SHOAH

...He claims he knew nothing about what happened to his "transports"—after all, "I was strictly a bureaucrat...

...It was "sad," of course, what happened to those Jews—let's see, how many were gassed...

...and wished that the words had not yet been spoken,.that they had been saved for the forests and the fields of Poland...

...Ah yes, she responds, "Four hundred thousand, yes...

...Why did she go there...

...It is not a long process of patient, bureaucratic, planned destruction of an entire people...

...quite the contrary, he is obsessed by them, almost to the point of morbidity...

...Imagine...

...The seeds sown by the wind have not been repelled by the soil soaked in blood...

...Claude Lanzmann's Shoah is more than nine hours long...

...It is dead...

...Not that he is uninterested in the facts...

...There is no archival footage dating back to the period of the Holocaust...

...Except that, in the case of memory, the blurring has the result of vividness, of saving an existential kind of precision, like a soul saved from the underworld, from oblivion, or from the perfections of narrative...

...Shoah is at once rooted in the past and in the present...

...homes once occupied by Jews but now—after the Germans expelled the former owners—by Polish farmers...

...It is a chilling measure of the film's success that by the film's end all these recognitions have been made...

...These were the forests through which the gas vans rode, until the men, women, and children within them were dead...

...For ten years Lanzmann traveled to Poland, Israel, Germany, and the United States, seeking out and interviewing Jews who had miraculously escaped the Einsatztruppen and the gas...

...In Israel Lanzmann filmed survivors in their homes, or against bustling street and harbor backgrounds, or—in the case of the participants in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising—in front of the model of the ghetto that stands in Kibbutz Lohame Hagetta'ot ("Kibbutz of the Ghetto Fighters...

...Contemporaneity is denied him...

...His film—a nine-hour proof of the proposition that all things human must bend or break before the supreme facticity of the world —shows neither wilderness nor wasteland...

...They boarded them living...

...He reaches for a pen: "May I take notes...

...Not to fight against the condition of latecoming, but to seize the people who never, and the places where nobody, alas, came late...

...Like Grassler's, her memory is faulty: "Four something...

...And he is mentioned in it...

...He seeks a sense of contemporaneity...

...For this reason it was entirely appropriate that the selection for the gas chambers should take place immediately at the end of the line, as the wretched Jews spilled out of the cars...

...but long before you understand what is present in this visual account of Auschwitz you understand what is missing from all the others...

...That meant details...

...But there are people for whom there is no "Holocaust," for whom the holocaust is alive...

...I knew it had a four in it...

...The pictures that shock us, that would shock us again if we could see them again for the first time, would not have shocked the inhabitants of the Nazi world, because within the Nazi world they showed only stations in a sequence, points in a logic...

...The Germans, some of them interviewed with the help of hidden microphones and camera, are ensconced in their gemiitliche apartments or in hotel rooms...

...Lanzmann's slow, sedulous panning across this lethal landscape marks the collapse of all verbal and visual rhetoric about "the Holocaust...

...And there is Frau Michelson, who spent several years in Chelmno...

...Who will forget Abraham Bomba's face, as the full force of what he saw is restored to him, and he pleads for permission to stop remembering...

...Czerniakow, the president of the Judenrat in Warsaw until his suicide in July 1942, whose diary has been published in the West...

...It has been called a documentary, which it certainly is not...

...Returning Simon Srebnik, forty years later, to the jolly, Jew-hating company of the villagers who tried to kill him is more cruelty than even collective memory can justify...

...No longer...

...and their innocence is protected by the shades of the photographs, which cannot show how the sun shone upon what was taking place in its light...

...Does Lanzmann realize, for example, that the "special trains," directed with such efficiency by hundreds of Walter Stiers, were actually handled by the official German state travel agency, the MittelEuropaische Reisebilro...

...Poles who witnessed the deportations and 30 killings...

...The mind reels...

...And repeatedly, relentlessly, cattle trains chug down tracks, arriving at or departing from Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz...

...It also inflames in a new way...

...Similarly, there is something a little too Montparnassian about Lanzmann's repeated insistence that Abraham Bomba recall his feelings at the sight of the naked women in the gas chamber...

...More generally, it was Lanzmann's aim to furnish the viewer with all the first-hand acquaintance that is still available...

...Believe me...

...That's unique...

...Walter Stier was in charge of many of the "special trains" that sent millions of Jews to extinction...

...There appears to be no trace in nature of what men have done...

...He had "no idea, not the slightest...

...That is not, incidentally, a misprint: two survived, by chance, out of 400,000...

...The photographs have an extracted quality...

...Here are two discussions—we shall return to it.—Ens...

...But Lanzmann shows how futilely they would still be spoken...

...And, by means of his 29 fanaticism for capturing the sensation of being murdered, he has captured, imperishably, with love and with truth, the inner life of the survivors...

...Because there is not a single frame of documentary footage in Shoah, it is the most original restoration of its subject to consciousness that I have ever seen...

...What dissatisfies him about the historian is that he, too, is a latecomer, with a latecomer's aspiration to omniscience...

...It is precisely this conjunction of now and then, as well as the fusing of words and images, that constitute one of Lanzmann's most arresting achievements, for he makes us aware that the Holocaust did not take place in the dim recesses of history, is not something lodged only in the memories of its victims and their executioners, but that it remains part of our own reality...

...The single "great invention" of the Germans was the "Final Solution . . . and that is what made this entire process"—above all, its bureaucratic component—"different from all others that had preceded it...

...Lanzmann's attitude is the opposite of the historical attitude...

...a walk through a forest in Israel with a survivor from Vilna who recalls the woods of Ponar, near his native city, where he was forced to disinter, with his bare hands, some of the 90,000 Jews executed by the Nazis' Einsatztruppen ("the Germans made us refer to the bodies as Figuren . . . or as Schmattes, which means `rags'—anyone who said 'corpse' or 'victim' was beaten...

...The trains, then, were everywhere, and they are everywhere in the film...

...It is a work that ought to be shown in every city and town in America...

...Before pictures of their first world, which should have been their only world, I have seen almost all of them, in the final sanctuary of their third world, break down badly...

...the forests, meadows and rivers holding the bones of the executed and the ashes of millions of asphyxiated victims...

...It is a work of shattering beauty and horror, unsurpassed and unforgettable...

...They were the enabling condition for the Nazis and the disabling condition for the Jews...

...Grassler is astonished: "It has been printed...

...But this was an experience without epitome, an atrocity without apotheosis...

...Of such memories are the minds of murderers made...

...When Lanzmann inquires how it was possible to "process" 18,000 people a day in Treblinka, he demurs: "Herr Lanzmann, that's an exaggeration...

...His is a double hell, the hell of the experience and the hell of the memory of the experience...

...I have observed survivors regard the pictures that made us weep without weeping, without almost any trouble at all...

...Lanzmann returns to this theme in an interview given to L'Express, May 16, 1985: "One must not drown the Holocaust into a problem of universal evil...

...The presumption that they can, which is what much "Holocaust literature" and "Holocaust film" has presumed, leads only to sentimentality, or to arrogance, or to other kinds of inadvertent numbing...

...SS men and German bureaucrats who were part of the machinery of death...

...With the exception of a single privy in the town hall, "there were no toilets there at all...

...They saw the tones of the death...

...Still, these are the lapses of a masterpiece...

...Some of the witnesses break down, sobbing, unable to continue...

...Lanzmann was appalled especially by the 1979 Hollywood miniseries "Holocaust...

...For those who were not there, the holocaust, strictly speaking, never happened...

...the scandal of Polish anti-Semitism established by this long segment does not exceed the indignity that this survivor is made to endure...

...No Jew knows that today...

...Above all, there are the witnesses...

...Their role as the inventors and executors of the methodical extermination of six million Jews emerges from their own words, their "lapses" of memory, their evasive grins...

...The Germans, he points out, did not have to "invent" much: they had a rich anti-Semitic heritage to draw from—ghettos, marking designations such as the Jewish star, restrictive prohibitions— all of which "had been worked out over the course of more than a thousand years by authorities of the church and by secular governments that followed in their footsteps...

...hence he recalls "more clearly [his] prewar mountaineering trips than the entire war period and those days in Warsaw...

...When Lanzmann expresses his incredulity, Stier refuses to budge...

...Lanzmann has gone where nobody has gone before...

...The result is a nine-and-a-half-hour film, edited from 350 hours of footage...

...The central subject is Death, and its leitmotif is the utter solitude of the victims, as they saw themselves abandoned by most of humanity...

...It was on the trains that the victims were broken down...

...They are prodded, cajoled, urged, sometimes almost forced by Lanzmann to give him every single detail, every scrap of information, however seemingly trivial...

...The implacable and ubiquitous presence of Death, the planning, implementation, and administration of Death, the setting and the locale of Death...

...Lanzmann has established how much can be accomplished when distance is acknowledged...

...But between contemporaneity and history lies a third term, which combines the sentience of the one with the structuring of the other, and that is memory...

...Nor assimilate it into the horrors of war or any other genocide...

...For, although the rise of antiSemitic ideologies in 19th-century Europe, the virulence of the image of the Jew as Christkiller, and the "seduction of the whole German nation by the 'charming rapist' Hitler" were all necessary preconditions for extermination, "they were not a sufficient condition...

...always elsewhere...

...q Four years ago, more than halfway into his ten-year labor of producing Shoah, Claude Lanzmann published an article in Les Temps Modernes (translated in Dissent, Spring 1981...

...The viewer would have to come to know not the stunning revelations of the history 28 books, which take no time at all, but the texture of the event—to come to recognize individual trees and pits and platforms, the lines in the faces of the witnesses and the variety of their voices...

...But Lanzmann is implacable: "We have to do it...

...The film ends with the tale of one of the surviving leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising...

...The Holocaust, he wrote, that "most monstrous crime perpetrated against the Jewish people" and indeed the most monstrous crime "in the history of mankind," was—attempts to explain and assimilate it notwithstanding— in danger of being forgotten...

...Lanzmann's camera lingers long over these trees, these meadows, these clay pits, these roads, as it will linger long over the other scenes (the mise en mort, if you will) of 27 the Final Solution...

...It sets out from the premise that, for the purposes of understanding, they are, fortunately for them, forever lost...

...The "operating vehicles" at Chelmno, for example, did their foul work sufficiently swiftly for Lanzmann's camera to reproduce the full span of the drive, as it follows the same rainy roads at the same remorseless pace...

...A woman from Lodz speaks of her parents' death in the ghetto, while the camera pans slowly over the broken-down tombstones in the city's Jewish cemetery...

...His film is a profound meditation on the situation of those who came after...

...The film is a remarkable realization of its author's artistic vision, as expressed in the 1981 essay: Shoah succeeds in telling the truth about the extermination of the Jews, in a manner never ventured before...

...Four hundred thousand, forty thousand . . . ?" Again Lanzmann obliges: "Four hundred thousand...

...This project—the creation of presence by absence—required a very long movie...

...These are the heroes who live, like black suns, in our midst...

...Shoah has the duration not of spectacle, but of experience...

...and by a few who were instrumental in running and maintaining them...

...The Gulag, as abominable as it is, consists of concentration camps, which are not camps of extermination...

...They are the epitome of the experience, the apotheosis of the atrocity...

...It is not surprising, he says, that "bad times are repressed," while good times remain in one's memory...

...and places where it is always here...

...Franz Grassler, deputy commissioner of the Warsaw Ghetto, suffers from similar lapses of memory...

...I thought immediately of David's curse upon the ground where Saul and Jonathan were killed—"Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain, upon you...

...It is a vain search...

...Amazing...

...He would see them and hear them, to the exclusion of everything else...

...Obligingly, Lanzmann offers to help him remember: for instance, does he recall Dr...

...We have been taken to the catastrophe and left there for nine hours, and after nine hours, as Lanzmann expected, you remember things...

...You know it...

...each initial theme is repeated by several voices and becomes modified without ceasing to be recognizable...

...In some instances Lanzmann could even dare to reassemble the catastrophe in real time...

...Those who were there saw it in color...

...The matching of image and word is suggestive...

...With the exception of a riveting scene in which Hilberg decodes a Nazi train schedule for its full, rank, real-world meaning, Hilberg's mood of knowingness (won by immense historical knowledge, to be sure) and distance (the very condition of historical knowledge) is sharply in contradiction to the essence of the film...

...In some sense Lanzmann has literally re-assembled the catastrophe...

...They go on...

...When the Second World War ended, the world seemed to be stunned into the realization that the systematic slaughter of six million Jews was a logically consequential—if unexpected —product of Western history, of "two thousand years of persecution and anti-Jewish hatred," and that anti-Semitism must therefore "be irrevocably banished...

...I use the term "leitmotif' deliberately...

...Lanzmann's film begins with shots of Chelmno, near the Narew river in Poland, which was the scene of the Nazis' first effort to destroy the Jews physically...

...There is no more lasting effect of this film than the feeling it leaves for the trains...

...This article helps explain what had led him to embark on his arduous task...

...Unlike the many writers and filmmakers on "the Holocaust" who seek to transcend history, Lanzmann seeks to precede it...

...This is amplified by one "non-witness" interviewed by Lanzmann, the American historian Raul Hilberg, whose comments are a masterpiece of scholarly depth and lethal precision...

...The heavy, mindless, inexorable chugging of cattle cars runs through Shoah like the tormenting theme of a nightmare...

...For the Jews, as Lanzmann correctly grasps, the trains were where extermination began...

...In its efforts to achieve audience "identification," it distorted the specific character, the "otherness" of the Jewish victims...

...That is probably as good a way as any to measure the gulf that divides those who were there from those who were not...

...it is not long before the cold, mechanical flexings of his scissors, then and now, in Auschwitz and in Tel Aviv, collapse into a single act, into a single story...

...This strange placement in the interstices of the tenses makes it difficult to assign Lanzmann's film to a genre...

...The Germans in the film, then, are unspeakable...

...The others—all the sickening photographs of the living corpses and the dead corpses that the Nazis made out of Europe's Jews—all the images of that inferno that has become canonical in our culture, that has, as if to complete the curse, become even cliched— all have failed at full exposure of the enormity, at least by the standard of radical exposure that Lanzmann has in mind...

...Consider, moreover, the extra degree of protection provided by the photographs for their being black and white...

...Lanzmann's brilliance lay in his decision to find just those people and just those places, in his strict abstention from any other avenues of access...

...The meadows are brown...

...its last haunting image is of a train rolling down the tracks...

...Together with all this came efforts to "reject" the Holocaust, to deny its uniqueness by burying it in a thesis of universal evil, by subsuming it under generalities such as "the horrors of war" or "the victims of fascism," as if "The Final Solution" can be compared to any other atrocities in human history...

...A little reflection will reveal, indeed, that rather than exposing us, the famous photographs have protected us, by virtue of their being photographs, that is, frozen, fixed, false to the flow of time in which the sufferings were lived...

...they left them dead or dying...

...Le Nouvel Observateur, April 26, 1985...

...How much easier it might have been, for Bomba and all the thousands of others who were asked by fate to return from Auschwitz to the world, had the world, and not just their extraordinary part of it, really ended...

...And in its determination to endow the victims' unimaginable sufferings with "dignity," it succeeded in turning reality into a vulgar caricature, "a lie, a moral crime...

...Instead, Lanzmann wants to push the facts back to when they were not yet the facts, to restore them to the state of becoming the facts, when they were fresh to the senses and new to the mind, to reconstitute the ordering of what was happening into a world...

...One thing, however, engraved itself indelibly upon her memory—the "primitive sanitary facilities" in Chelmno...

...Like that camp—what was its name' It was in the Oppeln district . . . I've got it: Auschwitz...

...And the colors are shocking...

...Shoah leaves not a shadow of doubt about 31 the absolutely unprecedented character of the Final Solution, nor about its principal villains: the Nazis, who went about implementing it with a mixture of satanic sadism and icy efficiency...

...Imagine the increase in horror and in fear that would result from the attempt to put these scenes—the little boy surrendering to the helmeted troops in the ghetto, the rows of broken bodies stretching across the compound of the camp—into color...

...Jorge Semprun has written an unforgettable novel about this...

...It consists of remembrances by a handful of victims who escaped...

...For the Germans, the efficiency of the transports represented a triumph of bureaucratic rationality...

...He has penetrated time, and the privacy of other minds...

...We cannot "remember" what the Germans did to the Jews, because we cannot remember what we never knew...

...A second world war...

...They are not informants, but the protagonists of a drama who literally relive their past...

...Similarly, in perhaps the most shattering segment of the film, the Jewish barber Abraham Bomba tells of barbering in the women's crematorium in Auschwitz while he barbers in his shop in Tel Aviv...

...The juxtaposition of these words and these images adds up to, or at least approximates, the lived experience of the end...

...You realize, almost as if you never realized it before, that the Jews were murdered in a place on earth...

...Disastrous...

...moreover, he is something of an amateur psychologist...

...The most surprising mistake, however, is the inclusion of Raul Hilberg, the foremost scholar of the destruction of the Jews...

...The drainhole's cover . . . should be equipped with a slanting trap, so that fluids . . . can drain off during the operation...

...Under Lanzmann's unremitting pressure they protest their innocence, or ignorance, yet avidly provide him with the very details that confirm their guilt...

...Those who were not still have innocent eyes, for which certain colors have not been forever compromised...

...Oh well, she laughs, she wanted to be "useful," she was full of that youthful "pioneering spirit...

...They (that is, we) can never annul the difference in time and in space that separates them from the event...

...a crematorium in Auschwitz...

...The work of the murder had begun on the way...

...It is just as certainly not a docu-drama...

...In every generation every individual must regard himself as if he journeyed out of Egypt": the Jews have made much nourishment out of this philosophical nonsense...

...Several decades later, it has arisen "virtually everywhere from its own ashes, wearing its ancient disguises or the more modern, 'democratic' mask of anti-Zionism...

...There are errors of judgment in the film...

...Children are not gassed there...

...Nor, Lanzmann adds, have documentaries, with their emphasis on sequential or chronological accounts (from shots of Hitler and Nazi rallies to BergenBelsen when the British liberated it) fared much better...

...the railway stations of Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz (Oswiecim...

...Ye banks of the Narew...

...Then, with a smile: "Satisfied...

...He filmed Polish villages that existed—and still do— right next to the death camps...

...It stretched on for years across a whole continent, it was long and wide enough to constitute for its victims not an event, but a second world...

...Today's Ruhr, with its smokestacks puffing and Saurer trucks speeding down the Autobahn, provides the chilling backdrop to Lanzmann's voice as he reads the text of a secret Nazi memorandum to the Saurer works, ordering them to redesign the gas vans so that the "loads" could be more efficaciously "processed...

...Another, Dr...

...That is Lanzmann's feeling about the holocaust...

...I know it's very hard and I apologize, but please, we must go on...

...The extermination was not 'generated,' and to wish to account for it thus is, in a way, to deny its reality, to shut one's eyes to the outbreak of violence— . . . in a word, to weaken it...

...a heap of suitcases that had held the belongings of West European Jews—suitcases abandoned at the entrances to the crematoria...

...It exists...

...none of those who entered ever returned to tell us about it...

...The trees are green...

...There is an American Indian superstition according to which a man is not dead until the last man who remembers him dies...

...And since Herr Lanzmann wants "history," he bursts into a song—not once, but twice!—that Jewish workers in Treblinka were "taught" to sing as they were marched off to their daily rounds...

...It is "the Holocaust...

...We are shown the sodden woods of Chelmno, the rocky hill of Treblinka, the greening ruins of Auschwitz, as we are told by those who were there what happened there...

...The Final Solution, after all, required the transfer of whole Jewish populations to the killing centers...

...The clay is red...

...Twelve thousand to fifteen thousand...

...The aim, then, that Lanzmann set for himself was to make us see the quintessence of the"Final Solution"—namely, Death...

...One French critic compared the construction of Shoah to "a series of Bach fugues...

...It is not an unfamiliar predicament for Jewish sons and daughters—which is why it has been a primary intention of Jewish culture throughout the ages to invent precisely a new form of memory, a fortifying fiction that we now know as "collective" memory...

...I reject any such comparison...

...and, with a cruelty that only collective memory could justify, he would return some of the people to some of the places, so that not even their own healing would stand in the way of Lanzmann's record...

...by some who through chance observed the death camps...

...SS Unterscharfiihrer Franz Suchomel, who spent about a year in Treblinka, flaunts his hideous pedantry, emphasizing the essential difference between Auschwitz and Treblinka: the former, he says, was "a factory [while the latter]—keep this in mind!—was a primitive but efficient production line of death...

...The takes are long, the words punctuated by silences...

...Perhaps it should be called a docu-memory, since it is upon that uncanny faculty for keeping dead things in life that it is entirely based...

...Only a cast-iron disposition would dare represent what went on in the gas chambers...

...That the agency was ready to ship either tourists to Aegean beaches or Corfu, or Jews to the gas chambers, all at special "excursion rates," with "children under ten going at half-fare and children under four going free...

...so it was designed by its German innovators in inhumanity...

...There is no facile chronology...

...The film begins with the story of Simon Srebnik, one of the two Jews who survived the murder of 400,000 Jews in the village of Chelmno, 40 miles northeast of Lodz...

...the conjoined voices create new, unexpected harmonies...

...The oxymoronic temporality of his film—the past seems like the present, the present seems like the past—is a perfect reproduction of memory's blurring of the dimensions...