Shoah (1985)

 

“They were stacked like wood.” This is how the Nazis disposed of thousands of Jewish bodies in the Holocaust.

“They fell out like potatoes.” This is how the Jews looked as hundreds simultaneously tumbled out of gas chambers.

“They cried like old women.” This is how Jewish prisoners who were forced to work at Auschwitz and Treblinka reacted to seeing their dead families and friends.

And these are the words from the Devil’s mouth himself, a Nazi officer confessing to documentarian Claude Lanzmann the horror he perpetrated and the repulsive stench of the camps that still lingers in his nostrils.

This is one of the more powerful moments from “Shoah,” the most pivotal film ever made about the Holocaust.

Nearly 10 hours in length and mostly subtitled, “Shoah” proved to be the roughest, most demanding cinematic marathon of my life.

It is a harrowing, torturous documentary made by a ruthless director, French born director Claude Lanzmann.

Lanzmann asks tough questions, paints horrid visuals through testimonials alone and educates to an unspeakable degree. For Lanzmann, the purpose of “Shoah” is to document everything that surrounds the Holocaust to serve as a chilling reminder of our dark history.

In his obsessive and endless interviews with countless subjects, he will fight until the last surviving Jew is standing and heard from. And he will force his subjects to relive each memory in vivid detail so that no word or image goes unheard or forgotten.

Lanzmann is quite omnipresent throughout the film, asking simple and blunt questions that demand the world of these victims. One of the first people he speaks to is Simon Srebnik, a boy during the Holocaust forced to sing German folk tunes for the Nazi soldiers as amusement. Today, for him to even sing makes his heart weep. He thinks it would be better to smile, but we know that even behind the camera, Lanzmann has no interest in smiling.

Ultimately, “Shoah” is a film that basks an unexpected scope and perspective on something we’re all very familiar with. It reveals to us the grim truth that the Holocaust was more than an act of hatred and that it did more to torture people by just murdering them.

From watching it, we gleam a new outlook to our history than that of just sadness. There is genuine pain, sickness and grotesqueness in “Shoah,” and there is no relenting in its depiction.

Where do I begin? Where does a film like this begin? Lanzmann strikes the right tone from the first scene as he interviews Srebnik. He shows this is a film without sentimentality or melodrama. Tears will be shed yes, but not through cinematic manipulation.

Lanzmann includes no footage from the ‘40s. He has no interest in endlessly replaying iconic, horrific images for the sake of tear jerking. Rather, he will show us an empty field or a shimmering river, and then Srebnik or another survivor will explain in horrific detail what happened there.

It’s impossible to imagine that in this landscape that is now silent and peaceful, tragedy once struck on that spot. He does not say how many ashes were thrown into that gorgeous Polish stream, but we can sense it.

The people who could not process the Holocaust as it was happening in their backyards were the Polish farmers forced to live life as normally as possible for fear of their own deaths. They were forbidden to see anything, but they knew people simply vanished. One farmer said he saw little and heard only screams.

They’re one example of the Holocaust’s broader impact. In fact, entire Polish communities have now eerily transformed because of these events.

Lanzmann devotes much time to a congregation outside a Polish Catholic church. They’re a picturesque bunch, all beaming gleefully as they remember what the town was like before the mass extermination, and right in the middle stands an awkward and silent Srebnik. From just his eyes, he seems to remember everything all too well and struggles to think of it peacefully the way his peers around him do.

What is so terrifying about this image is they now unequivocally accept that Poland is a Christian nation, that casual religious prejudice is alive and well against the Jews, and that this is the way things are.

One Polish woman all too cheerfully remembers what it was like competing with Jewish women, who as she saw them, were dishonest, rich, greedy, didn’t work, controlled everything and stole all the Polish men with their natural good looks.

And Lanzmann is not a bit amused. He grills these people as tough as anyone, and we get the sense that although they admit this was a travesty to mankind, that to change history would mean their present lives are upended, and they don’t want that either.

But Lanzmann’s scope of the Holocaust is hardly limited to those positioned outside it. One of his most moving sets of interviews comes from Fillip Muller, a Jewish prisoner turned worker because of his health and strength.

He survived not through some act of heroism, goodness or luck as is typically portrayed in Hollywood Holocaust narratives. Rather, the Nazis needed him to live to help exterminate even more.

Muller is wonderful at describing in such vividness the many victims he recalls. He has no precise idea what it was like to be gassed, but he takes us inside those walls as he speaks. Perhaps the most chilling moment of the film takes place when Muller relives how he was forced to work to clean and operate the gas chambers. Lanzmann’s camera slowly stalks the remains of an old facility, and the real life horror that lingers there is palpable.

Muller even gives Lanzmann his ultimate theme when he considers killing himself by trying to sneak into the gas chambers. He explains how all the survivors remembered him and said he must get out and tell the world what happened here. The truth cannot die with him.

For Lanzmann to bring it out in him is amazing, because many others are not as willing to talk. Near the start of the film’s second part, there is a sequence with inspired cinematography inside a barbershop. The man cutting hair once cut the hair of women and children to assure them that everything would be all right as they approached the gas chamber. He falters when he recalls how one of his colleagues was forced to cut his own wife’s hair and lie to her that she would make it out alive.

But Lanzmann never falters. He persists in asking the tough questions and forcing his subjects to truly feel their pain. He does it with the Jews, and he does it when he deceptively interviews former Nazi officers.

With two different men, Lanzmann sneaks a hidden camera and microphone into their room and lies right to their face that their identity will be protected. He gets one man to provide a map of a camp at Treblinka and gets another to sing a Nazi rally chant, saying to him, “Sing it again, but louder.”

Remarkably, the visuals in these segments resemble a haunting conspiracy thriller. And in the end, their many details and numbers feels not like an onslaught of facts and figures but a confession.

They reveal to him why the Final Solution was so much worse than any genocide. The Nazis treated it like a business, a systematic procedure to eliminate a pest, and in this way, everything that was done felt to them practically fathomable.

The officer calls the concentration camps “a primitive but effective production line of death.” They were able to process 200 Jews at once. They observed how the dead would be piled on top of each other in a corner inside the gas chamber, the strongest climbing on top of their own sons and daughters to reach up where the air was cleaner.

A Holocaust professor in the film analyzes a shipping document on one of the trains carrying the Jews. It’s a harmless piece of paper, but he knows that on just this one sheet, there are 10,000 dead Jews accounted for. Everything was geared to keep the crematoriums running, and if they weren’t, it was treated like a slow day at work. Inefficiency was not an option.

What other Holocaust films have missed the point of, even perhaps the great and powerful “Schindler’s List,” is that this extermination was unprecedented in human history.

All throughout time, powerful figures had hated and tried to eliminate or silence the Jews. First they were enslaved, then they were banished, then they were given no rights, and at last, Hitler’s Final Solution was to murder them all. There would be no coming back from this.

His goal revealed something much larger than the aims of any war. Regardless of their victory or failure in World War II, the Germans would commit to seeing all Jews exterminated. This was not just a horrific act of violence but also a calculated, rigid cleansing of humanity that shook the conscience of the world.

“Shoah” has the power to change you as a person because it reveals this horrific truth in a way that other films merely make you miserable.

Lanzmann simply lets the camera run as survivors, witnesses and perpetrators bare their soul. There is often no editing here and no cinematic flourishes. His efforts surpass the art of filmmaking and even surpass journalism.

What we are left with is the cold, hard truth, but more importantly, a need to continue, to survive and to tell the world what we know.