The entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau (Photo: flickr/ Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland)
It is the 40th anniversary of one of the most important films ever made this week. Shoah, the nearly ten-hour film about the Holocaust, should be watched by every anti-fascist.
Shoah is a triumph of what cinema is capable of—a monument to the memory of the Holocaust. Director Claude Lanzmann spent 12 years locating and interviewing eyewitnesses, survivors, perpetrators and scholars for the film.
The focus is the death camps of Chelmno, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Warsaw Ghetto. But Shoah uses no archival footage of the Nazi death camps. Instead, Lanzmann weaves the interviews in with his own images of the camps from the time of filming in the 1980s.
Locations come alive through the words of witnesses. A deserted spot in a forest is a graveyard for Nazis to dump human bodies. A derelict train track transported people to their death.
As a Jewish death camp survivor describes the operations of the gas chambers in Auschwitz, the camera slowly moves through the remnants of the camp. The effect is brutal, forcing you to confront every detail of the Holocaust. The too-often remote experience of the barbarity performed by the Nazis is made utterly concrete.
Some of the survivors struggle to describe their experiences, their voices crack, their expressions convey what they are unable to say in words. Faces of agony etch into your memory as they recollect unimaginable horror.
Filip Muller, a Czech Jew who was forced by the Nazis to clean out the gas chambers, recalls how the gas rose from the ground upwards.
“The strongest people tried to climb higher. Most people tried to push their way to the door. Which is why children and weaker people and the aged always wound up at the bottom. Because in the death struggle, a father didn’t realise his son lay beneath him.”
When the doors to the chamber open, Filip says, “People fell out like blocks of stone, like rocks falling out of a truck.”
At the Chelmno death camp, Nazis would force prisoners onto the back of gas vans and fill them up with carbon monoxide.
A note written by a Nazi bureaucrat details a meeting with the vehicle manufacturing company Saurer about how the trucks could be made more efficient for the job. The bureaucrat states that there is no possibility of “reducing the number of pieces loaded” onto the van. Instead, to improve stability “load space… must absolutely be reduced by a yard”.
Saurer bosses thought that the front axle might be overloaded by the changes. But the Nazi bureaucrat reassures them it would not be an issue as “during the operation, the merchandise aboard displays a natural tendency to rush to the rear doors”.
Here the uniqueness of the Holocaust is on show—the combination of scientific racism with bureaucratic techniques of industrial capitalism.
Franz Suchomel, an SS guard at Treblinka, describes the process of the camp with cold detachment. In his words, the Nazis created an “efficient production line of death”.
A train driver responsible for transporting people to Treblinka recounts the screams and cries for water—and the vodka the Germans gave him to help him get by.
A man living next to a church where Nazis rounded up Jewish people and forced them into gas vans, is asked if he saw the vans. “No, yes, from the outside. They shuttled back and forth. I never looked inside, I didn’t see Jews in them.”
As the interviews with bystanders go on, it becomes clear that almost all of them were aware of what was taking place. Some repeat antisemitic ideas, many remain insensitive to their own inaction.
Amid the horror, we hear of those in Auschwitz who disrupted the operation—as well as testimonies of those involved in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Hundreds of Jewish people attempted to resist deportation to the camps.
Humanity can prevail, even in the most inhuman circumstances.
- Shoah is available on BBC iPlayer
