Shoah
Shoah
clocks in at nine and a half hours. That's enough to discourage any cinephile
from committing to this 1985 ultra-epic documentary on the Holocaust as
told by its survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators. All you need do, however,
is slip in the first videocassette (of five) to discover that what arguably
constitutes the greatest horror of Western history provides an inexhaustible
resource of gripping material - which may be the film's most tragic aspect.
This film would fail if it attempted, like Schindler's List, to approximate the feelings of despair and loss of consignment to the concentration camps. Schindler's List aspired, somewhat presumptuously, to encapsulate in a cinematic framework an historical abomination before which art and language can only fail (how do you represent hell?), whereas Shoah, made ten years earlier, anticipated this handicap. Instead of asking the impossible qualitative question "how awful was it?", director Claude Lanzmann asks for concrete facts: what were the details of daily life in the concentration camps? By what methods were Jews exterminated? What horrors did those interred witness? Shoah wisely believes that the facts will suffice, and adopts an authorial stance of nil admirari (to marvel at nothing); it's a very sober enterprise, and such an engaging one that after nine and a half hours you still feel cheated.
Shoah is also an extraordinarily static
film, consisting largely of interviews and locations. Lanzmann spends
lots of footage exploring the European forests, railways, and cities in
which the events of the Nazi pogrom took place. It's all so surprisingly
quiet. By such static scenes Shoah bears silent witness that the
most unexceptional sites can in fact be venues for terrible inhumanities;
such a truth loses its hold on our memories as the gas chambers and ovens
crumble to ruin, and young trees threaten to conceal their existence once
and for all. A huge documentary with so little action is an enormous risk,
but we fill in Shoah's silences with our own incredulous queries
("Did that really happen right there? It looks so innocent . . .").
We spend interminable moments examining the faces
of former SS officers for traces of guilt. (We find none, even in those
interviews conducted with a hidden camera. In fact, it is these aged Nazis
who display the least emotion of anyone interviewed.) We marvel at contemporary
Poles who claim how life has improved since the deportation of the Jews
half a century ago. We listen to the internal debate of a survivor of
Auschwitz who, conscripted to maintain the gas chambers, could not decide
whether to reveal to his fellow Jews (who thought they would be taking
showers) that they were about to be gassed. (He decided not to make their
last moments even more unbearable.) Even more absurd is various survivors'
discussion of "resistance" movements within the camps - which
sounds more like choosing between deaths. "How will it impede the
whole machinery?" pondered the resistance leaders, constantly questioning
the utility of fighting back. (Amazingly, two prisoners escaped Auschwitz
in 1944 "to inform the world" of the Nazis' Final Solution which
was being fulfilled regardless of the war's outcome.)
The
last hours of Shoah focus on the Warsaw ghetto, a place we're inclined
to regard simply as an intermediate stage before the gas chambers, but
which in truth bore little difference from the death-camps. We're told
of piles of corpses in the streets, of complete isolation from "Aryan
Warsaw," and the utter deprivation of food and water. A courier for
the Polish government-in-exile who secretly visited the ghetto cried,
"I was told they were human beings . . . they did not look like human
beings." Though denied arms by the Polish resistance, the ghetto
formed a Jewish Combat Organization in 1942 prior to their scheduled deportation
to the Treblinka incinerators. The J.C.O. fought back, "to the Germans'
total surprise," tell the subtitles: "It had to be a fight to
the death."
Shoah,
while bombarding us with these staggering details, never loses its focus
on the How of the Holocaust, asking finally, "how did one survive
in the ghetto?" Theater presentations, chess tournaments, and a children's
festival were held right up to the end, we are told; an American scholar
explains that "in the process of healing sick people who are going
to be gassed, trying to educate youngsters who will never be growing up
. . . they are going on as if life will continue:
They have an official faith in the survivability of the ghetto, even after all indications are to the contrary. The strategy continues to be, We Must Continue, for this is the only strategy that is left.
Though "doomed
to failure," the Jews did all they could to minimize the damage,
for "continuity is the only thing in all of this." Herein lies
Shoah's terrible How. Steven Spielberg could never translate such
nightmares into quality Hollywood entertainment.
"Shoah" is Hebrew for "annihilation,"
which itself means "to reduce to nonexistence." Lanzmann's challenge
was to find concrete facts out of people who were crushed out of existence.
Searching diligently for a history that was in itself threatened with
annihilation, he found a handful of individuals like the Auschwitz survivor
who was forced to upkeep the gas chambers and at one point threw himself
in out of despair. He recalls an old woman beside him who sensed their
imminent demise and insisted he return to his post, because "you
must bear witness to our suffering, and to the injustice done to us."
In Shoah he lives to fulfill his tragic commission.
April 1996
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