Shoah (1985)

directed by Claude Lanzmann

Colin Rafferty

English 395B, Holocaust Film, walked out of Denison Hall into the dusk of a spring day. It felt all wrong. At the beginning of the semester, class would end and we’d emerge into the dead world of a Kansas winter, ice and snow and people bundled against them, hurrying from class to class. That felt appropriate. But now, now was a college campus in springtime, all joy and life, layers stripped away, love in the air, mating rituals underway.

This is what we exited our darkened seminar room to, eyes blinking, visitors from a different land. None of it was right.

Spring break would start in a few days, and I walked home with two videotapes in my backpack with Shoah written on them in my professor’s handwriting. I’d asked her if I could borrow them over the break. In class, we only watched a few excerpts from Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour documentary—the opening sequence on the river, the hidden camera interview, the barber in Tel Aviv—but I’d wanted to watch the whole thing.

I left campus, crossing Anderson Avenue and walking the two blocks to the apartment my roommate and I shared. Both he and my girlfriend were going out of town for the break, so I’d have the place to myself. Lots of time to watch the whole thing.

In the darkening sky above the parking lot, the comet was coming into view.

*

Claude Lanzmann began making Shoah in the mid-‘70s, when he realized that the generation that had experienced the Holocaust—victims, perpetrators, and bystanders—had begun to pass away. He tracked down as many people as he could to interview them, from survivors in Israel and around the world who had been forced to work in the gas chambers, to Polish farmers whose land abutted the camps and railway workers who’d driven the trains there. In beer halls and quiet homes, he found former Nazis, some of whom agreed to speak with him under condition of anonymity—which Lanzmann agreed to and then hid a camera in a bag in order to record them anyway.

At over nine hours, Shoah contains so much, but it’s also worth noting what it doesn’t contain. There is no archival footage and no dramatic re-enactments of the Holocaust. Shoah is a movie made of two components: people in their fifties and sixties recounting the 20th century’s biggest nightmare, and long, unbroken shots of forests and fields and the endless trains where that nightmare happened.

Lanzmann took ten years to complete Shoah, shooting so much footage that he later made four feature-length documentaries from unused footage. The reels of film are now in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington; Shoah itself was released as part of the Criterion Collection in 2013 on both DVD and Blu-Ray.

The version in my backpack in 1997 was on a pair of super-long-play VHS tapes, recorded by my professor off of public television years earlier.

*

In 1986, a year after Shoah debuted in France and the United States and the year it played at the Berlin International Film Festival, my father woke me in the middle of the night to go see Halley’s Comet.

We drove out from the lights of Kansas City into farmland and scanned the sky looking for the comet. As cold as I was, I was still excited, envisioning the comet with a long tail, shining in the darkness of the night sky, bright and glorious. The newspaper had printed stories of the 1910 visit, the last time Halley’s had appeared, recounting how the tail had stretched across the stars and the comet seemed to shine more brightly.

The paper also told of the panics the comet created, how people boarded up their houses and took “comet pills” out of fear of the supposed poisonous gases that the comet’s tail would bring to Earth when it passed through. It told of how in 1835, people blamed Halley’s Comet for fires, massacres, even the fall of the Alamo. The comet had been viewed as a terrifying figure, to the extent that in 1456, the Pope excommunicated it as an “instrument of the devil.”

Out in a Kansas field 530 years later, we saw nothing even remotely terrifying. With Dad’s binoculars, we searched the sky, eventually finding a small smudge near the horizon that we guessed must be Halley’s Comet. We looked at it for a while, then returned to the car and drove home.

*

There’s a sequence near the end of the first half of Shoah that takes place in front of the church in Chelmno nad Nerem, Poland. During the war, Nazis would round up Jews into the church, and then load them into specially modified vans that fed carbon monoxide exhaust into the sealed rear compartment. By the time the vans reached a site outside of town, the people inside would be dead, and Jewish prisoners would unload the van and burn the bodies. At least 150,000 people were killed this way; seven prisoners survived.

One of them, Simon Srebnik, who was fourteen at liberation, and who survived a bullet to the back of the head when the camp was liquidated, stands in front of the church, surrounded by eight villagers. People pass in the background; it’s a Catholic feast day. Through a translator, Lanzmann speaks with them. Srebnik smiles softly as the conversation begins.

Ask them if they’re glad to see Srebnik again.

Very. It’s a great pleasure.

Why?

They’re glad to see him again because they know all he’s lived through. Seeing him as he is now, they’re very pleased.

They’re pleased? Why does the whole village remember him?

They remember him because he walked with chains on his ankles, and he sang on the river. He was young, he was skinny, he looked ready for his coffin.

A crowd gathers around the group. Lanzmann asks the villagers to describe the loading of the vans. At times, he is amazed by their accounts (It took fifty vans to empty it!). He lets the villagers tell their stories of how the tried to give food and water to the Jews in the church, even though the Germans forbade it.

Once they’ve told their heroic tales, Lanzmann tells the translator to ask why do they think all this happened to the Jews?

The villagers speak animatedly. Because they were the richest! A man steps forward from behind Srebnik, and the translator tells Lanzmann, Mr. Kantorowski will tell us what a friend told him. It happened in Myndjewyce, near Warsaw.

Mr. Kantorowski tells the story of the Jews of the village and their roundup, and of how the village’s rabbi told the assembled Jews of the crucifixion of Christ, of how the Jews cried out “Let his blood fall on our heads and on our sons’ heads,” and how the rabbi then said that perhaps the time has come for that, so let us do nothing, let us do as we’re asked. The story this rabbi supposedly told is from the Gospel of Matthew, and has been used for millennia to justify the persecution of the Jews.

Throughout this long sequence, the camera moves in and out on various people’s faces, and Simon Srebnik never stops smiling. But once Mr. Kantorowski has finished the story, blaming the Jews for their own murders, the camera very slowly zooms in, until Srebnik’s face fills the screen, impassive, the smile gone. Around him, the same villagers who just celebrated his survival and pitied the dead now enthusiastically agree with where the blame lies. The look on Srebnik’s face suggests that he knows that nothing has really changed, that the villagers are performing a show of gratitude for his survival, and that the same ages-old hatred still surrounds him.

*

When my roommate left for spring break, he padlocked his door but neglected to turn off his alarm clock, so for the entire morning and most of the afternoon that week, a steady beeping echoed through the entire apartment. I tried to spend that time away, returning in the evening.

With the sun setting, I put the first tape into the machine and pressed Play. The automatic tracking smoothed out the image, and I settled onto the couch to watch.

Lanzmann is relentless in Shoah, confirming every detail: how many cars in a transport? How long was the road from the ramp to the gas chamber? Was the camp boundary here? Or here? He is looking for the truth in the landscape, rushing against time to ensure that the facts get recorded.

Over the course of the documentary, Lanzmann is often aggressive and confrontational with his interview subjects. He argues with former Nazis who insists that they didn’t know where the trains they scheduled were actually going or who claim that they tried to help the Jews of the ghetto they supervised. With bystanders, he is often incredulous, giving them the space and time to reveal their true feelings.

Lanzmann brings the same intensity, tempered with mercy and kindness, to the survivors he interviews. Some of them seem to have reached a settling with their experiences, relating them carefully and precisely to Lanzmann. Others, less so.

In one of the film’s most famous sequences, Lanzmann interviews Abraham Bomba as he cuts hair in a Tel Aviv barbershop. Bomba survived Treblinka, an extermination camp second only to Auschwitz in its lethality, and, in fact, cut the hair of Jews about to be gassed.

As he trims a man’s hair, Bomba tells Lanzmann how arriving Jews were taken off the trains and to the gas chambers, where they were told by the Germans that they would be disinfected. He speaks in an accented English carefully, and begins to tell a story about when a train from his hometown arrived and another barber recognized his wife and children in the crowd about to be gassed.

He gets a few sentences in, and then breaks off. He keeps cutting hair. The camera never leaves him.

Lanzmann, off camera, says Go on, Abe. You must go on. You have to.

I can’t. It’s too horrible. Please.

We have to do it. You know it.

I won’t be able to do it.

You have to do it. I know it’s very hard. I know and I apologize.

Don’t make me go on please.

Please. We must go on.

I told you that today it’s going to be very hard. They were taking that in bags and transporting it to Germany.

And so Bomba continues. On the couch, in a dark living room, I watch him finish his story, describing how the Germans shipped the hair off “for their purposes.” I watched Lanzmann kindly and apologetically violate social niceties to make sure that not only could the stories be told, but also be heard.

For a film made of interviews, so much of Shoah involves not talking. Between Bomba trailing off and Lanzmann telling him to go on, seventy seconds pass. The sequence in front of the church lasts almost seventeen minutes. I sat on the couch, watching, watching. At some point I got up to switch out the tapes.

Outside, one day changed into another, the Earth released the sun’s heat it had stored during the day, and the comet hung in the sky, impassively watching.

*

Nine years after my father and I observed a dull smudge in the sky, two astronomers, Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp, both independently discovered another comet. A year later, it became visible to the naked eye, and by January of 1997, as I began that spring semester, it was so bright that it could be seen even in the light-clogged cities.

Comet Hale-Bopp was visible without a telescope for 569 days, far longer than any previous comet. It is difficult to express how awe-inspiring it was. I never really got used to it, and seeing it was a constant reminder of the mystery of things. Even with a scientific explanation, even knowing that comets are icy balls of rocks and dirt travelling across the galaxy, I still found it easy to get overwhelmed by Hale-Bopp. The primal terror of seeing something in the sky that should not be there was easy to feel.

The closest Comet Hale-Bopp came to Earth was on March 22, 1997, during the same week I watched Shoah. It was also the week that 39 people, members of a cult called Heaven’s Gate, took their own lives in a rented house in California, believing that an alien ship behind Hale-Bopp would take their souls away from Earth to a new existence.

*

About seven hours in, I began to wonder how Shoah might end. Lanzmann had organized the film roughly chronologically, beginning with the early versions of industrialized death that would reach its apotheosis at Auschwitz, so I assumed the final interviews would recount the liberation of the camps, and the rescue of the survivors, the punishment of the guilty.

Instead, Lanzmann bent the timeline back upon itself. Shoah ends not with the Red Army liberating the camps, but rather with the Warsaw Ghetto, the place from which the Nazis deported tens of thousands of Jews.

Lanzmann interviews a Polish Home Army courier who secretly visited the ghetto to meet with resistance leaders. He speaks and argues at length with the former Nazi deputy commissioner of the Ghetto, and with a historian, discusses the Jewish Council chairman, who killed himself rather than hand over the ghetto’s orphans for deportation to Treblinka.

In my living room, I had a naïve thought: this is not going to end well.

Then, the scene shifts. We are now in Israel, at the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz. An older man, once a resistance fighter codenamed Antek, tells Lanzmann you asked for my impression. If you licked my heart, it would kill you.

He and another man, codenamed Kajik, talk about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the attack on Nazis by ghetto inhabitants in April of 1943, and the reprisal by the Germans that leveled the ghetto.

Kajik describes escaping the ghetto through the Warsaw sewers to try to find help, and then returning after the Germans had cleared the ghetto of the remaining Jews, deporting those they did not immediately execute.

Seated, arms folded and legs crossed, Kajik tells Lanzmann of hours wandering around the ruins, calling out the password Jan, looking for someone, anyone.

I didn’t meet a living soul, he says. At one point, I recall feeling a kind of peace, or serenity when I said to myself, “I’m the last Jew. I’ll wait for morning, and for the Germans.”

The camera holds on Kajik for a little longer, then cuts from him to yet another train, endlessly rolling down the track. Eventually, the screen cuts to black, and the credits play.

I sat on the couch a long time. The VCR clicked, the screen turning blue, and the whirr of rewinding began. It was early in the morning or late at night. In an hour or two, my roommate’s alarm clock would begin its ritual beeping.

I stood up and walked to our apartment door, unlocked it, and went outside. Maybe I could hear a car or two on the road a few blocks away, but besides that, the air was as quiet as a college town gets during spring break.

In the parking lot, I lifted my head to the sky. The comet burned there, unmoving and travelling thousands of miles per hour. I looked at it for a very long time, trying to discern something, but I could see nothing in it that suggested anything but indifference.

Colin Rafferty lives in Richmond, Virginia, and teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Mary Washington. He is the author of the essay collections Hallow This Ground (2016) and the forthcoming Execute the Office (2021). Read more of his work at colinrafferty.com.