Lanzmann’s Shoah was so well done many find it near-impossible to watch

Shoah is the essential piece of Holocaust culture and Lanzmann knew it. “For 12 years I tried to stare relentlessly into the black sun of the Shoah, I forced myself to get as close as I could. I alone had to carry the burden of anxiety, I alone know what the lies, the pledges and the false promises cost me,” he wrote. (He promised the Israeli government, his original backers, that he would deliver a two-hour film within 18 months. In the end he shot more than 200 hours of footage). Lustiger knew it too, which is why he could not watch it, and that is the contradiction within Holocaust culture: if it is well done people cannot watch it.

Lanzmann, a handsome, untethered writer who once lived with Simone de Beauvoir, was “absolutely contemporary to the Shoah”. As a child in occupied France, his father taught him to dress in the dark and flee, should the SS knock. When the émigré Polish Jews in the town disappeared “it was an extraordinary shock, an abrupt, incomprehensible absence”.

That is his subject: absence, and Lanzmann, who is the protagonist of Shoah, made himself an avatar for all surviving Jews. Initially, “the terror it evoked in me… had consigned it [the Shoah] to a different time, almost to another world, light years away, beyond human time, to some quasi-legendary illo tempore”. His task was to recover it, and it consumed him. “Madame,” he once said, “my homeland is my film.”

“My mother was incapable of choosing,” Lanzmann wrote, “she wanted everything. I’m like her.” He wandered dazed. “I remember spending three mad days in London with an obsessive, poignant, haunted Jew named Kissel who had stopped the clock in ghetto time.”

Initially, Lanzmann would not go to Poland: “I thought there was nothing to see, nothing to be learned there, that Poland was a non-place.” When he discovered a revenant (he refused to call them “survivors”) he “was absolutely stunned, it felt almost like something unearthed during an archaeological dig, my find appeared to me as a sign, a vestige of the immensity of the catastrophe”.

He gathered stories. He found Abraham Bomba, who cut the hair of women inside the gas chambers in Treblinka, lost him, and found him again; Filip Müller, three years a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz; Richard Glazar, who escaped Treblinka; Rudolf Vrba, who escaped Auschwitz; and Szymon Srebrnik, who sang for the SS at Chelmo when he was just 13. Lanzmann put Srebrnik on a boat on the River Ner and made him sing.

Eventually he went to Poland – “Treblinka existed!” – and found Henrik Gawkowski, who drove the trains carrying Jews to Treblinka as a young man. Lanzmann marvelled, “I was the first person ever to question him,” and Gawkowski’s courtesy to Lanzmann is unbearably moving: “Though I apologised for showing up so late, he seemed so unsurprised by my urgency that it was as though he shared it. He had neither forgotten nor recovered from the horrifying past in which he had played a role, and he found it entirely just that he should have to answer any demands made on him at any hour”.

Lanzmann secretly filmed perpetrators, and sometimes got caught. The sons of Heinz Schubert of the Einsatzgruppen hospitalised him after finding the hidden camera, and Lanzmann was, in his words, charged with the unauthorised use of, “German airspace, German radio frequencies, German air”.

Shoah needs its length to contain its testimony, but, above all, it needs its length to contain its silence. Lanzmann was wracked with the lack of testimony from within the gas chambers. “I knew that the subject of the film would be death itself, death rather than survival…. [and] the dead could not speak for the dead.” And so, Shoah is filled with silence, which the viewer fills for itself. The images of the death camps – Lanzmann’s camera moves constantly, as if in prayer – are relentless. He shoots trains and cars – especially trains – and Polish faces.

They are mesmerising. Poles alive in 1941-45 saw what we most want to see: the Jews of Europe. At one point Lanzmann, a man of self-annihilatory courage, walks around a Polish town asking: do you miss the Jews? Some do; most don’t. None have met a Jew like Lanzmann, with his leather jacket and his beautiful female translator. Lanzmann does not fear the silence because it is all that is left. Rather, he waits.

He waits for Josef Oberhauser, a former SS officer at Belzec, at the Munich restaurant where Oberhauser works as a barman. It is my favourite scene in Shoah because it is filled with Jewish wit. Oberhauser, who looks like a pantomime villain, pours drinks as Lanzmann asks him how much beer he sells each day; or if he remembers Belzec. One of the waiters – he looks like the head waiter in Casablanca – obviously hates Oberhauser, and he loiters by the bar, smirking. I think he knew. “Go on, tell him,” he says, nodding at Lanzmann, as Oberhauser flees to the kitchen, and I laugh.