Shoah

Claude Lanzmann made a film about the murder of Europe’s Jews without using any footage from the time. No newsreels, no liberation photographs, no shoes. Instead there are people, filmed decades afterwards, telling him what they saw, and there are the places as they were when he arrived with a camera: a field at Chełmno, a forest clearing at Sobibór, the ramp at Birkenau under snow. It runs 566 minutes and the length is the method. He wants us to sit long enough that the past stops being history and becomes something that happened to the man in front of us.

The witnesses are why it works. Simon Srebnik is rowed down the river at Chełmno singing the song the guards made him sing as a boy, and the villagers on the bank remember him fondly, which is its own horror. Michael Podchlebnik smiles as he speaks and Lanzmann asks him why. Filip Müller, who worked in the crematoria at Auschwitz, describes the undressing room with an exactness that no photograph could improve. Rudolf Vrba, who escaped from Auschwitz, talks like a man giving evidence. Jan Karski, the Polish courier smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto so he could report to the Allies, begins to answer, stands up, walks out of frame, and after a while comes back.

Then there is Abraham Bomba. He cut women’s hair inside the gas chamber at Treblinka, and Lanzmann films him in a barber’s shop, cutting a customer’s hair while he talks. He reaches a particular memory and stops. Lanzmann tells him he has to go on. Bomba wipes his eyes, and does. We have argued with ourselves about that minute for years. We wanted Lanzmann to leave him alone, we knew the film needed him not to, and we have never settled which of those was the decent instinct.

Four cinematographers are credited, Jimmy Glasberg, Dominique Chapuis, Phil Gries and William Lubtchansky, and their work is plainer than that number suggests. The camera rides on the front of a locomotive along the single track into Treblinka. It zooms, slowly, across grass towards a line of trees where a building used to be. It holds on a field of stone markers until the eye starts counting. Ziva Postec, the editor, cuts from a face to a place while the voice carries on, so we hear the ramp described over the empty ramp. She also keeps the interpreters in. Lanzmann asks in French, the question goes into Polish or Hebrew, the answer comes back, and we wait through the translation while watching a face that already knows what it said.

The film has a score of nothing. No music, apart from the songs people sing. It has no certificate we can quote, and we would not put a child in front of it, though there is not one image in it a censor would cut. What is unbearable is entirely in the words and the waiting.

Lanzmann is in it a great deal, and not always to its credit. With the Polish farmers around the camps he asks questions built to produce the answer he wants, then stands back while they produce it, and the way those scenes are cut has been argued over since, fairly in our view. He filmed some of the former SS men without telling them, and shows the van outside with the recording equipment. One or two critics have doubted his methods and his history, and we think the doubts are real and the film survives them. The later stretches on the ghetto are slower than the first half, and we followed them with respect rather than with the grip of what came before.

Almost every documentary on the subject before this one used archive and a narrator. Almost every one since has had to decide whether to do what Lanzmann did or to admit it could not. That is the position the film holds in the genre, and it has not been challenged.

It was built in two parts and should be watched that way, on two evenings, not one. We would keep nothing else to hand. We would not look up who is who beforehand; the film says when it is ready to. Afterwards, a walk helps. We found we looked at fields differently, and that is roughly what Lanzmann intended.