egonzinc
Powerful film. I have seen many films and read many books, so very little of the information came as a surprise...EXCEPT, and looking around the comments, another poster "Lufty" described what impacted me most about Shoa. Here are his words, I could not have expressed them better than he does:"The complicity of most of the populations of Central and Eastern Europe in this horrid stain on human history was most famously exposed in Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners" (released 12 years after "Shoah")which investigates the endemic antisemitism throughout this part of Europe and how Hitler's rantings were descended upon a more than willing audience.And THAT is Lanzmann's brilliance. Through their own words, he demonstrates clearly that not only were those in the areas of these camps fully aware of what was happening, but fully complicit in it. And more frightening is that even knowing what happened, and the unimaginable results, their attitudes, in many cases have not changed."That is what I found most disturbing, specially considering this film was made 30 years after the events, when EVERYONE knew exactly what had happened.
Rodrigo Amaro
"Shoah" is a Hebrew word for 'destruction', and that's what the Holocaust was, a genocide, the destruction of religions, cultures, ideologies, etc. The documentary directed by Claude Lanzmann is a heartfelt and powerful labor of preserving the tragic and real stories of people involved in one or way or another in one of the most darkest periods of the 20th century. In its long 9 and half hours you're gonna be informed in a way you've never were before, since the film does not make use of archive footage of any kind, and to most of the accounts revealed here you're gonna need to imagine how things were, how things happened and the director gives you time and space to form those desperate moments, thankfully to a slow pace and the presentation of places where part of the genocide happened, abandoned locations that seemed to be doomed to never have another function than of being a crime scene. In all of those hours and minutes of this experience you're gonna be sad, angered, dry, a little bit tired, intrigued, amazed, whatever reactions you may think of you might feel it watching this film.This is what we get: the movie presents three categories of people: the survivors of concentration camps, Jewish rebels working for the resistance; the perpetrators of the most horrendous crimes of the century, Nazi officers; and eyewitness who witnessed or were forced to pass through the horrors of war. In the latter category you'll see figures like the Polish train conductor who had to be drunk while making his service for the Nazists, transporting Jews on the worst possible conditions, otherwise he couldn't bear hearing the suffering people was going through.What the survivors have to say to us is impressively shocking but not just that; it's the way some of them express their suffering, their tragedies and losses: some of them explain things with a nice smile on their face. We ought to be amazed with that but there's a reason for it, they survived a time when most of them had the same thought of dying in the camps. Some had the frightening thought of being the last living Jew on Europe. Their testimonies are heartbreaking, very compelling, specially the ones when they can't even continue to be interviewed by the director, tears on their faces, voices almost unheard. But they go on. As one of the interviewed says: "I understand what your movie is trying to do" in the way he knows this is an important document that needs to be documented for future generations who must not be ignorant about what the Holocaust was.Secretly filmed, there's the stories told by Nazi officers and guards of how they conducted their "operations" of exterminating the Jews, how everything was carefully planed in the gas chambers, furnaces, executions, and disposing thousands of bodies. And what they have to share, almost running on a tangent, is simply the fact of they being people who were following orders, they never knew anything beforehand but they went along with the killings. Did they ever show some remorse for what they've done? Did they express some emotion while talking about executing people for no reason? No, never, not in this movie. It's interesting to see how some people with no kind of ideology can be easily guided for doing the most disgusting and vile possible acts like murdering millions of people. 9 and a half hours long but it worths all the while. I watched the whole experience, made a few minor pauses whose totality haven't reached five minutes long, since it's one of those things you don't want to get out of it. My advice to you is don't do what I did, instead, watch in the segments (after all the film is divided in three long ones). It's exhaustive, long, but never boring, never uninteresting, just a little excessive. The problems I had while watching it was some unnecessary moments involving unnecessary questions made by the director about the feelings the Poles had about the Jewish people, if they missed their presence in their life, since now most of them are living now in what used to be Jewish houses. My other problem, and I know I'm not alone in this, was the translation of questions during the first part of the film, being included instead of being edited out. Why it was a problem? First you have the question made, then it is translated, then the answer appears in the foreign language, to finally be translated. By the time we know the answer we forgot the question made. This only happened in the first segment of the documentary. The reason the director did this was in order to not be manipulative, like many documentary pieces tend to be, we have the whole thing, the real article, it's history happening in front of us. The idea is good but it doesn't work much. Much could be edited, reduced, a more straightforward picture.It's intriguing how a piece of garbage like "Triumph of the Will" in its ridiculous and racist propaganda of the Nazism is a more known film, lauded as one of the greatest films ever made, while "Shoah" is barely mentioned anywhere. The 9 hours of this amazing documentary worths more than seeing boring marches and speeches over and over again of the cult Riefensthal film. Both are important documents but "Shoah" is more than that, it's an experience that reveals not only the most horrific side of mankind but also to show how hope can survive, how strong and positive the human being can be in the most depressive and helpless of times. The experience stays with you after a long time. 9/10
soevik1983
I have always been interested in the Holocaust since i first learned about it in school, but its in the last couple of years i have been studying it to the point that i actually could consider myself an amateur holocaust scholar ( alt-ho that term somehow seems a bit non PC in this context ), so when i came across a 9+ hour documentary i was very intrigued as i find it problematic to find raw unedited books or films about the topic. The film offers a huge collection of first hand testimony of the atrocities that occurred during Nazi rule from both victims ,offenders and general witnesses. The interviews with the survivors is both gripping and chilling and gives you a better feel of the actual fear they must have felt in contrast to what certain other movies have been able to as they talk in detail about the actual specific things that took place. In this part of the film he ( Lanzmann ) does a great job, and thats because he lets them talk for themselves.... as for the offenders and gen.witnesses he fails and this is why;First off he seems to blend the two, that is he seems to be under the impression that as long as you where there and didn't do everything to stop it then you are an offender in the genocide, the most apparent and appalling examples of this is when he interviews some poor polish peasants from "hillbilly"-land , have them look into the camera and ask them ( and I'm paraphrasing ) " was the Jews that lived here rich ? " thus getting them to say a common antisemitic phrase "the Jews around here were rich" and then lets them stare into the camera unable to detect what just happened. This is also apparent when he asks them questions about what they witnessed ( usually someone living nearby the Reinhard camps ) and when they answer he has this way of responding with a subtle sarcastic manner that implies they didn't care what happened, even tho most of them actually did try to warn the people in the incoming trains and the like. About the offenders ( i think he talks to 2 or 3 ) i agree that i don't find much sympathy for them but Claude should just let them speak and not interrupt them and try to get them to break down as that has no relativity to the purpose of the film IMO. He constantly tells the ex Treblinka guard that he doesn't believe him, really ? , the guy sits there and willingly speaks of seeing Human feces in rows outside the gas chambers but he is somehow lying about other details ? that doesn't make any sense. I will say tho that when he talks to the guy who was one of the people in charge of the Warsaw ghetto that claims he didn't know anything, his disbelief is justified.My last problem with this film is that it not only doesn't mention the non-Jewish victims it seems to purposely avoid the subject. One particular scene comes to mind when a Pole tells a heart gripping story about a mom getting shot with her kid ( i cant remember detail ) outside the train and Lanzmann asks quickly, even interrupting, " was she Jewish ?". Does that matter ? She was a victim of the holocaust and she got shot with her kid but shes not worth remembering because she was a non-Jew ?I might seem very disappointed in this film but its actually not that bad. I just think Claude should have left himself out of the camera and let the people involved speak for them-self to the extent that it is possible.Great collection of very important history but , but with some serious issues
