Whenever I’m asked to reveal my “favorite” film ― and be aware this happens rarely, because everyone who knows me understands that I’ve never been obsessed by cinema (as opposed to music and books) ― I find it difficult to answer the question.
This doesn’t owe to a paucity of viewing opportunities, as I’ve sat through my share of wretched movies, but rather lingering uncertainty about the meaning of the word “favorite.” and how we ever arrive at a “favorite” anything.
A better question to ask: “Roger, what are your most influential films?”
Thankfully, documentaries are eligible, or else the list would be quite brief: Reds, Animal House, maybe Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary Shoah ranks at or near the top of my influences list; a film this grueling could never be considered “favored” in the customary context of pleasurable entertainment.
Shoah is an oral history of the Holocaust that runs almost ten hours and demands supreme effort on the part of the viewer, a commitment extending somewhat beyond the typically vapid Hollywood blockbuster on date night.
That first experience with Shoah came in the spring of 1988. I’d been in Europe the previous year when the film was shown on public television (see below), and my mother videotaped it for me. For a week, I set the alarm an hour early each morning and made my way through the film in bits and pieces before heading off to work.
Lanzmann’s relentless imagery has been with me ever since. Shoah was visceral, and essential for my understanding of the Holocaust. It is an unconventional, brutally effective documentary that depicts and describes historical events without the use of archival footage or reenactments.
During the 1970’s, Lanzmann began filming real people ― Jewish survivors, serenely acquiescent Poles and even (surreptitiously) an unrepentant German SS officer ― all of whom had lived through cataclysmic and unspeakably horrible events that primarily took place in areas of dense pre-war Jewish population, which during the Nazi occupation became dotted with planned centers of systematic slaughter.
Some of these people were participants, whether unwillingly or not.
Lanzmann filmed the memories and recollections in a dozen then-Communist locales in Poland and Eastern Europe, with occasional side excursions to Israel, Germany and elsewhere, as conforming to the post-war diaspora of victims (and perpetrators).
Shoah is organized into narratives woven together with consummate skill, and as the hours pass, there is an emotional crescendo guaranteed to leave the viewer both drained and fearing for the future of humanity. It’s true that we manage somehow to survive our own stupidity and brutality. It is by no means clear how we do it.
At the time Shoah was released, its director was criticized for including footage that unflinchingly exposed lingering anti-Semite tendencies on the part of ethnic Poles, this coming at a time when Poland ― through the activities of the Solidarity trade union movement and a sitting Pope ― was being lionized by anti-Communists throughout the world as the best extant hope to commence the toppling of the Bloc’s socialist dominoes. I’m guessing this remains a sensitive topic despite Poland’s subsequent 37-year-long, non-communist history.
In retrospect, my initial viewing of Shoah was the culmination of a free-lance, post-graduate, self-guiding educational binge. I was a sponge, voraciously soaking up books and documentaries about European history, culture and any related matters in an effort to achieve greater understanding during my periods of continental travel.
I’d studied the Holocaust in college and devoured Abba Eban’s Heritage: Civilization and the Jews PBS series. As a philosophy major, debates pertaining to the ethical culpability of ordinary Germans in atrocities committed during the war were certainly familiar to me, but when I watched Shoah in early 1988, it had been only a few months since my first trip through Poland.
And yes, although it might have been better the other way around, I visited the memorial at Oświęcim/Auschwitz before seeing Shoah.
In July of 1987, I was in Krakow with my childhood friend Barrie Ottersbach and two fellow travelers from Florida. We’d chosen to make an unscheduled detour from our Soviet/Baltic/Poland youth and student package tour by hopping a Friday afternoon “express” train from Warsaw, an experience that taught us the dubious (and embarrassing) value of handing the conductor $10 cash (dollars) and watching him evict people from their seats to make room for us.
We rationalized the bribe. After all, the system was to blame, not us.
On a Saturday morning, after overnighting in Krakow for $2.50 each in a willing pensioner’s shabby flat, we rustled a few grams of greasy salami and bread, then found the dingy bus station in the city’s crumbling and neglected downtown, joining several dozen Polish weekend trippers on a bumpy, grinding, two-hour journey to Auschwitz, standing room only.
(It needed to be uncomfortable. Later in life I came to Auschwitz a second time, riding in a cushioned, air-conditioned motor coach. It didn’t seem right.)
No English speakers were available to help, but we guessed the correct stop near the entrance to the museum and memorial. Our fees were paid, and we wordlessly passed through the numbing exhibits inside the old brick barracks buildings of Auschwitz 1, a strangely bureaucratic and tidy introduction to the supreme horror a few hundred meters away at Birkenau, the epicenter of the assembly line death camp.
You’ve probably read or heard about the rooms filled with abandoned luggage, eye glasses, artificial limbs, shoes, children’s toys – all confiscated from prospective victims as they were paraded off cattle cars to perish within the gate that read, “Arbeit Macht Frei” ― work will make you free.
Intense? Chilling? Insane? Redolent of MAGA?
Yes. Words are inadequate, and can only hint at the emotion we felt at a crime site with a scale of aspiration well beyond the imagination of twenty-something Hoosier and Floridian bumpkins. Two were enough, and we beat a hasty retreat.
To get back to Krakow, and thus return to Warsaw later that evening, there was a short walk into the center of Oświęcim. We boarded a train that ran roughly half the distance back to the city before abruptly disgorging us to change at a dusty rural crossing point.
The day had become hot and sultry, and activity at the station was minimal. There was a simple buffet inside offering plates of mystery meat in gray sauce, but we weren’t so much hungry as thirsty, and not just thirsty, but fairly desperate for an adult beverage or eight to ease the transition from wartime Auschwitz back to shabby 1980’s-vintage communist Poland.
Piwo? Wodka?
Alas, there was no succor for the bibulous at the train station. Resigned to temperance, and waiting at the platform, green fields and crops were visible in the distance beyond the tracks. Tidy but roughly dressed people were walking in little groups toward the settlement (surely even in a Polish farm town there’d be something happening on Saturday night), and just before the train finally limped in, a horse-drawn cart clattered across the weathered cobblestones nearby.
I’d been looking at the older folks among the crowd. With memories of Auschwitz still raw, it’s obvious what I was thinking, and I kept those thoughts to myself. Watching Shoah the following year, our parched rail platform reverie and the native Poles populating it kept coming back to me with a vengeance, and they wouldn’t let go over a period of days as Lanzmann meticulously peeled away the murky layers of memory and forgetfulness, and forced the viewer to think: What did it all mean?
This is by no means a denunciation of Poland and the Poles, or an attempt at facile erudition with respect to their places in the historical record, only an observation that there are times when very little makes sense, especially when one’s own senses are being burdened with the unsettling melancholy of time.
Or, of time passed. Living memories then are academic memories now, making remembrance in whatever form even more imperative.
It has been more than a half-century since Lanzmann’s film went into production, and all the survivors he chronicled are long since dead. The people I saw in Poland in 1987 are forty years older, and many of them have passed on, as well.
While I am reasonably confident that my closest friends (and readers) need not be reminded of what the Holocaust was about, I’m not so sure the same is true of others, here or abroad. When I’m walking the streets of New Albany for my daily exercise, I accept that anti-Semitism persists nearby, in spite of what happened in Europe eighty-odd years ago.
Is racist bigotry nature, or nurture? I choose the latter. At birth we’re classified as Homo sapiens (Latin for “wise man”) by biological default, but the wisdom part is variable. We must learn how to be “human,” and no, I can’t tell you how or why Donald Trump forgot the basics.
Why do we reject what we’re taught? Is THAT nature, or nurture? Beats me, although Homo sapiens seems destined to repeat on a regular basis its previous acts of inhumanity. Maybe, then, you’d feel less threatened by a nice rom-com, and that’s fine.
Just don’t pass on Shoah. Learning is good, and there are times when it’s painful, too.
I’m not sure how one goes about watching Shoah in 2026. My copy is on video cassette, but I no longer own a VCR. The film can be purchased outright on DVD for around $70 new, but I didn’t look for used copies. Streaming? I don’t know. It’s time for me to see the film again, and when I get around to determining how, I’ll update this post.
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As a postscript of sorts, two links from 2018, when Claude Lanzmann died in Paris at 92…
The Economist’s obituary of Claude Lanzmann:
WHAT did “Shoah” mean? After Claude Lanzmann had spent almost 12 years making the film he was most famous for, recording 350 hours of interviews in 14 countries, sitting in his shirtsleeves across the table from greying, cautious, sometimes angry people, unsparingly coaxing out of them their memories of the Holocaust, he often met that question. The simple translation was “destruction”.
But as a secular Jew, brought up in central France with no sense of Jewish culture and no Hebrew, he had no idea, at first, what it meant. The word seemed just an utterance, a sound, without associations. It might have been the wind in the trees, or a moan of pain. That suited his purposes, because he wanted to give his work no name at all.
From Julia Pascal’s obituary of Lanzmann in The Guardian:
Lanzmann’s technique was compelling because he (some say cruelly) forced his interviewees to remember their most terrible experiences on camera. In the most famous Shoah sequence, Lanzmann asked the former Treblinka barber Abraham Bomba to talk about the cutting of the hair of a fellow barber’s family before they were about to be gassed. This is agony to watch. When questioned as to the morality of making those who suffered reveal their horror on screen, Lanzmann said: “One has to die with them again in order that they didn’t die alone.”
…and a video from 2020.
