The recent atrocities in Paris – the shocking yet all-too-familiar sight of European Jews murdered, yet again, simply for being Jews – made this year's Holocaust Memorial Day ceremonies even more poignant and sombre. And alongside the spectre of old hatreds clothed in new ideologies walk others, less lurid but more inexorable: time itself, and its companion, silence.
This year as every year, Holocaust survivors have spoken at schools and museums, civic and community events, and in the media, compelled by the burden of their experiences to bear witness to those who come after. But their numbers are dwindling; and sooner rather than later all those surviving voices – each one a miracle in itself – will finally fall silent and the Holocaust will pass beyond the horizon of living memory.
The huge public interest about the Great War this past year has proven that history past personal recollection need not be past awareness or understanding. Still, with the death of the last Holocaust survivor a certain surety against amnesia and indifference – or, worse, denial – will have been lost. And the Paris attacks prompt concerns that without the compelling power of authentic witness, the civic defences against barbarism so painstakingly erected in the wake of the tragedies of 1933-45 might also weaken.
All of which makes it especially appropriate that this year's Holocaust commemorations also see the renewed visibility of a landmark Holocaust film uniquely dedicated to the power of memory, in fact to the act of witnessing itself. Thirty years after its original release, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah is being on BBC4, will be released for the first time on Blu-Ray and, later this year, an international colloquium of academics will gather in London, hosted by the Holocaust Research Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London, to discuss the film's achievement and legacy.
Why so much attention to a film that is more talked-about than seen? Shoah has never reached wide mainstream audiences like Spielberg's Schindler's List (or before it, the TV mini-series Holocaust); it is not even the most widely-seen Holocaust documentary (the "Genocide" episode of the endlessly repeated 1973 series The World at War has been seen by millions more viewers than Shoah ever will). Yet Shoah's impact both on Holocaust cinema and on perceptions of Holocaust memory has unquestionably been profound.
The impact of such gruelling interviews in the film Shoah have been profound
Famously, in his nine-hour film (edited down from some 350 hours of footage acquired over seven years' gruelling and sometimes risky research) Lanzmann foregoes any use of archive footage – or voiceover narration, soundtrack music, graphics or any of the customary tools of conventional documentary – in favour of extended, single-take interviews with participant-witnesses to the Holocaust: Jewish victims, Polish bystanders, and former Nazi camp guards and civilian administrators (the latter shot clandestinely by Lanzmann using a gentile alias). The film's extraordinary, haunting power consists entirely in the capacity of these middle-aged (in the early 1980s) people, cajoled, prompted and occasionally coerced by Lanzmann not so much to recall the past as to embody and relive it before our astonished eyes. In several cases, survivors return to Holocaust locations – the extermination sites at Treblinka, Sobibor and Chelmno, as well as the ruins of the Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria – amidst whose overgrown, abandoned, mute remains their presence is both a moving statement of defiance and survival, and a reminder of the power and necessity of witness and testimony in the face of encroaching silence and oblivion.
The film does not concern itself with the larger narrative of Jewish life under Nazi tyranny, before and during the war. As Shoah's title suggests, this is a film exclusively about the years of extermination , and specifically the Polish extermination sites. Even in this limited compass, Lanzmann makes no effort "tell the story" of the Holocaust in any conventional sense. Events are related out of chronological sequence; the interviews jump in space and time in ways that may baffle any first-time viewer without a secure grounding in Holocaust history. If anything binds together the disparate testimonies, it is the freight trains – the film's key visual leitmotif – whose rumbling passage across European rail networks draws together the disparate testimonies just as they once carried Jews in their hundreds of thousands to their deaths. We never get the "big picture" – any more than those at the heart of these traumatic events did, or could have, at the time. Which is, partly, Lanzmann's point.
Throughout, Lanzmann insists on precision and detail of language and recall from his witnesses – sometimes maddeningly so, as when he insists on knowing what colour the gas vans at Chelmno were painted. But there is careful method in his apparent pedantry. The cumulative impact of all the tiny details Lanzmann elicits from his interviewees is to shift the viewer's understanding of the Holocaust away from incomprehensibly vast numbers and large philosophical debates about the nature of evil, towards the unendurable pain and suffering suffered by countless individuals, day after day, at the hands of their fellow human beings.
For audiences, Shoah is one of the most demanding, even exhausting films ever made. It is not simply the film's duration, nor even the litany of horrors and suffering that inevitably comprise so much of the testimony, that make it so. Rather, it is the film's sheer austerity, its refusal of any stylistic distractions: the way we are required to encounter the witnesses, to look into their eyes as they struggle with (and in some cases, flee) intolerably painful memories. The real-time translation allows us to register every detail of emotion and pain as they play across each witness's face. Lanzmann is always a courteous, yet also a relentless interviewer for whom the imperative to secure testimony seems to override conventional ethical boundaries, even if this means pushing his witnesses to and sometimes beyond their breaking point. In one famous and controversial sequence, Lanzmann records Treblinka survivor Abraham Bomba as, overcome by grief, he implores him to turn off the camera.
All this relentlessness has one target above all: silence. Because it is in silence that forgetfulness and untruth flourish. Lanzmann's camera, dwelling on the eerily silent woods at Treblinka and Sobibor – razed to the ground by the Germans once their "work" was done – remind us the Holocaust was conceived by its perpetrators as a crime without a living witness. Repeatedly, interviewees recall the Nazis' characteristic distortions of language, whether substituting antiseptic euphemisms like "special treatment" for murder and "pieces" for bodies, or with candid sadism directing Jewish slave workers to call the bodies they were interring or incinerating "rags" or "dolls". This linguistic violence was a distinct and unique dimension of the Holocaust.
But it is not confined to history: Lanzmann's German and Polish witnesses alike are prone to self-serving selective historical amnesia and revisionism, confident no Jewish voice can be raised to contradict them. In one of the film's most indelible and shocking sequences, villagers in Chelmno, gathered on the very steps of the church where Jews were corralled before being gassed, with obvious relish relate the "true" story of a rabbi who allegedly advised his community to accept their imminent annihilation as a judgment for "killing the innocent Christ". And all of this while one of the only two survivors of the quarter-million Jewish victims at Chelmno stands silently by, his face an inscrutable mask. (Shoah's unflattering portrayal of the Polish peasantry's widespread unreconstructed antisemitism made the film controversial in Communist Poland.) Such scenes underpin Lanzmann's conviction that Holocaust survivors are "spokesmen of the dead" and their duty to bear witness an absolute obligation that transcends personal pain.
Shoah has no obvious civic message and unlike Schindler's List (of which Lanzmann is a trenchant critic), it bears no reassuring message of ultimate redemption. It is as pitilessly bleak as it is visually restrained. In watching it, all we can do is submit to its calm progress, take on its meticulous accumulation of evidence and testimony, contrast the quiet, pained dignity of the Jewish witnesses with the smug indifference of (most of) their Polish compatriots and the mendacity of the former Nazis, and hear what they all have to tell us.
By now all the witnesses who populate Lanzmann's broad canvas have died. But revisiting Shoah reminds us of the unique power of testimony to make the unimaginable concrete, to give a human face to statistics, and by speaking out in plain language to combat the encroaching silence whose triumph would give the Nazis a perverse kind of ultimate victory. As long as there remain survivors to speak, Shoah reminds us why it is imperative to listen; and when there are none, Shoah will remain to preserve the voice of undeniable, indelible experience and pose to us as spectators the challenge of honouring their memory, and that of the lost millions whose voices went unrecorded.
