Word: lanzmann
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...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...
Neither a dramatization nor a documentary, Lanzmann's project achieves what neither of those genres could: it records actual memories, unmediated by any dramatist's conception, in the richest possible detail, recreating the fabric of ordinary life which was alternately shattered or untouched by the horrors of the Second World...
...Lanzmann is obsessed with detail. "Excuse me," he will ask. "But what time in the morning was it? Six or seven a.m.? What color were the vans that took the Jews away?" Other critics who find fault with such meticulousness are missing the point of Lanzmann's goal: to render real experience in all its richness--not to interpret or to impose anything else. And these memories, which speak eloquently for themselves, in turn create new memories--from the painful to the exhilarating--for those who hear them...
There is the former Nazi official whom Lanzmann interviews clandestinely at his home, reminding him of his responsibility as deputy director of the Warsaw ghetto, and filling in details as he interviews. "It was July 7, 1941? That's the first time I've relearned a date," says the small, white-haired Dr. Franz Grassler. "May I take notes? After all, it interests me too. So in July I was already there...