About the Film
More than ten years (1974-1985) in the making, Shoah (the Hebrew word for ‘Annihilation’) brings together testimonies from both the victims of the National Socialist extermination of European Jews and from its perpetrators and observers. Many of them tell their story for the first time in 30 years. According to Claude Lanzmann, Shoah is not a film about survival but a “testimonial of death”. He not only asks the witnesses to recall their experiences; his questioning technique prompts his interviewees to relive the past events. Lanzmann’s questions revolve around events at the sites where Jews were murdered –Chelmno, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Warsaw Ghetto– laying open the bureaucratic mechanism of extermination, which began in the ghettos and was eventually implemented in the concentration and extermination camps. In its nine and a half hours, the film only makes use of only one archive document. Otherwise it exclusively relies on witness statements and newly filmed footage of the death sites showing them as they were at the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties. This was a radically new approach. Much of the film’s powerful effect stems from the montage of testimonies and the footage of the places referred to in their memories. “I travelled to the places on my own and I realized that you have to combine the two aspects. You have to know and see, and you have to see and know. That’s why the problem with the places is so immense. It is a down-to-earth film, a topographical and geographical film.” (Lanzmann)
