SHOAH [Hardcover]

It answers the question: Why could this global tragedy happen? It also answers the question: Who were these people who committed the atrocities and where were all the people who bore witness?

The movie asks these questions of the real people who we want to know the answers from. Mr. Lanzman interviews the wife of a concentration camp commandant. Her attitude and her carefully chosen words speak volumes for what she doesn't say. She embodies evil to the nth degree. Her lack of empathy and gross disdain for the 10,000s of Jews that her husband murdered makes you sick to your stomach. And yet she is not guilty of anything more than being an accessory to mass murder and she has never spent a day of her life paying for the sins of her husband. She complains that her life after the war has been hard on her. She wants our pity.

Mr. Lanzman interviews a peasant who lived along the rail line to Birkenau and Auschwitz. The jolly old peasant was proud of how he gesticulated to the hapless souls in the packed railcars how they would have their throats slit soon enough. The peasant made fun of how he convinced many a desparate Jew to throw him their jewelry in exchange for a cup of water - only to not give the Jew the promised water.

There is no ray of hope. There is no triumph of good over evil. There is only the sheer will power and determination of the few survivors that now live in comfortable flats in Israel, the United States and other parts of the world. After the war, they picked themselves by their bootstraps and mentally blocked the horrors that befell upon them by the Nazis and they succeeded to live their lives.

The conclusion I draw from this movie is to remain forever vigilant. Evil is banal. Evil can be overwhelming. Only a clear conscience, an open mind and a consistent collective voice against the darkness of evil will we keep men like Adolf Hitler from propagandizing his fellow countrymen and women into similar acts of atrocity.

Claude Lanzmann gives us a history of the Holocaust from the point of view of the participants. The survivors, the guards, the townspeople who witnessed the Final Solution firsthand. The thing that makes the film amazing is that we do not see the grisly images that were so prevalent in films like Renais Night and Fog. We simply hear voices and see faces.

The interview technique is what makes this film so important. We are forced to look into these people's faces as they tell their stories. And they do have important stories to tell. Also we literally visit the places of destruction as they are now. We see green meadows that were once killing grounds like Sobibor or Chelmno. We see the village of Grabow now reduced of its Jewish population; we bear witness to the railside horrors of Treblinka, and the haunting desolation that was and is Auschwitz.

The startling thing is that the people of the film have been able to rebuild their lives and go on. This is the triumph of the film. We hear horrible things to be sure but these people are true survivors.

The DVD does not offer many extras, but then not many are needed. The end result is a sort of numb silence and this prevades the viewing. The transfer could have been a little clearer but I feel that this was more of a flaw in the source footage than a problem in the DVD creation. The only real problem with my set was on the fourth disc where there were numerous sound fall outs.

All in all Shoah is not an easy film to watch. It takes patience and careful listening if one is to truly understand but it should be regarded as essential viewing for any would be student of history.