'SHOAH' RECALLS THE HOLOCAUST

...denied the visual, the viewer is provoked to imagine, to join in the reconstruction of events rather than be a passive recipient of packaged horror...

...Many stories are particularly affecting, especially those by survivors who witnessed the deaths of loved ones or who had to participate in the preparation or disposal of their bodies...

...Lanzeman even manages a near impossible task, given the notoriety of his subject: he evokes suspense...

...Few subjects are worth a nine-hour mo vie...

...only at Auschwitz do we see actual evidence of the events themselves...

...Most of Lanzeman's cinematography, in short, is visually "innocent...

...Worse than the screams, he says laconically, was their end...

...Many of these, subjects of long interviews in the film, were born around 1920...

...Elie Wiesel has written that to witness, to remember, is the only weapon against this intellectual barbarism...

...The SS man had already been tried as a war criminal before the interview, and, although acquitted, he feared further publicity...

...In the second place, the young — although more curious about Hitler and the Holocaust than most other epochs of history — have little concrete knowledge of what actually happened...

...if some can be persuaded to see Shoah, or at least a part of it, perhaps their ignorance can be significantly remedied...

...Daringly, Lanzeman does not use many images from the past...

...again, we have to wait to learn why...

...Lanzeman uses no newsreel footCommonweal: 702 age, no still photographs, and few direct visual reminders from the past: one of the best half-echoes is the old railway link to Treblinka, now torn up and resembling nothing more than a country path...

...As Lanzeman alternates between stories of Treblinka, Sobibor, or Auschwitz, one begins to assemble a massive mental mosaic of the terrible efficiency of the SS and the terrifying experiences of its victims...

...Lanzeman does not spare to report instances of Polish and particularly Ukrainian anti-Semitism as a valuable tool of the SS...

...In the first place, the truth of the Holocaust is not universally acknowledged...

...The whole process — off the train and into the "shower" area — took twenty minutes, Glazer reports...

...Ironically, he is not entirely unconvincing in his self-defense in Shoah...

...What the Holocaust involved, Shoah records, was not just mass murder but the industrialization of death...

...One of the prime interviewees in this regard is an ex-SS noncommissioned officer who granted Lanzeman an oral interview without realizing that Lanzeman's technicians could also get him on remote television...

...Similarly, many of the survivors, interviewed in Israel, discourse in Yiddish, often talking haltingly, with pained expressions, as though Lanzeman were opening scars...

...Lanzeman's technique is unlike any other Holocaust memorial, particularly the overstated NBC soap opera mini-series of several years back...

...Only exceptional art saves such truths from the dull fate of complacent repetition...

...another survivor of a burial detail explains how he disposed of his wife's and children's bodies after they were asphixiated in a mobile gas chamber where they were "packed together like herrings...

...he carefully interrogates his subjects, asking them repeatedly to be exact about what happened — how camps were set up, for example, how the trains arrived (the Western European Jews came in passenger cars, it is claimed, and some even "dolled themselves up" before debarking), and finally how the extermination began...

...One camp barber explains how he cut his wife's and daughter's hair silently, knowing full well this prefaced extermination...

...And Rene Lanzeman's Shoah, distributed for showing in two four-and-a-half-hour parts, uses its length to renew interest about an often cliche-ridden and overwritten subject...

...in the early 1940s they were physically healthy enough to survive both the initial selections at the gas chambers and the later assaults on their well-being in the labor camps...

...Accompanied by an interpreter, he often walks the ground or rail lines proximate to the camps, talking to Polish trainmen or farmers who either drove the Jewish prisoners to death or who witnessed their arrivals...

...Lanzeman's goal in Shoah (Hebrew for '' holocaust'') is to create a gigantic oral history by talking with these men and women, and by having them recreate in their own words exactly what happened...

...One elderly Polish woman, still living in the city of Auschwitz, seems coldly cynical in her casual description of Jewish "resettlement" (the town was 80 percent Jewish in 1939, and still has remnants of a lovely Jewish section...

...Lanzeman probably had a different reason for making his documentary: the threat of natural death for the generation of survivors...

...But as Coleridge would have it, Lanzeman here accomplishes something more difficult than originality: making the old new again...

...TOM O'BRIEN Commonweal: 704...

...This is mostly due to his interviewing technique...

...As they talk to the interpreter in Polish, we in turn wait for her to translate to Lanzeman in French (which in turn, here, is translated into English subtitles...

...Lanzeman's laborious understatement, in short, is designed to leave room for us to enter...

...Painstakingly rescuing the Holocaust from abstraction, Lanzeman makes it as real and as inhuman as an assembly line...

...He recalls the initial days at Treblinka, after the shootings had stopped and the use of the mobile gas chambers began...

...Some of this may be true: the SS high command invented the large gas chambers and the crematoria not only to 20 December 1985: 703 speed the pace of the killing but also to anaesthetize it, to disengage their subordinates from its performance...

...Part of Lanzeman's point is that it is not easy to kill six million people...

...The camera in Shoah focuses primarily on the interviewees' faces, or their exchanges with the director, or purposely on bland images taken from the present — the charming little railway station at Sobibor, for example, with the same flower pots and commuter benches as in the 1940s, or the green-black woods near Treblinka where the slaughter (by guns, initially) first started...

...The Holocaust certainly qualifies...

...We hear increasingly of denials of the event by neo-Nazis and their sympathizers...

...Some Polish farmers also cackle with glee describing how they informed train-trapped Jews of their fate (a hand across the jugular...

...He describes how he was detailed to clean up a messy burial site and begin cremation of the remains, claiming that it left him sickened...

...Shoah might better be called an anatomy of the Holocaust...

...Ukrainian guards are universally fingered by all involved as more brutal than many Germans in the operation of the camps...

...This is even more true because of the leisurely pace that Lanzeman employs...

...over landscapes where somehow the sun still shines and the sky stands, all that atrocity really happened...

...surviving the initial selection, they were detailed to stack the suitcases and clothes of the less fortunate who stayed naked...

...For the most part, his camera implies, all is forgotten — a suggestion that adds a sense of urgency to every word of the survivors...

...As an interviewer, Lanzeman is passionate about the details...

...Shoah is pertinent for several reasons...

...Rather, stylistically Shoah resembles Marcel Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity, which focused entirely on contemporary interviews with members of the resistance and with Vichy sympathizers in a small French city...

...The result in Shoah is not boredom...

...Watching it, one begins to feel the palpable fact of the thing...

...One survivor, Richard Glazer, now living in Switzerland, describes how he and several other young men were told to put their clothes back on after first being told to prepare for "showers" on arrival in Auschwitz...

...his major question isn't why, but where, when, and more precisely, how...