BECAUSE REMEMBERANCE SHOULD NOT BE CONFINED TO JUST ONE WEEK... "SHOAH"

This post was originally meant for Holocaust remembrance week. God knows it would have suited the week infinitely better, subject-matter wise. But it took me a while to get through the watching stage for this one. And I don’t just mean because of the length. The subject matter means that you cannot actually sit down and watch the thing in a couple of large chunks. The “sessions” I watched this rather extraordinary documentary in left me drained, and in serious need of a drink and a good few episodes of some sort of sit-com to bring me back to the real world.

Shoah is a truly extraordinary documentary. If you decide to watch a single thing about the Holocaust, make it Shoah and you never need to watch anything again. Not just because it is a mind blowing 9,5 hours long, with no natural cut-off points or episodes. Because making a (very) long documentary is all well and good, but you can perfectly well manage to use that time to say very little. Director Claude Lanzmann uses the time to say virtually anything you can think of, and tell stories from the Holocaust that you may not have heard before.

Because yes, we hear the heart-rending and extraordinary stories of the survivors of the camps. But we also talk to the drivers of the trains that took them there. The villagers in the surrounding fields who were allowed to tend their crops as the prisoners were worked to death in the camp next door. The regular poles and Checks who joined the resistance after realising the true extent of the horrors taking place on their door steps. And last, but by no means least, the Nazi soldiers who oversaw the killing machines.

The one advantage this work has over modern works is the fact that since it was made in the early to mid-80s (the official date of the film is 1985 but it must have taken a good few years to assemble) a lot of the people who were involved in the Holocaust (be they victims, perpetrators or just witnesses from afar) were quite old, but still alive and able to tell their stories with clarity. Not a single, solitary frame of archive footage is used. Which makes sense, because I am sure that Shoah was meant as an archive- an archive of memories.

You have often heard me drone on about how difficult it is to make a film about a topic like the Second World War, simply because of the profusion of material about it. But Lanzmann, meticulous in his approach, manages to elicit stories and points of view that I have not seen before or since. I was especially touched by the testimony of the train driver who was responsible for driving the infamous cattle trains to Treblinka. It will not be a major plot spoiler to tell you that the only way the drivers of these trains could bear the job they were given was by making the journey almost blind drunk. For even above the roar of the train, it would seem that the lamentations of the people in the first few carriages were clearly audible from the locomotive…

Then of course there are the interviews with the ex- Nazis. Some of these interviews were actually filmed in secret as the Nazis had originally only agreed to do voice recordings. But the hidden camera imagery shows old men who could, for all intents and purposes be your own grandfather. “We may have to stop early” warns one old man “I have heart problems as you know and… I will let you know if feel I cannot go on.” And while this warning is a clear demonstration of emotions built up inside, the ex-soldier uses a meticulously drawn map and stick to explain the day to day workings of the camp (Auschwitz) and talks about the details of operating the death machine in a manner that is almost matter of fact. One cannot help but wonder at the extraordinary defence mechanisms the human soul throws up to combat stress and memories…

As a modern day film-viewer you will find Lanzmann’s style of filming hard to get into. It is slow moving, and seems to focus on the tiny details you may at first find irrelevant or unimportant. What Lanzmann is actually trying to do is to reconstruct the entire landscape of the Holocaust. The workaday details. The little and the large that made up the entire, horrendous death machine. The result is one of the most realistic portraits of the death camps, where your imagination can transport you there so much more efficiently than stock-footage of liberated camps ever could… Because that’s the tricky thing about archive footage… So much of it is from “after the event” as it were. The only real record of what actually happened in the camps are memories. And perhaps the only way of truly doing these memories justice is to record them in the most minute detail possible. To this end, Lanzmann does not even use voiceovers or subtitles for some of the interviewees who don’t speak a European language. We hear their story in their own voice, then through that of the interpreter. It maybe takes a little longer, but the emotion in the voices of the storytellers (for what else can I call them) is not lost.

This is a definite must watch. And not necessarily just for Holocaust remembrance week but for all times, for truly, remembrance of these horrors should not be confined to just one week…  Just set aside some time over a few days, and bear witness to these stories, so unbelievable and so horrifying that they could only ever be real…