Word: shoah
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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...
Like Historian Raul Hilberg, who bears eloquent witness in Shoah, Lanzmann did not begin his mammoth project by "asking the big questions." Instead he amassed thousands of details--the exact size of the gas chambers, the regimen of the SS killer-bureaucrats--and arranged them in a vast mosaic that exposes but does not explain the mystery of extermination. Many of the details are riveting. Former SS Officer Franz Suchomel (whom Lanzmann filmed with a camera concealed in his shoulder bag) sings the Treblinka marching song--"No Jew knows that today"--and describes a pit that consumed discarded bodies: "There...
...didn't do this for the pleasure of having him crack," Lanzmann told L'Express. His mission, as he saw it, was to lead each subject "toward the moment of truth." Whatever his journalistic ethics, Lanzmann proved himself an indefatigable guide on that journey. By the end of Shoah, the viewer is grateful to have made the forced march with him, for the film's achievement is to show there are stories worth hearing, and ravaged, resilient faces that reward our scrutiny. The horror, the gallows humor, the shame and the heroism, the lessons of this holocaust--and all others...
...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...