Georgia Amick

Professor Phillips

English 101

18 April 6, 2016

Shoah

Shoah is a documentary film created by Claude Lanzmann in order to showcase the horrors that were committed by the Nazi party within Poland during WWII.  Shoah is a Hebrew word, meaning catastrophe.  The Holocaust was often called The Shoah by Jewish people, and still is to this day.  Within the film, Lanzmann records both survivors and perpetrators of crimes committed in Polish concentration/death camps.  Within the documentary, there is a primary focus on solely crimes against Jewish peoples, one of its critiques actually was that it did not give a broader scope of the victims of this event. The entire Shoah documentary is about 9  one-half  hours long, so the focus within this paper will be on smaller, more generalized portions of the film.  Lanzmann took 10 years to complete this documentary, he used interviews and secret filming in order to not just remember the history of the Holocaust, but for the audience to see the experiences of these men and women reflecting on their history, and then inviting the viewers into those memories.

Lanzmann begins the documentary with one of only two survivors, Simon Srebnik, from the camp, Chelmno.  He is on a boat singing one of the songs that the SS officers used to make him sing while he was being held captive at the camp. The documentary begins with Srebnik riding in a gondola type of boat down a river on the way to Chelmno, which Lanzmann took years to convince him to return to.   Lanzmann gives an excerpt before the film began saying that Srebnik used to ride with an SS officer throughout the Polish town and sing, crediting that to why he survived so long within the camp.  Lanzmann places Srebnik back in the boat and singing the same tunes as he once did when he was a captive at Chelmno, in order to encourage Srebnik to relive the experience and possibly give a more accurate depiction of what happened to him.  The audience can also develop more of a connection with Srebnik, by actually seeing and experiencing (as much as what is now possible) what his life was like.  

When the Russian army was closing into the camp in 1945, the SS army took all of the prisoners and shot them so that they could go ahead and work on demolishing the evidence and leave the camp themselves fast enough.  Srebnik was shot but he survived and was rescued by a Russian military physician.  When watching the first scene, it all looks quite beautiful; it is a bright day and he is simply drifting along in a gondola-boat singing what sounds like a nice, melodic tune about a white house.  However, in a later interview, Lanzmann tells a reporter "It is not beautiful ... " he tells him that the song Srebnik was singing was a Nazi marching song that Srebnik was forced to learn and sing for his captors.  And the same river he was floating down in the beginning of the film was the river that he dumped "sacks of crushed bones of Holocaust victims into" (Jeffries, 2011).  This calm scene that many individuals would see as a beautiful boat ride listening to a nice tune, is now contrasted with the knowledge of this being a horrible place for this man.  He was going through and reliving what was the most horrific time of his life.  In the documentary, Srebnik was not really returned to for a main interview, he was only set up as the beginning story possibly to give the viewers a beginning testimony that was going to draw the audience in.  Srebnik, according to Lanzmann, did not want to return to Poland with him after what happened.

 There was a focus on Poland during the documentary.  Western Poland was where the first violence against Jews began on a mass scale (Pentlin, 2011). They are specifically Polish camps and ghettos that are discussed; Chelmno, Aushwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and the Warsaw Ghetto.  Chelmno was one of the death camps that first incorporated mobile gas vans, described in some detail during the secret interview of German police officer, Franz Schalling. Aushwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka were the two death camps that had large gas chambers in order to exterminate large numbers of Jewish and Polish people; SS officer, Franz Suchomel, described Aushwitz as "a factory" and Treblinka as an "efficient production line of death".   The Warsaw Ghetto was one of the largest ghettos during Nazi-Germany; Lanzmann interviewed Franz Grassler (commissioner of the Warsaw Ghetto) about the famine and diseases within the enclosure.  These four focuses were done in order to cover all of the atrocities that were occurring, each equally horrible but none the exact same horror.  

Franz Schalling was assigned to Chelmno in 1941/42 in the winter and left in 1944.  In the transcript of his interview he talks about the SS officers would load the people onto the trucks and then someone would take a hose connected to the exhaust pipe and screw it into the bottom of the truck where the people were standing.  Then they would back up the trucks and have the other prisoners unload the bodies to be burned in the pits.  This was the "cleanest way" of disposing the bodies (Schalling).  Chelmno was the first camp to use these mobile gas chambers in the extermination process.  Lanzmann focused a large chunk of the documentary on Chelmno because it was the beginning of a camp that had gone even further than trying to exterminate, it was a camp that attempted to progress in its ability to exterminate.  This enhances the 'robotics' of the Nazi party for the audience to see that it was the people that were making it a game or a challenge to kill who were the ones that were not human.  Franz Schalling was one of the German police officers assigned to Chelmno, during his interview he made sure to say that he did not see much of what was going on and did not comprehend a lot that was occurring around the camp.  He also made sure to say that he had no idea that it was a death camp when he was first assigned to it, he thought it was just simply for relocation purposes for the Jews.  Many of the other interviews with German officers or soldiers said similar things, saying this and giving their testimonies at Nazi trials. 

Schalling, further into his interview, says how nobody besides the translator and, now Lanzmann know that he was at Chelmno; his wife and son would hate him for it if they knew and he hasn't talked about it with anyone else and that he knew that being at that camp was wrong.  He knew he "had to get out of there" (Schalling) and move to a different place to work because there were too many horrible things happening, however Schalling never made any steps in order to help the Jewish people at Chelmno. Lanzmann wants the audience to hear these facts and hear the perpetrators claim things that don't ad up in order to generate further identification and sympathy for the Jewish people.  The fact that these guards at the camps were "just following orders" (Franz Suchomel) is, in some ways, more terrifying than if they were the masterminds behind all of this.  Instead, they were just robots that were killing innocent people because someone else told them to. 

Franz Suchomel was an SS officer at the death camp, Treblinka, whom Lanzmann interviewed. During the questioning, he goes into detail about the gas chambers and the process of "liquidation" (Lanzmann), or the mass murder of the millions of Jewish people that were sent to Nazi death camps.  Lanzmann secretly filmed Suchomel during the interview and got Suchomel to go into detail about the system of unloading people off the train and then gassing them in the gas chambers.  Suchomel, in several points throughout the interview, feigned pity for what happened to them; "we sat on our luggage and wept like old women ... . Yes, we cried" (Suchomel).  In several different parts of the interview he refers to them as "those poor people", but then he continues on and brags about the capacity of the gas chambers and he even joyfully sings the song that they forced the Jewish prisoners to memorize and recite at suppertime (they would be killed if they didn't).  Throughout the questioning, Suchomel never directly takes credit for any crimes; he even generalizes it for the Germans to look somewhat innocent in the process.  He begins by describing the process of unloading the Jews off of the trains that came in from different ghettos around Poland.  He says that the Ukrainians that were working on the trains were "especially brutal" and they had whips.  He also says that there were about 20 Jews working in the Blue Squad (Jews within the camp that were in charge of unloading the train cars), about 10 Ukrainians, and only 2 or 3 German soldiers that were overviewing the process. Suchomel used this as a way to passively blame-shift by saying that everyone else was really in charge and how the others were the ones that were actually doing bad things, the Germans were more of bystanders.   There are contrasts in the story which Suchomel believes that it portrays him as more humane, when in actuality it enhances the crimes that were taking place; such as, Suchomel would say he never saw any of the guards hit the women on the route towards the gas chambers (he later said that it may have happened but he didn't see it).  This type of statement makes the audience ask the question of, why the courteousness if they are all being starved and forced out of their homes and then transported to a death camp?  They were already being beaten and tortured in the ghettos and on the trains; Lanzmann brought this argument up to show the audience that Suchomel was probably under-exaggerating the process.  Suchomel then goes to describe how the people "shit all over the floor,  ...  it was a mess", accentuating his callousness about these people; here they were terrified and about to die and he was complaining that they "couldn't control themselves" (Suchomel).  The interview was secretly recorded by Lanzmann and was edited down to almost an hour.  Lanzmann seemingly edited the interview in order to place the parts that didn't add up side by side with one another; allowing the audience to make the connections of what didn't make sense within his interview.  

The Warsaw ghetto was the largest ghetto within Poland.  Lanzmann interviewed Franz Grassler, the Nazi Commissioner of the Warsaw ghetto (the guy in charge).  Grassier spoke mainly on the state of the ghetto while he was in charge of it before the Jews began to be sent off to the extermination camps.  Grassler spoke, mostly in denial, about the famine and diseases throughout the ghetto in 1941.  Lanzmann kept returning to the poor state of the ghetto, which Grassler replied with how it wasn't his fault and that the peope "at the Commission did [their] best to feed the ghetto, so it wouldn't become an incubator of epidemics" (Grassler).  However, earlier in the interview of the SS officer, Franz Suchomel, there was discussion about the ghettos as well as the camps where the survivors stayed, and that the extermination "began before and continued outside of the gas chambers" (Suchomel).  Suchomel said that starving them gave them less hope and would bring diseases that would kill them off if they weren't already sent to the gas chambers.  The watchers of the film are led to believe that the ghettos were a key part in beginning of the process of trying to kill the Jewish people.  The ghettos were terrible, but the Germans could afford making that step of relocation when they are still semi-healthy, then while at the ghettos the Jews would be starved and become ill so that there was little to no ability for resistance when finally taken to extermination camps.  

Lanzmann created this documentary to showcase the horrors that occurred specifically within Poland by the Nazi regime.  There was a plan in place and all it took was one man's decision in order to cause the death of almost 6 million people.  Through all of the interviews both with sufferers and perpetrators, the audience is given a personal experience of intensity and connection with the victims of this time period.  

References

Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team. "English Transcript of interview with Dr. Franz Grassler". Claude Lanzmann. 2009. http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/grassler.html

Claude Lanzmann. "Shoah" Israeli Officials. 1984. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rEAIG1jzbY

Stuart Jeffries. "Claude Lanzmann on why Holocaust documentary Shoah still matters". The Guardian. 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jun/09/claude-lanzmann-shoah-holocaust-documentary

Pentlin, Susan Lee. "The Holocaust Experience In Western Poland." Journal Of Ecumenical Studies 46.4 (2011): 557-566. Academic Search Complete. Web. 17 Apr. 2016.
