'Shoah': Part 1 of 4:
Keeping my wartime theme going, I also watched Claude Lanzmann's documentary Shoah recently, all nine hours of it... because it was too fascinating not to watch. It really brought home to me again the enormity of the Holocaust. The documentary is particularly interesting because, having filmed in the 1970s and 1980s, Lanzmann can use testimony from people who lived as adults through the Holocaust.
Keeping my wartime theme going, I also watched Claude Lanzmann's documentary Shoah recently, all nine hours of it... because it was too fascinating not to watch. It really brought home to me again the enormity of the Holocaust. The documentary is particularly interesting because, having filmed in the 1970s and 1980s, Lanzmann can use testimony from people who lived as adults through the Holocaust.
Such adult eye-witness testimony is much rarer these days of course because of the time span involved. Hearing the words of people who could understand events around them as adults, people who had co-ordinated resistance movements in Auschwitz and fought in the Warsaw ghetto uprising was particularly revealing.
Lanzmann also manage to 'catch' Europe, so to speak, before self-consciousness about the Holocaust set in. Prior to the late 1970s when he started filming his documentary, the Holocaust was something of a taboo. The war in general was not a topic that the generation who had fought it and survived it wanted to focus on. So it was only a generation after the war that people began to speak more freely about what had happened and admit to the scale of the horrors. By the 1990s and 2000s, of course, we had entered the era of Schindler's List and The Pianist and now there seems to be a movie or a book out nearly every month that tackles some new aspect of Holocaust history.
This level of exposure is a good thing so that we 'never forget' but it also means that people are now highly aware of the Holocaust and, as a result, are self-conscious about it when they speak. In contrast, when interviewing Polish villagers local to the Auschwitz area, Lanzmann manages to capture some very plain speaking on what went on in the Polish death camps. At that point in time, the locals had little consciousness of their anti-Semitism because Poland was still behind the Iron Curtain. Anti-Semitism was never tackled by the Soviet / Eastern Bloc governments in the way that it was in Western democracies so these locals speak very freely to Lanzmann. He also captures some raw emotion from witnesses and survivors who are often speaking for the first time about an event that left a deep scar on their psyches.
Strangely, Lanzmann gets very little testimony from perpetrators. It was presumably difficult to persuade the criminals to speak on camera because the few Nazi or SS men he does have in the film are only recorded on a secret camera. To get the one big fish on camera, Franz Suchomel who was a camp guard at the extermination camp Treblinka, Lanzemann apparently had to wine and dine him and promise him not to record the interview. Even then, he has little to reveal about his life as a mass murderer except details about the process. It seems to have been all about the process with Suchomel. Great eye for detail. Pity his soul was nothing but a howling vacuum.
Lanzmann's documentary is an exhaustive and exhausting slog but it is worth it. It certainly changed my understanding of some aspects of the Holocaust and was an intense recording of Europe's coming to terms with wartime horrors the previous generation wanted to forget.
