a ten-hour memoir film by Claude Lanzmann on the genocide of European Jews by the Nazis

Holocaust is a long documentary by Claude Lanzmann. For eleven years, the director recorded testimonies from survivors, Nazis, victims and executioners. With his team, he films the locations, because no archive images will illustrate the point, nor any voice-over. Neither reporting nor fiction, Holocaust has become “the memoir film” about the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. On the occasion of the Day of Remembrance of Genocides and Crimes Against Humanity, which also commemorates the liberation of the Auschwitz camp on January 27, 1945, ten hours of the film are broadcast on France 2, Tuesday January 30.

1The Shoah takes its name from the film by Claude Lanzmann

Between 1941 and 1945, nearly six million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany. The Shoah is the Hebrew term to designate precisely this enterprise of extermination of European Jews by the Nazis. In Hebrew it means storm, disaster, catastrophe, annihilation, absolute destruction. This does not have the sacrificial connotation of Holocaust (Greek term), also sometimes used. Raul Hilberg, an Austrian historian, speaks of the destruction of the Jews of Europe, and the term Jewish genocide is also used. Since Claude Lanzmann’s film, the Shoah has become the most widely used term.

2A long story of this period

Claude Lanzmann speaks best about his film on the set of Antenne 2 in 1984. “It’s not a story where people in ties behind their desks tell you memories, the memories are weak. I chose protagonists capable of reliving that and to relive it, they had to pay the highest price, it ‘that is to say, suffer while telling me this story.’

“Victim and executioners, this is the first time that they speak in 40 years and that we see them talking. I had more difficulty finding the executioners than the victims.” When it was released, the director spoke of it as “of a fiction of reality” Or “we had to transform these people into actors (even if) It’s their story they’re telling.”

3Why is “Shoah” exceptional?

Holocaust, that’s 16 years of work for Claude Lanzmann. Investigations, filming and editing. It took 300 hours of 16mm film and more than thirty interviews to make the film and five years of remarkable, precise and cinematic editing. with editor Ziva Postec. The strength of the film lies in the idea that dominates Claude Lanzamnn’s project. No question of using archive images. There is no question of him collecting cold testimony. He says it, these are his own words: wanting “bring the protagonists back to the past”.

Simone de Beauvoir summarizes the importance of Holocaust in a letter she sent to Claude Lanzmann the day after the first screening in 1984: “It is a monument which for generations will allow men to understand one of the most sinister and enigmatic moments in their history.”

4Who testifies in this documentary?

More than 30 testimonies form the basis of the film. After long years of investigations in search of the protagonists, Lanzmann continues his quest: to collect the words with this precise, sometimes harsh questioning to bring the story of horror to fruition. Lanzmann interviews the victims, the executioners and the “passive” witnesses, such as the Poles who lived on the edge of the horror camps and who saw the trains of deportees arriving.

Abraham Bomba’s testimony is one of those which is never forgotten and which allows us to understand the director’s method. Abraham was Sonderkommando in Treblinka and had the hellish task of cutting women’s hair before they entered the gas chamber. To collect his testimony, Lanzmann rented a hairdressing salon in Tel Aviv and asked Abraham to speak, who cut a man’s hair during the interview. Abraham, in tears after very long silences, responds to the director: “It was very hard to feel anything (…). Your feelings disappeared, you were dead to feelings, dead to everything.”

The director, faced with questions about his way of giving birth to his witnesses, declared : “I have often been criticized for my sadism in questions. It is false, it is a fraternal birth. The hairdresser’s tears are for me the seal of truth.”

Suspended sentences also leave an impression on the viewer. Yitzhak Zuckerman, leader of the Jewish resistance in Warsaw, returned from Treblinka. His friends died in the extermination camp. He survived. He has this sentence thrown at Lanzmann: “If you could lick my heart it would poison you.”

Another witness: Simon Srebnik, one of the only survivors of the Sonderkommando from the Kulmhof extermination camp in Chelmno where he was deported at the age of 13. In Chelmno, 400,000 Jews were killed. In front of the field which barely reveals a few traces of the ruins of the horror camp, Simon says: “There were two huge ovens (a long sigh) and then the bodies were thrown into these ovens and the flames rose to the sky. Lanzmann raises: “up to the sky ?”. “Yes”, replies Simon, “it was terrible, we cannot tell this story, no one can imagine what happened here and no one can understand.” And, as he walks in the field, he says these terrible words : “When we burned 2,000 people every day, Jews, no one shouted, everyone did their job, it was silent, peaceful like now.” This is the extreme strength of the film, long silences, then the words that end up being born, calm, terrible and just.

5Six Nazis interrogated

To tell the story of the Shoah, Lanzmann also pursued the executioners. Six of them testify, either on a hidden camera or in front of the camera. Claude Lanzmann would later say that some were paid to testify. Six “witnesses” including Franz Grassler, German deputy of Doctor Heinz AuerswaldNazi commissioner of the Warsaw Ghetto, Josef Oberhauser, Nazi officer in the Belzec extermination camp or Walter Stier, member of the Nazi party and head of office 33 of the “Reichsbahn” (Reich railways). To measure the coldness of these actors of the Shoah, it would be enough to look at the testimony of Franz Suchomel, filmed without his knowledge on a hidden camera, which opens the second part of the film.

In Franz Suchomel is a Nazi official. He was assigned to Aktion T4 responsible for the extermination of the physically and mentally handicapped. He was found guilty of complicity in the murder of more than 300,000 people during the Treblinka trials and sentenced in September 1965 to six years in prison. The sequence begins in front of his house. A peaceful street in Lower Bavaria. Bucolic, you can hear the birds. In the off, a humming song. We later learned that this song was to be learned by the Jewish deportees arriving in the Treblinka camp. Unbearable when Lanzmann pushes him to sing louder and louder, Suchomel seems not to realize his inhumanity. Then the stolen image appears, blurry, streaked, in black and white, dirty, almost illegible, but the viewer can discern Suchomel who explains, armed with a stick on a drawn plan of the camp, the industrial functioning of the extermination. A precise geography of the hell created by the Nazis. He talks about flows, about stock data, coldly, without blinking, he tells how it was possible to treat 18,000 people per day in Treblinka. The portrait of a small, plump and chubby civil servant, one of the actors in this industrial system of extermination, a technician, a bureaucrat of horror.

6Who is the director Claude Lanzmann?

Claude Lanzmann is very present in Holocaust. His voice, his build, his calm, his stubbornness fill the screen. Sometimes, the spectator sees his hand placed discreetly on the shoulder of the witness, as a gesture of brotherhood. The film does not include any voice-over or commentary; it is the tone of its interviews that leaves an impression on the viewer. The director becomes the main actor of the film and of this quest. This quest which could have been born during the war. He is the son of an antiques dealer mother of Ukrainian Jewish origin and a decorator father of Latvian and Belarusian origin. Hidden on a farm, young Claude’s father trains his children to disappear by simulating Gestapo raids. This did not prevent the 18-year-old from joining the Jeunesses Communistes and participating in the clandestine struggle and fighting in the Auvergne maquis. In 1952, he met Sartre and Beauvoir who convinced him that he could be a writer and filmmaker. He lives with de Beauvoir and becomes a journalist and editor of the magazine Modern times and made his first film in 1973 Why Israel. Following this film, he embarked on his great work which would be Holocaust.

7The categorical refusal of fiction

In 1987, in a newspaper interview ReleaseClaude Lanzmann declared: “the perversion of the Nazi system is not only the destruction of the Jews, it is the destruction of destruction. There had to be no traces of the genocide. It didn’t exist while it was being made! We banned the word corpse, we said loading, puppet, shit, nothing… So we had to rebuild everything.” Recounting the Shoah in fiction was therefore “a crime” for him. He pursues : “I don’t see how we can make fiction about the extermination of the Jews. The very idea of ​​fiction! The very image of Jews entering the gas chambers! (…) It would be unbearable for the survivors, the dead, the victims. Impossible, a crime! I believe that by listening to this Pole tell – reliving before our eyes – this hellish vision of the ghetto, we are there… we see.”

In this sense, some see Holocaust a Talmudic work, which Lanzmann understood when saying: “The Talmud prohibits representation. It’s true… Holocaust is an allegorical experience of the journey of European Jews towards death. Of their last moments. It’s a resurrection.”

Remarkable Night and Fog by Alain Resnais based on archives and the text of Jean Cayrol, historian told by Michel Bouquet at There Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg, cinema is, more or less ethically, a work of memory. This week will be on screens, The Area of ​​Interest by Jonathan Glazer, which chronicles the life of Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss and his family in their home on the edge of the camp.

But Holocaust de Lanzmann remains this monument which made Simone de Beauvoir say: “I would not have imagined such an alliance of horror and beauty. Certainly, one does not serve to mask the other, it is not a question of aesthetics: on the contrary, it highlights it with so much invention and rigor that we are aware of contemplating a great work. A pure masterpiece.”

Holocaustby Claude Lanzmann, is broadcast on France 2 on Tuesday January 30 from 9:10 p.m. and available the next day on france.tv for thirty days.