40 years ago, on April 30, 1985, 40 years after the suicide of Hitler on April 30, 1945, the first privileged had this incredible experience of discovering the film that has become eternal: Shoah. This OCNI (unidentified cinematographic object) was shown at the beginning in three Parisian theaters, because only three 35mm copies were available: The Monte Carlo at 52 Avenue des Champs-Élysées, and two of Frédéric Mitterrand's theaters: the Olympic Maryline at 10 rue Boyer-Barret in Paris 14th and Olympic Luxembourg at 67 rue Monsieur-le-Prince in Paris 6th.
Let those who were there, do not hesitate to tell us about their memories by writing to contact@claude-lanzmann.com.
The theatrical release was preceded by a preview in the presence of François Mitterrand on Sunday April 21 at the Théâtre de l'Empire.
In January, he replied:
Dear Claude Lanzmann,
Thanks for your letter. Your testimony is precious to me.
I am happy to know that you are finishing your film and I can imagine what your state of mind may be when it comes to completing a work, which has occupied you for so many years. I am convinced that it is a monument worthy of our piety and of the collective memory of our time. After this movie, some hateful deformations of the story will no longer be possible...
Indeed, in January 1985, the film had not yet been named. A lot has been written about choosing this name. Some have even claimed to have mentioned this name to Claude Lanzmann at the last minute. In fact, recently, Tamar Lewinsky, the curator of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, let me listen to excerpts from interviews in preparation for Shoah, which constitute a corpus of 250 hours of interviews, recorded on audio cassettes, given by the ACFL at the Jewish Museum in Berlin in 2021, during the preparation of the joint Franco-German application for the UNESCO Memory of the World.
As Tamar Lewinsky, who is doing a remarkable job on these recordings, told me, this is an interview in English by Claude Lanzmann with one of the few women survivors of the Sobibor extermination camp, Ilana Safran, an Israeli woman whom Claude begged to agree to be filmed but who refused and therefore does not appear in Shoah. Claude explains to him in English verbatim: “I am preparing a film about the Holocaust” in 1975, 10 years before the release of the film. So I had proof of what Corinna Coulmas, Claude's main assistant in the production of Shoah over the 12 years: throughout the preparation of Shoah, between them, in the team that consisted of Claude and his two Hebrew-speaking assistants, Corinna Coulmas and Irena Steinfeldt-Levy, they commonly used the word “Shoah”, since it had been used in Israel since 1948 to refer to the extermination of European Jews during the Second World War, this word that means great disaster and that we find a limited number of times in the Bible.
So at the last minute, Claude not finding a title, decided on Shoah, he said that very well in The Patagonian hare.
Following the premiere at the Théâtre de l'Empire, the newspaper Le Monde published the review of Simone de Beauvoir in its edition dated 29 April that subscribers to the newspaper LThe world can read again today:”Shoah, by Claude Lanzmann: the memory of horror”.
The film was beginning its universal trajectory.
Since then, the inclusion by ACFL in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, due to its international dimension, has brought this monument back to the forefront all over the world.
On the weekend of April 13-14, 2025, it was shown in Warsaw at the Muranów Cinema in the heart of the ghetto's location, in a full house, then last weekend at the Beijing Festival with the magnificent film by Guillaume Ribot, based on the rushes of Shoah: I only had nothingness, which we started talking to you about earlier.
INA and Lumni Ensegnement are also celebrating the 40th anniversary of the film. The educational kit was designed by Jean-François Forges, in consultation with Claude Lanzmann. INA and Lumni are making excerpts from “Shoah” available on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the release of the film.
“Shoah” - Excerpt 1 - The disappearance of traces
“Shoah” - Excerpt 2 - The gas chambers of Treblinka and Auschwitz
“Shoah” - Excerpt 3 - Grabow Polish
“Shoah” - Excerpt 4 - Chelmno Poles
“Shoah” - Excerpt 5 - The killing process in Treblinka
“Shoah” - Excerpt 6 - Life and death in Birkenau of Jews from the Theresienstadt family camp
This work, which”Everyone must have seen once in their life.”, as Polish student Franek Csaja says about the Warsaw screening, must be shown and shown again and again. It is up to everyone to seize the educational virtues of this film without an image of violence, whether in school or in the family, in order to raise awareness at all ages to fight against current societal excesses.
