Word: shoah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...what makes this Holocaust film, Shoah, different from all others? For 40 years the event has been analyzed and dramatized. So the prospect of a 9-hr. 23-min. documentary, comprising no archival footage, only interviews with death-camp survivors and chillingly bucolic vistas of the camp sites today, is likely to raise apprehensions and even yawns. We have seen all that too many times before; next atrocity, please. And in fact the testimony in Shoah (a Hebrew word for cataclysm) does not justify either the film's extraordinary length or French Director Claude Lanzmann's relentless badgering of some...
...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...
Schindler's List did more than earn Spielberg some long-overdue respect as a serious filmmaker. It spurred him to create the Shoah Visual History Foundation, through which survivors of the Nazi Holocaust bear witness to the ordeals they suffered, the families they lost, the ideals they held high. He continues that good effort in this DVD's extras, particularly a 77-min. documentary, Michael Mayhew's Voices from the List, which assembles recollections of the Schindlerjuden and others who outlived the Nazi madness...
...another DVD extra, narrator Morgan Freeman insists on the role of these survivor-storytellers in teaching the young about bigotry. "Could it change the world? The Shoah Foundation knows it can." That seems an impossible quest. But what Schindler accomplished, Spielberg hopes to carry...
...Sharon quickly leads to charges of anti-Semitism. The fierceness of the debate augurs poorly for Europe's relations with Israel. Israelis blame Europe for being pusillanimous and pro-Palestinian; Europeans blame Israel for being harsh and inhuman. Yet their ties are inextricable. "Israel is a product of the Shoah, and the Shoah is a product of Europe," says Rony Brauman, former president of Médecins sans Frontières and a fierce Jewish critic of Israel. Chirac's initiative on anti-Semitism may help tear down one obstacle to better relations between Europe and Israel...