Shoah : an oral history of the Holocaust : the complete text of the film

This comprehensive transcription documents the interviews--with former German official bureaucrats, Polish peasants, and German colonizers of occupied Poland The complete text of Claude Lanzmann's film "Shoah". This nine-and-a-half-hour film was the result of years of research and the result is an oral history of the Holocaust that brings together a full range of witnesses: the SS officers who served in the death camps; the Polish villagers who tilled their fields within yards of the crematoriums; the Germans who resettled occupied Poland, moving into the houses whose Jewish owners had been sent to their death; the state employees who sold Jews half-fare excursion tickets to the camps- one way; and others. Then there are the survivors themselves: a Polish barber who cut the hair of women he knew were to die in the next few minutes; a thirteen-year-old boy who was to work in the death camp's "special squad"; the Pole who was taken into the Warsaw ghetto so that he could report to the outside world what he had seen; a woman who lived in hiding in Berlin for most of the war, in anguish at the fate of her people and her own escape from it. The film shows no archival footage, it is through the words themselves that the imagination recreated the world described in these words- a way of getting at the truth that is far more shocking than the depiction of actual images. Shoah is unforgettable, and it is destined to become a landmark of film and history. -- Publisher description A nine-and-a-half-hour documentary on the Nazi extermination camps, Shoah (the Hebrew word for "Holocaust") was internationally hailed as a masterpiece upon its release in 1985. Shunning any re-creation, archival footage, or visual documentation of the events, filmmaker Claude Lanzmann relied on the words of witnesses—Jewish, Polish, and German—to describe in ruthless detail the bureaucratic machinery of the Final Solution, so that the remote experiences of the Holocaust became fresh and immediate. This book presents in an accessible and vivid format the testimony of survivors, participants, witnesses, and scholars. This tenth anniversary edition, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the camps, is newly revised and corrected in order to more accurately present the actual testimony of those interviewed. Shoah is an unparalleled oral history of the Holocaust, an intensely readable journey through the twentieth century's greatest horror.

The text of the film which re-creates the horror and truth of the Nazi extermination camps through interviews with the victims.

Shoah is not an easy film to talk about. There is a magic in this film that defies explanation. After the war we read masses of accounts of the ghettos and the extermination camps, and we were devastated. But when, today, we see Claude Lanzmann's extraordinary film, we realize we have understood nothing. In spite of everything we knew, the ghastly experience remained remote from us. Now, for the first time, we live it in our minds, hearts and flesh. It becomes our experience. Neither fiction nor documentary, Shoah succeeds in recreating the past with an amazing economy of means -- places, voices, faces. The greatness of Claude Lanzmann's art is in making places speak, in reviving them through voices and, over and above words, conveying the unspeakable through people's expressions. - Preface. http://www.archive.org/details/shoahoralhistory00lanz