French director Claude Lanzmann’s Holocaust documentary “Shoah”, first released 40 years ago, had a one-time screening in its 9 1/2-hour entirety at the Berlinale film festival this week that underscored why, as a testament to history, it may be more significant than ever.
“It’s of course a groundbreaking work that revolutionised the representation of the Holocaust and still feels very, very urgent and relevant today,” Tricia Tuttle, the Berlinale’s new American-born director, said in introducing the screening on Sunday, attended by Lanzmann’s widow, Dominique.
With extreme right parties on the rise worldwide, Holocaust denial is gaining more of a voice on social media. U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance caused shockwaves in Germany last week by meeting with Alice Weidel, the head of the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland party, some of whose members openly embrace Nazi slogans and symbols. With Germany’s national election, in which the AfD is running second in the polls, set for next Sunday, the Berlinale’s screening couldn’t have been timelier.
New “Shoah” documentary
The rare showing of “Shoah” in a restored version coincided with the premiere at the festival of a new documentary compiled from the 220 hours of outtakes that Lanzmann, who died in 2018, left from his 11 years working on the project.
Entitled “Je n’avais que le néant – Shoah par Lanzmann” (All I Had Was Nothingness), and directed by French filmmaker Guillaume Ribot, the documentary shows how Lanzmann went about finding the subjects he films, including death-camp survivors, Polish railworkers, farmers and residents of towns near the camps. He also filmed, with hidden cameras, the Nazis and bureaucrats who ran the camps or authorised the trains that took the 6 million European Jews to their deaths.
Ribot shows how discouraged Lanzmann became over the course of the decade-long project when he repeatedly ran out of money and at one point almost ran out of film. The chain-smoking, bespectacled French intellectual is shown playing an utterly inept round of golf with a potential American donor. In the end, Lanzmann says, “I did not get one dollar of American funding” — it all came from Israel, European sources and personal donors.
Train tracks as a symbol
Ribot’s documentary also makes clear how Lanzmann came to film what became the enduring image of his work: the train tracks leading to the death camps. At first Lanzmann focused on interviewing survivors, like Abraham Bomba, who was a young hairdresser in the southern Polish city of Częstochowa before he, his parents and sisters were transported to Treblinka, northeast of Warsaw, the second deadliest death camp in the Nazi system. Everyone in his family was gassed but Bomba was kept as a worker to move corpses and later put to work as a barber to cut women’s hair before they were gassed — a tactic the Nazis deployed to keep the women calm before death.
One of the most moving scenes in “Shoah” is when Bomba, interviewed by Lanzmann while Bomba is cutting a client’s hair at his barber shop in Israel, describes when another of the barbers, a friend of his, had to cut his own wife’s and daughter’s hair before they were murdered. Bomba is so distraught, recalling the moment, that he cannot continue, to which Lanzmann, off camera, repeatedly responds, “You must, you know you must.”
Poland provides the key
But despite hundreds of hours of similarly intense and moving interviews and reams of footage, Lanzmann was at a loss how to put the film together. “I had no idea where I was going,” he says in Ribot’s film, which uses only Lanzmann’s recorded or written words.
Poland provided the inspiration. Lanzmann says that for years he had resisted going to Poland because he thought “there was nothing there”. The Nazis tried to cover up their crimes by levelling and removing all traces of most of their camps. Auschwitz, which was exterminating hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews until it was liberated by Ukrainian soldiers in January, 1945, is a notable exception.
It’s only when Lanzmann visits the remote villages where the Nazis built their death camps — often with Jewish slave labourers — and sees the memorials erected amid the remains of foundations or rail lines, that it clicks into place. He talks to the people who lived near the camps, heard the screams, smelled the stench of the burning corpses, drove the trains that delivered the mostly unwitting Jews to their deaths, and kept their gazes diverted lest the SS guards caught them looking and they shared the fate of the Jews.
Of the camps themselves, for the most part “there was nothing to be filmed”, Lanzmann says. “It had to be created.” So he films the train tracks leading to the camps, and the nearby small towns like Sobibor, Chelmno, Treblinka and Auschwitz. Those place names were the last the Jews crammed into cattle cars or, if they came from wealthier parts of Europe, sometimes in Pullman passenger cars, saw before they were shunted onto a spur line to death.
He hires a steam locomotive “at enormous cost” from the Polish national railroad and films it being driven by Henryk Gawkowski, who had driven countless trainloads of Jews into the Treblinka camp. While driving the engine, Gawkowski, whose rugged face has the look of a man who has seen everything, makes a gesture with his hand to suggest a throat being slit. He says he would do it when no guards were looking to try to warn the Jews of the fate awaiting them.
A command performance
But perhaps Lanzmann’s greatest achievement in finding a way to film the “nothingness” that was the fate of the Jews was to convince Holocaust survivor Simon Srebnik to return from Israel to the town of Chelmo, where he was one of only two people to survive the extermination camp.
Lanzman filmed Srebnik while he is being rowed in a small boat on the Ner River, singing a Prussian marching song that German soldiers forced him to sing at age 13 to entertain them.
Later Srebnik is shown standing amid a crowd of Polish churchgoers, gathered in front of the church that during the war was used as a holding centre for Jews as they were taken away by loads of about 80 at a time in “gas vans”, whose exhaust systems were rigged to rout the lethal motor exhaust into the sealed cargo space where the Jews were locked in. Several people in the crowd seem pleased to see Srebnik, whom they recall as the almost skeletal youth they’d seen on slave-labour gangs and who could sing.
But the cheeriness does not last. At Lanzmann’s prompting, asking why the villagers think the Jews suffered such a terrible fate, several of them mention the crucifixion of Christ and the Jews’ complicity in their Saviour’s death. Srebnik stands in the middle of the crowd, looking increasingly uncomfortable.
“Shoah” is a film that needs to be seen, now more than ever.
— By Michael Roddy
Irish Arts News 