In 1973, Alouf Aeven from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, won over by his film Why Israel, asked Claude Lanzmann to make a film that “is the Shoah”.
How to represent the killing and reduction to ashes of 6 million Jews—men, women, children, and the elderly—by optimized industrial processes, followed by the Nazis' attempt to erase all traces of this crime? To embrace this unprecedented event, Claude Lanzmann chose the only possible path: “Resurrecting the dead to kill them a second time, but not alone,” “To die with them again and to accompany them.” He found witnesses as close as possible to the death machine: the Sonderkommandos, or Jewish workers enslaved and assigned to gas chambers and ovens; the Polish inhabitants living adjacent to the killing centers; and the Nazis themselves, whom he managed to get to talk and film with a hidden camera. The presence of each witness, Sonderkommando or Nazi, is a miracle in itself, as it was so difficult to find them and then persuade them to speak. As Claude Lanzmann explained many times, Jewish witnesses never say “I”; they say “we.” They are not survivors, but “ghosts.” They speak for the dead.
Claude Lanzmann invented a new form of cinema, neither documentary nor fiction. He directed; his works are movies. For example, not having obtained the right to film in Lithuania behind the Iron Curtain, he chose a forest in Israel that was reminiscent of the Ponary forest and had trees burned in the background. He invented the boat on the Sea, the smoking glades, the hairdressing salon. Starting from nothing, or almost nothing that remains, Claude Lanzmann magnificently invested the landscapes and confronted the witnesses at the scene of the crime.
For seven years, he accumulated a treasure: a corpus of 220 hours of film reels and as many audio interviews. Then, over five years of editing, he produced a monumental work with a complex structure that was compared to a Mahler symphony—a nine-and-a-half-hour work whose duration remains human.
Faced with objections about the length of his film, Claude Lanzmann answered: “Six million Jews were murdered; I spent 12 years of my life trying to tell their story. In my opinion, the film is too short. Next question.”
Claude Lanzmann recounted the filming of his work in his autobiography The Patagonian Hare.
Shoah can transmit to anyone over the age of 12 the knowledge of the greatest atrocity of the 20th century, without a single archival image—which, in any case, does not exist. It is a unique experience of unheard-of richness that makes one different, smarter, and better, turning the viewer into a witness responsible, in turn, for the transmission of the event. Shoah can be seen in one sitting or in shorter segments. It is divided into 2 parts across 4 DVDs.
Very little is remembered from centuries past. The 20th century is the century of the Holocaust. It is also the century of cinema. Shoah will remain in the memory of mankind.
