving the reunions he had in that chamber with his friends and neighbours from whom he hid the secret of their imminent murders. The enormous burden of guilt he has been carrying for so long cannot be shielded from him any longer by busy work and it is hugely poignant to watch. Lanzmann’s plan to have him distracted by multi-tasking may well have allowed him to continue as long as he did, to give us more of this crucial testimony, than otherwise in a simple camera interview without any activity.

“I can’t do it. It’s too horrible” says Bomba, weeping and wiping his face with a towel.

“You have to”, pushes Lanzmann softly. “I apologise...but you have to”.

Lanzmann’s pressure upon Bomba whilst the camera zooms in tightly on him is a controversial gambit, but one that has to be balanced with the need for future generations to understand exactly what happened – and one that I would hope was ultimately cathartic for the man himself.

Possibly the strongest accusation of crossing ethical boundaries was levelled at Lanzmann over his unrepentant betrayal of the confidence of former SS officers such as Franz Suchomel who agreed to be interviewed only on audio-tape and on condition that their identities would not be revealed. (Lanzmann not only broke this agreement, he even shows the street name of Suchomel’s home which could have led to retribution after Shoah’s release). While wearing a mic, Lanzmann was concealing a video camera within a nearby bag to film his subject, relayed to an outside VW Transporter van containing two technicians and a somewhat conspicuous antenna on the roof. The picture quality is a slightly grainy monochrome, yet clearly shows Suchomel matter-of-factly explaining the layout of the Treblinka camp on a board, aided by a pointer, as though describing a circuit diagram to engineering students. In fact, his choice of words barely conceals admiration for the almost business-like processing of humans to their death. “People burn very well”. The souls destroyed had been dehumanised by bureaucratic language well before their physical dispatch by these soldiers. Auschwitz-Birkenau conveyed its victims like “a factory”, whereas his smaller Treblinka site was “a production line of death”.

This detail arguably reinforces Suchomel’s stark testimony more resoundingly than solely audio could. In his autobiography Lanzmann justified his deception as ‘tricking the tricksters’. Indeed there is sickening anecdotal evidence in the film that far more monstrous deceptions were perpetrated upon the prisoners, for example to pacify them into willingly going to the gas chambers. One camp Commandant assuaged crowd fears by eliciting random people’s trades from them, assuring them that after a hygienic shower their talents would be put to good use in camp work. This merely hastened their procession through to a gas execution and eventual burning in the underground ovens.

Such is the breadth of the human experience on offer in Shoah that the footage could have been weighted to support any number of themes or aspects of the Holocaust experience. Although it is almost impossible to extract anything positive from the senseless and unchecked destruction of millions of innocent victims, the very fact that there are survivors who could endure and give their testimony here offers a tiny hint of the indomitability of human spirit still unextinguished.  As Filip Müller says: “Where there’s life, hope must never be relinquished”. The tragic possibility of their living testimony going unrecorded also helps to justify the measures taken to capture them  so that future generations may at least hear them if not learn from them.

Many hours of unused footage were used to create four more films by Lanzmann: A Visitor from the Living (1997) based on an interview with the Red Cross’s Maurice Rossel, Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001) which details the prisoner uprising at the Sobibor camp, The Karski Report (2010) expanding upon the Shoah scenes of diplomat Jan Karski as he took his eyewitness account of the Warsaw ghetto to President Roosevelt, and 2013’s The Last of the Unjust which examines the Final Solution and interviews with the President of the Jewish Council in the Theresienstadt ghetto.

Much more previously unused film from Shoah has also since been released on the internet by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.