For those that don't know " Shoah" is a 1985 French documentary film which chronicals the memories and experiences of Polish Jews, and selected Polish and German witnesses of the Holocaust within three areas of Poland during the war,
A mammoth undertaking, the film by Claude Lanzmann, took some eleven years to collate and much of the footage from the German perpetrators was secretly filmed over very long takes.
Lanzmann, who could not speak Hebrew, Yiddish or Polish , had to use translators to capture the smallest detail of the personal experience of those he interviewed, so the subsequent scenes are long, often meandering and invariably painful to hear.
The documentary in its entirety is some ten hours in length.
I had the opportunity to go and see a partial showing of " Shoah" in Sheffield years ago and couldn't quite face the experience , so I was pleased ( was pleased the right word?) when I saw that BBC4 was showing it as part of its tribute to Holocaust Memorial Day ( 27th January)
Last night I sat through two hours of Shoah.
It was a painful and powerful experience.
One interview with Filip Muller of the Jewish resistance from Auschwitz lingers long in the mind. A physically and psychologically strong man described to camera the final moments of some 1600 Czech Jews from the Auschwitz' " family camp". For some strange reason the Germans had kept these Jews all together and alive and for over a year at the extermination camp, so when they were herded into the gas chambers they had a certain strength to resist the guards.
In a matter of fact voice, the former resistance man described how his fellow Countrymen refused to undress before their captors . He described how a small group of women begged him to leave them ( he was a worker in the crematorium) so that he could testify to what happened and only broke down when he remembered how the crowd stood proud and sang the Czech National Anthem before the crematorium doors were closed.
Most documentaries use vintage footage to illustrate the narrative. Shoah used people's faces, and winter scenes of the modern day camp sights to bookend those dreadful stories.
Those living faces , with their dead eyes......their stories need to be heard and heard by every
generation. I wish I had the strength to watch more than two hours of it
I did not.
Lanzmann, who could not speak Hebrew, Yiddish or Polish , had to use translators to capture the smallest detail of the personal experience of those he interviewed, so the subsequent scenes are long, often meandering and invariably painful to hear.
The documentary in its entirety is some ten hours in length.
I had the opportunity to go and see a partial showing of " Shoah" in Sheffield years ago and couldn't quite face the experience , so I was pleased ( was pleased the right word?) when I saw that BBC4 was showing it as part of its tribute to Holocaust Memorial Day ( 27th January)
Last night I sat through two hours of Shoah.
It was a painful and powerful experience.
One interview with Filip Muller of the Jewish resistance from Auschwitz lingers long in the mind. A physically and psychologically strong man described to camera the final moments of some 1600 Czech Jews from the Auschwitz' " family camp". For some strange reason the Germans had kept these Jews all together and alive and for over a year at the extermination camp, so when they were herded into the gas chambers they had a certain strength to resist the guards.
In a matter of fact voice, the former resistance man described how his fellow Countrymen refused to undress before their captors . He described how a small group of women begged him to leave them ( he was a worker in the crematorium) so that he could testify to what happened and only broke down when he remembered how the crowd stood proud and sang the Czech National Anthem before the crematorium doors were closed.
Most documentaries use vintage footage to illustrate the narrative. Shoah used people's faces, and winter scenes of the modern day camp sights to bookend those dreadful stories.
Those living faces , with their dead eyes......their stories need to be heard and heard by every
generation. I wish I had the strength to watch more than two hours of it
I did not.
