Word: chelmno
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...December 1941, within a few days of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Nazis began gassing Jews and Gypsies at a camp in Chelmno, Poland. More than 150,000 died there; two survived, and both offer their soul-scarred witness in Shoah. One of them, Simon Srebnik, was a boy of 13 at the time. Returning to Chelmno, he visits townspeople who were once enchanted by his beautiful singing voice. They also remember the screams of Jews locked in the local church before being taken away. At Treblinka, site of the Nazis' most efficient gas chambers, villagers recall standing...
Obsessed by his subject, Lanzmann wants to lick every Holocaust heart, and no matter if it bleeds on contact. Mordechaï Podchlebnik, the second Jewish survivor of Chelmno, "thanks God for what remains, and that he can forget." But Lanzmann will not let him forget; he even questions the man's fixed smile. Finally, Podchlebnik surrenders to the director's ghoulishness and quietly sobs. Abraham Bomba was once a barber at Treblinka, charged with cutting the hair of women and children in the gas chambers immediately before their execution. Today he cuts hair in Israel, and in a bizarre "photo...
...Nazis sought more efficient methods. Himmler's deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, summoned representatives of all major government departments to the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to inform them of what he called "the final solution." This required the creation of six giant extermination camps in Poland: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Maidanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor. The Wannsee conference was called for Dec. 9 but had to be put off for six weeks because of the extraordinary news from the Pacific. On Dec. 7 the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor...
...down the river, speaking softly. The first, Simon Srebnik, was a boy of 13 when he saw his father killed at Lodz and was himself sent to Chelmno. He was known, he remembers, by the villagers there as well as by the SS guards as the little boy with the beautiful voice, who sang Polish folk songs. The other man is French film-maker Claude Lanzmann, who more than 40 years later has persuaded Srebnik to return to Chelmno and sing the songs of his childhood...
...were sent to Chelmno, to be gassed to death in vans, only two survived. Srebnik is one of them, Lanzmann has found them both. Their stories and those of dozens of others of survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators of the Holocaust unfold, blend, and resolve to create an absolutely riveting nine-and-a-half hour film, Shoah...