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THIS FILM HAS BEEN MADE USING CLAUDE LANZMANN'S UNUSED FOOTAGE
FROM HIS HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTARY ENTITLED SHOAH.
THE NARRATION IS A MIX OF LANZMANN'S MEMOIRS AND PERSONAL WRITINGS.
Take 99!
One hundred.
Making Shoah
was a long and hard-fought battle.
I wanted to make a film, but was filled with emptiness.
I wanted it to be about death
in the most extreme sense.
I'd fall into futile despair some nights,
only wanting to give up,
but I kept working,
12 long years
staring unflinchingly
into the black sun of the Holocaust.
The film project started here in Israel
in 1973.
It wasn't my idea to make this film.
It was the furthest thing from my mind.
I was alive during the Holocaust.
It could have claimed me,
but I knew nothing about it, honestly,
absolutely nothing,
only that an abstract number of people were victim to it.
Six million of us were murdered.
Something very strong,
even aggressive, within me
moved me to take on the film.
I had no idea how to go about it.
Looking back on it now,
parts of my process strike me as utterly strange,
incomprehensible.
In Israel, I heard about a man called Simon Srebnik.
Srebnik was the youngest
of the only two people to survive Chelmno, Poland,
where 400,000 Jews were killed in mobile gas vans.
At the camp, prisoners were forced to empty the vans of the dead
and toss their remains into mass incineration pits.
Simon Srebnik was 13 and a half
when a firing squad put a bullet in his neck.
Miraculously,
the bullet missed his major arteries.
We spoke, or at least tried to speak about it,
but I grasped almost nothing of what he described.
The little I could understand
were his bits of memories obscured by fear.
He struck me as still the same scared child
he must have been back then.
I just understood he used to sing songs for SS guards
while rowing them down a river in a skiff.
I instantly asked him to sing me what he sang them.
There's a little, white house
I still dream about
The windows
of that little house
shine strangely
in the sun
like a pair of eyes
full of tears
I couldn't give up on Srebnik
or leave him to one side.
I had work to do in order to be able to understand him.
I needed time to pin down what my film was about.
For two years, I read Primo Levi, Antelme, Rousset
and a hundred other works.
Book after book, month after month,
my film rose from the ashes
of my trials and errors.
I had no idea where I was going.
Burlington Hilberg, take nine.
I think that the reason why your book is a master book
is you succeed to show, really,
the inside, the implications
how the destruction of the Jews
has been possible.
My breakthrough was entirely intellectual.
I had this particular Rosetta Stone for quite a while.
Rosetta Stone?
And I studied it,
still not knowing what to make of some items of information in it.
How do you know that "PKR" means the death train?
Well, here again, of course,
the only way we know this kind of information for sure is that...
we know that the destination is Treblinka
and that the train does not go further,
so when we consider that an entire train is going to Treblinka
and there are after all several or rather many of them,
then we say to ourselves,
this was not a train carrying German soldiers on furlough.
This was not a train carrying
Polish workers to a labour camp.
This was a train carrying people
to a particular place,
the object of which overwhelmingly, primarily, in 99% of all cases was
death.
I spent hours with survivors,
who spoke to me about raids, trains, extreme thirst,
being beaten, arriving to the camps and so on.
Every account that I recorded,
even the most tragic,
failed to touch on the heart of the issue.
The central piece was missing:
dying in the gas chambers.
No-one survived them.
I'm haunted by what victims suffered in their final moments
right before they died.
Is there meaning in standing nude in sub-zero temperatures
waiting your turn to walk into a gas chamber at Sobibor or Treblinka?
Questions like that obsessed me,
tormented me.
I'd heard about Abraham Bomba
while doing research in Israel.
I learned he'd cut the hair of Jewish women
inside the gas chambers at Treblinka.
I only knew that Bomba lived in New York City
where he was still working as a hairdresser.
Do you know the town of Sea Gate?
- Of? - Sea Gate.
- It's in Brooklyn, in Brooklyn. - Coney Island.
Not in Europe. Seagate.
It's a neighbourhood in Coney Island.
A community.
I wandered round
and around for hours.
Bomba seemed key to me.
I wound up meeting an old Jewish cobbler who'd known him.
The Bomba family had moved 20 years before.
Distraught,
I leafed in vain through every NYC phone book,
residential and professional.
Because Bomba was a barber,
I went asking around hairdressers'.
At the 15th shop I visited,
a woman with her hair full of rollers and pins
gave me an address.
I finally got a hold of him
and he must have talked to me for 48 hours
as if he'd never spoken to anyone in his life.
After they were gassed,
the spectacle already started
and that did...
They worked the people from the other places,
from the gas chamber
taking out already those... all those people
clung one to another
because even after their death
they clung to one another to have
together, close to one another,
not to be apart from each other
in lifetime and also in their death
and that's the way they took them out from the gas chamber and to...
the places where they put them.
So, far for a while,
they dig big thing
and they put them over there,
but that was not the end.
After that, they dig them out
and they put on top each other, body by body
and they burn them like a...
It was then clear to me
that the Jewish subjects of my film
would be Jewish prisoners forced into labour,
either as Arbeitsjuden
or members of the Sonderkommando,
or special labour units.
These men, like Bomba,
who were present in the final moments of the victims' lives,
had been, apart from the murderers,
the only witnesses to Jews
dying in the gas chambers.
Rudolf Vrba, take 100.
What were your feelings when you were waiting for these trains
and knowing that most of the people who would be in would be
immediately sent to the gas?
But describe as you wish.
It is very difficult
to describe feelings,
but I have seen it so many times that it became a routine.
I wouldn't think that
I have been in any way particularly moved or...
It was not time for feelings.
You remember the arrival of Greek Jews or transport from Greece?
I remember many because in the time when I was on the ramp
at least 30 to 40,000 people came from Saloniki.
And they came from a very long journey
because from Saloniki to Auschwitz or from Athens to Auschwitz
it was nine days and nights.
The Arbeitsjuden and Sonderkommando
had all been young men,
ages ranging from 18 to 25 years old.
They hailed from Poland, Hungary and Greece.
They were handpicked,
then shaved, tattooed, whipped and beaten.
They'd be conducted to the door of Crematorium 5
where they suddenly saw everything.
The mass graves, the flames,
the tangle of discoloured bodies
that came tumbling out when the chamber doors were opened.
There's people from Saloniki who are very different in many ways.
They are more colourful, already by dress.
They had a very philosophical approach to life.
A touch of Orient was in them.
Those people were more mild mannered,
less prepared for toughness.
Some Jews hailing from the sunny shores of the Ionian,
gentle people,
"tender Jews", as Albert Cohen described them,
couldn't bear it all.
They threw themselves into the infernos with open arms
like sea divers.
The day I realised my film would be about death itself,
death and not survival,
the realisation hit me like a great epiphany
and I knew I'd be able to see it through.
Nothing would dissuade me.
At times, I ran out of money
and feared I wouldn't be able to finish the film.
People organised fundraisers for me in the US.
Ambassador Robert Borden Reams?
They were all a total failure,
despite my sincere appeals explaining
why I thought the movie deserved to be made.
This is the fundraising department
of the American Jewish Committee.
I showed them everything I'd learned so far
and the work I'd already carried out.
Have they gone upstairs to the library?
I would like to welcome first of all Mr Lanzmann from Paris and his film
crew. I guess everybody is aware of by now what's going.
After I'd spoken,
I'd field questions - always the same ones.
Mr Lanzmann, what is your message?
Two-one-four.
I didn't know what Shoah's message was.
Two-one-four.
I still don't know what it is.
Had I said,
"My message is, Never again", or perhaps
"Love one another",
the pocketbooks would have fallen open,
but I was no good at fundraising.
Not one American dollar went to financing Shoah.
Individual donors kept me afloat
in the dreadful stretches of hard living
when the immensity of the project towered over me.
My research took me from one continent to the next.
I felt like I was on a police manhunt,
a never-ending chase.
I knew early on that my film would have to feature
the perpetrators too.
From my reading, I'd composed
a list of around one hundred names
of Nazi war criminals and bureaucrats alike
who struck me as key to what I was after.
At the outset,
I was embarrassingly naive, inexperienced and honest,
calling people up, giving them my name
and the reason I was calling,
to make a movie about the extermination of the Jews.
I didn't often get the chance to say any more.
so, after many failures,
so I decided to stop calling
and to just turn up at the homes of the people I was looking for
with my trusted German assistant, Corinna Coulmas,
a brilliant and brave woman.
So,
what do we have on...
Laabs?
An excerpt from an indictment
from the Chelmno war-crime trials.
Gustav Laabs, gas-van driver
during both periods of extermination at Chelmno.
When a lorry arrived to the manor building,
the accused drove the gas van
up a wooden ramp.
He'd wait for victims
to be loaded into the van and for the doors to close.
Then,
he'd attach a hose from the fixed exhaust pipe
into the interior of the van.
He then would start the engine,
put his foot on the accelerator
and let the engine run for 10 to 15 minutes.
Once the shouts and moans
and banging
quieted down within the van
and all within had been suffocated or had fainted,
he'd drive the van
to Waltlager, a wooded area
seven kilometres from the village of Chelmno,
where the bodies were unloaded
and either buried or incinerated.
He won't open the door.
His neighbours tipped him off,
telling him not to open.
Are you allowed to film people
without asking their permission?
Film people who don't wish to be filmed?
You can't film this house or anything else for that matter.
But we rang the bell.
- You did what? - We rang the bell.
You can't have this camera on right now.
We don't care if you want to talk to Mr Laabs.
We just want to talk to him. Do you know him?
Sure, he's our neighbour.
- Is he a kind man? - Of course he is.
Do you know anything about his life?
- No. - No?
You don't know what he was involved in?
- You have no idea? - No.
Hold on.
Sir, do you know what a gas van is?
No.
You've never heard of that?
No.
He operated them during the war.
- How is that our business? - Gas vans.
- He killed 200,000 Jews. - What are you on about?
- Where are you from? - Did you know that?
French television?
We don't care about what you have to say.
- Fine. - People deserve privacy.
I only care about what he does as my neighbour.
Anything beyond that is none of my concern.
Why don't you carry on your way?
That's just what we'll do.
Everyone's in on it.
To Germans,
my last name was a giveaway that I was Jewish
and it only made things harder.
I needed to start using an alias.
I won't reveal how
because I promised not to say,
but I managed to get a fake passport
that I swore to get rid of after filming was over.
I started going by Claude-Marie Sorel.
I worked for a phony modern history research institute.
I gave myself the fictitious title of Doctor of History.
Honesty and transparency with former Nazis
had proven utterly futile.
I had to learn how to lie to the liars.
So...
Take off your...
Do try
and not go too tight like last time,
though I'm not sure if it was tight
or I was just nervous.
Every time
I took a breath, it felt
like I was restricted.
You're just aware that it's there,
like it was going to break.
- You just feel it's there. - Yeah, but still...
I'd rather it were a gun.
That all right?
Maybe a little tighter.
I'm afraid it will fall like the other day.
It fell?
No, but it felt like it was going to.
Hold on.
The Paluche
was a small, handheld, cylindrical camera that changed everything.
You could use it without looking through the viewfinder.
It didn't record on film,
but transmitted the images to a small van nearby.
The little miracle
was going to drastically change how I'd film in Germany.
There we are.
How has your heart been?
All right?
My heart's been fine lately.
If it starts acting up, I'll let you know.
Sure, sure.
- Then we'll have to stop. - Of course.
Everything working?
Franz Suchomel
agreed to a voice interview only.
At Treblinka, Suchomel was in charge of a unit
tasked with confiscating money
and valuables the victims were hiding on their person.
I hid a Paluche in a bag
along with a professional-grade microphone.
My director of photography William Lubtchansky
worked double duty as a sound engineer.
Everything in order?
- Are you ready? - Yes.
- Shall we? - Let's get started.
Great.
Let's do that.
- Let's start with Treblinka. - By all means.
We were brought to the far side of the camp,
around the back,
and when we got up there
the gas-chamber doors had just been opened
and bodies had come tumbling out like potatoes.
Like potatoes?
I wish to remain anonymous telling you this.
Of course, of course.
How do you say, "I gave you my word?"
I gave you my word.
- D*mn! - What's wrong?
So...
Sound is out of sync.
Was that a frightening duty to perform?
It was.
People were stripped of their most basic human dignity.
Even their hair was taken from them.
It was total humiliation.
Well...
There's a haircutter in New York City.
Bomba, that sounds familiar.
Sounds familiar.
I think I remember that name.
Yes, Bomba.
REEL NO. 21
Abraham Bomba had left New York without leaving an address.
I made phone calls for days and they led nowhere.
The letters I sent were returned to sender.
Bomba, take one!
I finally managed to track him down
while shooting in Israel.
He thought my movie was just a cover.
Bomba, take four!
Excuse me,
can you describe... You became quiet suddenly.
At one day we had a order
to get together a certain amount of barbers
and to go cut the hair of the women.
They took us up to the place
where we never went over there.
No-one from the...
the Treblinka, where we were
at our place and we went across that big door
going into,
at that time, which we know already was the gas chamber.
They took us over there.
I could sense Bomba getting nervous,
which only agitated my own anxiety.
We both knew the difficult part was nigh,
that we'd have to talk about cutting women's hair
inside the gas chambers.
It's difficult for you, I know.
Yes, it is.
It's very difficult because, you know,
you have to go through this thing all over again
and it is very painful.
Yes, but you have to do it.
You must.
You have no choice.
Let's cut, please.
The barbershop idea was mine.
I thought getting him working
might make it easier for him to talk
than sitting in front of a camera.
I placed him in his professional setting and said,
"Abraham,
do what you did back then".
That's when the truth found its footing
and he was transported into the past like an actor.
You said that you didn't shave them.
No, we did not shave.
We just cut the hair, make them believe
that they're getting a nice haircut.
But you cut with what? With scissors?
With scissors, yes, and with comb, without any clippers,
just like a men's haircut, I would say.
What did you feel when you started
to cut the hair of the women after the war?
After the war... That is a really good question
because
when I came out from the
extermination camp in Treblinka
and I went into work in a barbershop
and when a woman was sitting at the chair,
in dress,
it was funny for me
because I was cutting the hair for so many 100 and 100 women
all naked, without any dress
and I didn't know that, from the beginning, I didn't
know how to start doing the haircut
where a woman sits
dressed like a woman should be
and it was, emotionally for me,
it was... I couldn't get used to the idea.
It took quite a time
until I get used to myself to do the cutting
of a lady's hair
dressed with her clothes on.
You can fill in details, but I've told you a lot.
You have indeed.
He has to change his tape.
- Yes. - You should try...
He's looking at you a lot. You should...
- Can you hear him all right? - Very well.
- Let me take a moment to change... - The tape?
- The head. - All right.
- Sound working? - No.
OK, headphones back on.
Or let's stop and get a bite to eat.
We took a break for a lunch
and I invited Suchomel's wife to join.
They stuffed themselves on salmon and cream.
That night,
I got into a heated discussion with William Lubtchansky,
whose father had been gassed at Auschwitz.
He couldn't understand why I was so cool-headed,
that it was crucial to the act I was putting on.
He'd have killed Suchomel.
I wanted to kill him another way...
kill him with the camera.
Let's stop.
My heart is starting to act up.
Very well.
No, keep rolling.
Pretend like you're stopping.
Are you experiencing pain?
Pains in your chest?
- Angina pectoris. - Angina pectoris?
It'll pass in five minutes.
Very well, I won't go out for a smoke then.
Is it from...
Can you ask him if it's because he's getting emotional?
Is it from the emotion?
I get annoyed
when people ask me that.
It's because I ate too much.
You did eat a lot.
We'll restart in a bit.
Salmon does that.
- Excuse me? - Salmon does that.
It was all that cream.
Sure.
When we got going again,
Suchomel was feeling confident.
I had him sing for me the song the Arbeitsjuden
had to learn upon enlistment.
The commandos march To their daily labour
In our eyes, All that matters is Treblinka
Our destinies are tied to it
Treblinka became part of us
In the blink of an eye
The words of our commander Are all that matter
Beside obedience and duty
We're here to serve And serve and serve
Until happiness shines upon us one fine day
Hoorah!
You have a great singing voice.
Yes, I have...
A great singing voice.
Only the Jews sang that song?
Only Jews, yes,
but we can keep singing that our destinies
are tied to Treblinka, can't we?
The Jews are no longer around.
They can't tell the story.
With sure step Looking out over the world,
Headlong into the distance
The commandos march To their daily labour
In our eyes, All that matters is Treblinka
Our destinies are tied to it
Treblinka became...
One Jewish man remembered it.
Richard Glazar had survived Treblinka
by fleeing during the Treblinka Uprising of August 1943.
To pay their way on the run, Glazar and a friend
were given a few diamonds that Jews in Suchomel's work units
had looted from the remains of the dead.
We hid the diamonds
in beard soap
and held onto them,
telling ourselves...
that we shouldn't pawn the diamonds
to help us survive.
If fate would only smile on us,
the riches we took from Treblinka
should never
be traded
for our survival.
So, we never sold the diamonds
and later...
we had the diamonds set
in rings we gave to our wives.
Carel's wife and my own
still wear their rings to this day.
You never sold them?
No.
Even though we were constantly short on money.
Can you show what you have there?
This is the razor.
And the soap.
This soap is from Treblinka,
as is the case.
These are likely all
that have survived
of the 800,000 victims
and this is the ring my wife wears.
That's...
gorgeous.
Are you tearing up?
Did you also used to cry back then?
Yes, at day's end every day, I'd pray.
- You would pray? - Yes.
To God?
To God.
For Him to forgive me.
I'll consider this compensation for my pain
and not compensation for doing an interview.
Compensation for your pain?
This...
cross I bear that causes me to suffer.
It's the reason I'll burn tomorrow and forever.
This is 2,000 Swiss francs,
similar to Deutsche marks.
Thank you.
I kicked and screamed all the way to Poland,
though it was the beating heart of the extermination project.
Something in me didn't want to go there.
What was there to see? People who weren't there any more?
I figured that, since my film was about destruction,
settings were of no importance.
I saw Poland as a memorial void.
I went late in the process,
in the winter of 1978,
five years after starting work on Shoah.
I'd been everywhere else until then.
I was arrogant arriving in Poland,
positive I was only there to prove I didn't need to be there.
My first day there, I rented a Russian banger
and set out for Treblinka.
I wanted to see the site with my own eyes.
I felt nothing.
I gaped,
my mind and soul bewildered,
the only reaction I could manage
at the traces left of the massacre.
What lay before me was so different from what I'd learned about
from my reading
and, more importantly, from Suchomel,
Glazar and Abraham Bomba.
There are two kids there.
Barbara, say hi to them.
Ask him to come over here.
Hi there, sir.
Ask if he's lived in Treblinka a long time.
Sixty-seven years.
- Sixty-seven? - Yes.
He must have seen some things.
Does he care to share with us what he's seen?
I'm going to step out.
What's that?
- Step out with me. - How?
Step out
on the other side.
Two Germans struck them and killed
both of them,
two boys as young as his grandson,
about his age.
He witnessed that?
Where was he?
He was on his way to the fields.
Tell them we're making a movie. We're from France.
Hello, sir.
Hi.
Does he have any memories of Warsaw Jews arriving in cattle wagons?
Six trains per day.
Each train was 60 cars,
but only 20 of them would go off to the camp.
I see.
The trains were separated by hand.
He saw all this himself?
If it happened here, he saw it.
He locked the door and may go fetch his gun.
Well, let's try somewhere else.
You heard that lock, clack!
Come on.
I'd felt nothing seeing the memorial at the camp,
but that little sign struck a deep chord.
Treblinka was real.
There was once a village called Treblinka,
a brave village.
When I first arrived here
full of everything I'd learned,
I felt like a bomb ready to go off.
All I needed was a detonator.
Treblinka was that detonator.
On the line over there where we stayed,
there was a small sign which said, "Treblinka"
and it was first time
in my life I heard about that name, Treblinka.
On the other side of the tracks,
I saw about
18, 20, maybe more wagons
going away
and after about an hour or so,
I saw the ones coming back, but without the people.
Our train went in also.
When we got to the extermination camp,
all of a sudden we heard screaming,
"Men to the right and women to the left!"
My wife was holding the child
and my mother was together with her,
so we, me, my brother and my father, went to the right side,
and the women went to the left side,
to the barracks.
That was the last time
I saw anybody of the female relative of mine.
I heard about a train driver
who operated the Holocaust trains
every year the camp was operational
and he lived only some 10 kilometres from Treblinka.
Rolling.
Call out.
Take 17.
How old was Mr Gawkowski at the time?
He began operating trains
when he was fairly young.
He was in his early 20s during the war.
His early 20s,
a young man.
Yes!
That's why his memory of what happened
is so clear.
In that case...
His memory is less sharp now.
He seems to have a great memory.
So much so he looks to be reliving that time.
Absolutely right.
Right.
It's as if he can see it all before his eyes.
Did he hear ever screaming while driving the trains?
Yes.
What did people scream?
Were they just shouts or did people say things?
It was anything and everything,
anything and everything.
Calling out, shouts, everything.
Does he have nightmares about it
to this day?
It's happened more than once,
to say the least.
Sure!
Let's go!
I told Gawkowski
I'd film him driving into Treblinka.
Just like Bomba in the barber shop,
Gawkowski was transported,
seeing 60 imaginary Holocaust trains taking people to their deaths.
There were no wagons attached,
just the engine that came at a high rental price from the Polish rail.
Barbara, will you please ask Mr Borowi,
if he lived here
during the war?
Yes,
during the occupation.
I heard him say the word "Christ",
what was that in relation to?
He says that according to religious tradition,
when Christ was alive,
the Jews had him crucified
and as we know,
he was resurrected,
so what happened to the Jews
happened to them
because of what they did to Christ.
They had to pay for the injustice.
Is that what he means?
"That's what the old timers say.
- I'm just repeating it". - I see.
Take 55.
Barbara,
can you ask...
Excuse me, Mr Borowi. Would you ask him
if he thinks I'm Jewish?
- He thinks so. - Why?
The way you speak
and carry yourself,
but mostly how you speak. You speak French
with a slightly Jewish accent.
- A Jewish accent? - Yeah.
Very well.
I was the first to interview Gawkowski, Borowi
and the other farmers around.
No-one else had cared to listen to what they had to say.
It produced a harrowing realisation in me
that the farmers in the heart of Poland
had been the nearest humans
to the victims of the Holocaust.
In Poland, I discovered
a gold mine of things left unsaid.
You'd think it impossible for this to have happened here,
given how beautiful and peaceful it is here.
So quiet.
Believe me, it wasn't always
this quiet around here.
There was a time
when you'd have only heard shouts, barking dogs and gunshots
where we are now.
When not filming in Poland or the US,
we were like a travelling circus
or theatre troop
crisscrossing Germany's towns and villages gleaning more and more.
In the hotels at night,
a good bottle of red wine
would help keep our spirits up
to do it all over again the next day.
Every day, we set our sights on a new target.
Mr Kretschmer?
On my way.
OK.
I'd love to interview you
about your letters. Do you remember them?
Oh, I don't much wish to.
That's so...
The reality of what happened is so disgusting
I'd really rather distance myself from all that.
Why'd you make the joke,
"The sight of blood has become so common
you can't bear the taste of black pudding"?
What's black pudding?
It's pork and beef blood.
So, a sausage made with blood?
A sausage made with blood that takes on a black colour.
Why was the taste of black pudding so hard to bear?
Because there was so much blood?
I don't know.
It seems to me...
We went out one time and when we got back,
there was a table set with a dinner spread
that included black pudding and comments were made.
I believe what you're trying to say
is that after an execution, it was hard to eat black pudding.
I... I...
It's an interesting thing to say.
What?
That was something, huh?
I hope that Dominique
caught all that.
A euphoric feeling of omnipotence was coming over me
and our entire little troop.
I let my guard down.
I grew less weary.
D*mn!
Whatever it took, I wanted to talk
to a commander of the Einsatzgruppen,
the mobile killing squads that murdered 1.5 million Jews.
I set my sights on Heinz Schubert,
a lieutenant who oversaw the Simferopol massacre in Crimea.
There are dogs.
Yeah.
Hi, might I speak to Mr Schubert?
Please, have a seat.
We're on the garden side.
This is good here.
He can be there.
- Hi there. - Hi, Mr Schubert.
- You're Dr Sorel? - That's right.
I'm not familiar with your institute.
I don't understand the work you do.
It's affiliated to the University of Paris.
Are you're here on behalf
of the French government?
No, I'm carrying out research
on the Einsatzgruppen.
I had Corinna go out and make sure the van was picking us up
because we were toward the back of the house.
Great.
Mrs Schubert swiftly grabbed our bag
and placed it on the ground,
so all we caught from then on were lower legs and chairs.
Oh, what happened? That's not good. We've lost connection.
Pardon me. Heinz, will you come pick up the phone?
Excuse me.
They noticed the van.
I bet they noticed the antenna.
It's hard to miss.
They keep jostling it about.
It's a problem.
You shouldn't be broadcasting this to the outside.
I was out by the vehicle and saw the recording equipment.
It isn't right to lie to people like this.
Let's work this out.
- No. - We heard voices in the vehicle.
I stood right next to it.
What do you think I'm up to? I would like to know.
There's a vehicle outside with recording equipment in it.
And it's recording this conversation.
What?
Call the police.
Madam, you were outside next to the vehicle.
I saw you out there.
You saw that it was recording.
Show us what's in your bag.
Show us.
No. That's none of your business.
I want to see what's inside.
No. That won't be happening.
What is all this?
We had to run from police.
With all my might, I threw the bag at them,
which held them off.
I jumped in the car
and drove flat out at the human blockade
trying to keep us there.
They knew I'd rather kill them than get caught by police.
I couldn't replace the Paluche.
I didn't know how I'd keep working.
Even worse than that,
my film didn't feature anyone from the Einsatzgruppen,
though they were so crucial.
For those executioners,
I'd gone out on a limb
and I'd lost my bet.
Barbara, ask these kids
what they think of the history here?
They don't much believe the tales the old folks tell.
They don't?
Hey, quiet down, huh?
I filmed every season in Poland,
each one a season of death.
Shoah is an allegory
of European Jews journeying toward death.
It's a race against death.
Soon, the recent past
will become history
and only history.
Shoah is an act of remembrance.
Remembrance is all that matters.
Ready? Rolling? OK.
My directors of photography, Chappuis,
who followed Lubtchansky and Glasberg,
all would ask to me,
"Why do you keep filming these rocks?
You've filmed them ten times".
I couldn't get enough of them.
I didn't film them enough and kept returning to Treblinka
to film them more.
I shot them because that's all there was to shoot.
I couldn't come up with anything else.
I'd need them for when Bomba, Glazar, the farmers
and Suchomel would speak.
These blocks of stones turned human before my eyes,
the only trace of the hundreds of thousands who died here.
Years prior, I'd left Simon Srebnik, the singer from Israel,
without having understood much,
but I'd honed my craft in the meantime.
Corinna, ask Mr Srebnik
if anything strikes him as familiar.
What's this to the left?
He doesn't remember.
His memory will come back.
Now he's remembering.
Chelmno is this way.
The camp was that way.
What's this here?
It's the church they locked people in.
He'd go there to give people water.
They'd see him approaching with his ankles
in chains.
No, this way.
Here?
Perhaps...
Sure, go that way.
Plane overhead.
So,
Corinna, tell Mr Srebnik we'll head
to where the schlöss was, but I have a question first.
Is this the same church that was here back then?
What's changed since then?
The exterior is the exact same.
He can't say about the interior.
The exterior is the exact same.
The fence, the colours, everything?
Yes, it's the exact same.
Father,
do you know what happened here
in your church in Chelmno?
He heard there was a drop-off
of clothing that people would separate
before shipping it off somewhere else.
Shipping it off?
That's all he knows about what happened in this church?
That's what people have told him.
What he's heard?
He doesn't think anything else happened here?
The church was just used as a collection point.
For items?
Yes, a collection point.
I didn't think this interview
would go like this.
Yesterday
when the cameras weren't rolling,
Father explained to us
that when he first began to lead this congregation,
the walls of the church were covered in writings
from the Jews who'd spent their last night alive here,
writing messages on the walls.
He even showed us one,
the only one left
from a Jew from Leipzig,
who wrote his name, though it's barely legible.
You can make out Leipzig.
How does he explain this graffiti? I don't understand.
He doesn't understand your question.
He doesn't?
When I first got the chains put on me,
I couldn't walk very fast.
I had to walk like this.
- You had chains put on you? - I did.
Then an SS officer made an announcement:
"The first person to reach the petrol supply",
said SS Bothmann,
"can get longer chains put on".
My God, it was a game.
Yes, we were all lined up here, standing,
and we raced to the petrol supply,
but I didn't run, I hopped with the help of my hands.
You could do that?
I got there like this.
When Mr Srebnik was here,
people would get locked in the church
before being loaded into gas vans.
No, no,
not right before.
That's incorrect.
When there was no more...
Oh, that!
People were in the church
and the gas vans would come to pick them up.
The van would take 80 to 90 people
and head to the forest.
They'd empty the vans there,
then come back to the church to load up more people
and head back out to the forest.
They'd go back and forth from the forest
to the church,
forest to the church,
until there was no-one left in the church.
It's always been quiet here.
Always.
Even when they were burning people every day,
or I suppose every other day,
2,000 people, Jews,
it was still this quiet.
There were two chambers here,
one over there and a second one here,
and everything was as quiet as you hear now.
No-one would cry out or anything?
No, no-one would cry out at all.
They were all performing their duty.
All was calm.
- Calm? - Yes.
As it is now.
Can you sing that same Polish tune?
The same one as before?
- Now? - Yes.
There's a little, white house
I still dream about
The windows...
Cut, cut, cut. Something's off.
I was with a guard,
an SS soldier stationed at Chelmno.
OK.
I'd row the boat
and look for food for the rabbits.
When I'd get back to Chelmno,
I'd go feed the rabbits.
- You'd go out rowing? - That's right.
In a skiff, a boat.
- And you'd sing? - That's right.
- You'd be ordered to sing? - Come again?
Were you ordered to sing?
Yes, it was an order.
Did others have to sing as well?
No-one else sang.
You were the only one.
- One more time. - The same one?
There's a little, white house
I still dream about
The windows
Of that little house
Shine strangely
In the sun
Like a pair of eyes
Full of tears
We couldn't film what had happened.
We had to re-enact it.
I had to grow delirious
and convince myself nothing had changed.
Shoah cuts across the distance between past and present.
I experienced the past in the present.
Shoah
looks into the eyes of the witnesses.
Cut.
The Shoah saga had started here, in Israel,
six years earlier.
I came back here for my final interviews.
I was almost out of film
and money to buy more.
I'd been filming non-stop
to the point of serious exhaustion.
Antek, come near me.
Antek had been second in command
leading the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Antek, a hero, was a drinker.
The kibbutz bureaucrats didn't want me to talk to him.
I gave them my word I wouldn't.
Can you ask him to stand
next to you?
I only really started drinking after the war.
When I climbed up on the great tomb...
Claude wanted to know
how I felt. If he could have licked my heart,
he would have tasted poison.
When that great injustice was carried out
against the Jewish people
and when we look for symbols,
be it Antek,
be it Tsivia,
be it Morekhay Anilewic,
they're all heroes.
The hundreds of people
whose names have been lost,
not one of them has written a book.
The little bit of hardship
that I'm facing now
is I'm making a movie
and I need human faces
to help tell the story.
The question to ask is:
what good can it do,
this documentary?
I survived millions.
All around me,
not looking,
are thousands.
Each one of them...
Ask yourself if I wish to lose sight of the past.
Go on.
For example,
Hebrew peoples,
millions of them were sacrificed
at Treblinka,
Sobibor,
Auschwitz.
I've always felt haunted by the ones
who died alone,
far from anyone.
I wanted the film to bring them back to life
only to kill them a second time,
but we would die with them
so they wouldn't die alone.
SHOAH TOOK 12 YEARS TO MAKE. THE 9.5-HOUR FILM
WAS FIRST SCREENED IN APRIL OF 1985.
IN 2023, SHOAH WAS ADDED TO UNESCO'S
MEMORY OF THE WORLD REGISTER FOR ITS VITAL DOCUMENTATION.
Subtitle translation: Timothy Stone