Cover of Shoah
Spending a week in Poland I decided to take a trip to Auschwitz. As a teenager and right through to University the history of the Holocaust has been of interest to me and so taking a trip to the biggest and most horrific concentration camp of them all seemed like a necessity. It was an emotional trip, one that I wasn’t sure how I would handle, after seeing so many films which show the camp as it was, it was interesting to note that it really hasn’t changed in almost 70 years. Movies like Schindler’s List and The Pianist serve to provoke and encourage an emotional response in the viewer, even when they have no knowledge of the true story behind it, and whilst this does serve to keep the memory of the atrocity alive, it may not always help people to understand what exactly happened.
Spurred on by my recent visit, this weekend I finished watching Shoah (1985). A 9 and a 1/2 hour documentary by Claude Lanzmann. A chain-smoking visionary who spent 6 years searching for eye-witness accounts of the Holocaust, refusing to include historical footage and instead preferring to focus on human accounts and how the camps look in the 80s. The documentary moves slowly, taking in everyone from survivors to ex-Nazi officials, and some of the most harrowing parts are unspoken. When the camera zooms in on the speaker’s face, it’s easier to see the horror living behind their eyes, even 3 decades after the tragic events took place. This documentary, or at least parts of it, should be shown for educational purposes around the world. Along with Come and See (Idi I Smotri) this is one of the best movies to get across the complete and utter incomprensibility of what happened during the most terrible genocide the world has ever seen.
Related Articles
- John Farr: Never Again: Ten Great Holocaust Films You May Have Missed (huffingtonpost.com)
- Holocaust-denier barred from Auschwitz tours (sfgate.com)
Left Me Reeling 