Shoah

by Claude Lanzmann

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.

Genres: History, Holocaust, Nonfiction, Film, Politics, War, Germany

288 pages, Pocket Book

First published June 12, 1985

About the author

Claude Lanzmann is a French filmmaker and professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. He was the brother of writer Jacques Lanzmann.

Reviews

[Rainer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Das lässt mich lange nicht mehr los. Das Buch umfasst den vollständigen Text des französischen Dokumentarfilms SHOAH aus dem Jahr 1985 von Claude Lanzmann. Der Film zeigt Lanzmanns Interviews mit Überlebenden und Tätern des Holocaust. Es geht um die Vernichtungslager Chełmno, Treblinka und Auschwitz-Birkenau und das Warschauer Ghetto. Der 9 Stunden lange FiIm ist auf YT verfügbar. Nach der Lektüre habe ich mir einige Stellen dort noch einmal angesehen. Wie ein Psychoanalytiker bittet er die Zeitzeugen sich nicht bloß zu erinnern, sondern fragt beharrlich nach wie bei einer Zeugensvernehmnung. Das ist sehr eindringlich. Lanzmann sagt in einem im Buch abgedruckten Interview: "Ich habe sachliche Fachgespräche mit Ihnen geführt, über das Wie der Dinge, und stellte präzise Fragen. So konnten sie mir nicht entkommen. Sie sind es , die von Moral sprechen, nicht ich. Wenn sie mir Entschuldigungen oder Ausreden auftischen wollten sagte ich immer, das interessiere mich nicht. [...]" Das ist so anders als modernes Dokutainment, auch deshalb empfehlenswert.

[Dolceluna ♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Film documentario di oltre 6 ore sugli orrori della Shoah, gli orrori veri. Dimenticate film basati su storie immaginate seppur plausibili, dimenticate l'immaginabile. "Shoah" di Lanzmann è storia, è realtà, cercata, vissuta, testata su campo. In un vero e proprio viaggio-orrore Lanzmann si è recato sui luoghi, tanti dei luoghi, che sono stati teatro dei crimini della Shoah perpetrati durante la seconda guerra mondiale, campi di concentramento e sterminio, città, locali, stazioni, e ha interrogato testimoni, superstiti, carnefici, spettatori al fine di avere risposte che forse, fino in fondo, non è riuscito nemmeno ad avere. Ne deriva un insieme di testimonianze a volte scioccanti, come quella di uno dei carnefici che ora lavora in una birreria in Germania e rifugge alle telecamere di Lanzmann e quella di uno dei tanti ferrovieri che guidava uno dei "treni della morte". Ma Lanzmann non si ferma, chide, si informa, cerca, disturba, con una sete e una curiosità implacabili.
Devo essere onesta, ho letto e visto molto sull'Olocausto e so che molti considerano quest'opera imprescindibile e fondamentale....personalmente la ritengo molto importante e di grande valore ma forse dal ritmo a tratti un po' lento e pesante da seguire. Di sicuro va spezzata in più parti, anche per essere digerita meglio.

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I've seen the film a few times, I'm glad to have read the complete text. Watching the film and seeing the survivors and the perpertrators speak to the director about what they witnessed gives the viewer one type of experience. Having the words right there in front of you gives you another. You read the lines over and over again because you can't believe what you just read. A line that I will never forget comes from Itzhak Zuckerman, second-in-command of the Jewish Combat Organization, a resistance group in the Warsaw ghetto. He says, "Claude, you asked for my impression. If you could lick my heart, it would poison you."

[Oliver Shrouder · Rating 5 out of 5]

May be the most important, pertinent, harrowing, essential book on the Holocaust I've read - in freeing itself of context and historiography, it places the events completely in the hands of the victims as well as the perpetrators - through this lens we learn so much more about the events from a human level, and the economy of the author to pick these moments from hundreds of hours of testimony is magisterial. Structured almost poetically, the text has a holistic weight that only increases as it continues, ending with a sequence on the Warsaw Ghettos and its uprising, just as the horrors of the text begin.

It might be odd to review the transcripts of the documentary this way - but with the voices placed in isolation we are left to read in silence, picture the events in silence, and experience these testimonies in isolation - naturally the documentary does this too, but the words (and how they manifest in our heads as we read them) are what allows the Holocaust to be witnessed today as memory and history

[Dariusz Gzyra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dziwnie dawać gwiazdki w takim przypadku. Trafiłem na tę książkę przypadkiem, szukając w bibliotece innych rzeczy związanych z Zagładą. Nie wiedziałem, że poza filmem jest jeszcze zapis dialogów w postaci osobnej publikacji. Te teksty robią piorunujące wrażenie. Ze względu na sposób złożenia tekstu całość przypomina poemat. Na dodatek autorem przekładu jest Marek Bieńczyk. A całość wydała na początku lat 90. koszalińska oficyna wydawnicza, którą można kojarzyć głównie z wydawniczym chłamem w rodzaju kilkutomowej serii "Najlepsze polskie dowcipy".

[Virginie Dolléans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ne jamais oublier !

[Daria · Rating 5 out of 5]

the HORROR of it

[Eva-Marie Nevarez · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm still trying to figure out how a 9+ hour movie translates into a -200 page book with double and sometimes triple spacing, not to mention a few photos. I don't normally read texts of films though so maybe there's something I don't know.
I borrowed this from my library because everywhere I looked the DVD cost hundreds of dollars. My library didn't have it, my DVD swapping site didn't have it, NetFlix didn't have it, I started to think I'd never see it. Then I had the bright idea to check eBay. Or, well, actually, a friend told me to. And it was there, my region, for cheap.
I haven't watched the film yet so I can't speak on that.
This is most definitely worth reading in my opinion, if only because it's handled differently here.
Raul Hilberg talks about the progression of hate, on pages 71-72 and it stuck with me. He said, "...from the fourth century, the sixth century, the missionaries of Christianity had said in effect to the Jews: 'You may not live among us as Jews.' The secular rulers who followed them from the late Middle Ages then decided, 'You may not live among us.' The Nazis finally decreed, 'You may not live.'" Conversion, expulsion, death.
I found (Dr.) Franz Grassler's testimony the most intriguing. Grassler was the deputy to Dr. Auerswald, Nazi commissioner of the Warsaw ghetto. His words seem so glib. So 'it's over, it didn't effect me to any harsh decree, why must we talk about it.' It's disgusting and fascinating.
I look forward to seeing the film but as it's so long I have to not rush. I hope to get to it soon but just knowing it's here in my possession makes it easier to wait until I really have the time alone to devote to it.

[Júlia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aquest llibre és la transcripció dels diàlegs del documental "Shoah" de Claude Lanzmann (1985). Tot i notar a vegades que hi ha un element visual que falta —hi ha elements en pantalla que no es descriuen a la pàgina—, és una lectura important i molt recomanada.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haven't seen the movie. Book is rather shocking, distrubing, and engrossing.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow...its a very haunting reading about their experiences they went through the holocaust.

[Reece · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have not watched the film, Shoah. This was a bit more self-contained, as Lanzmann’s introduction makes clear it might very well be, regardless of having seen the documentary or not, given the brutal nature of reading which lends to our subsummation of preceding words by those which follow. In fact, without a face to attach to the names, I commonly ran back and forth to the first instance of a witness’s name in order to properly recall what their role was, which camp they came from and when, or which of the Nazi officers or camp workers was being referred to. And it provoked me to feel more sensitively than I naturally do towards literature – I did my best to recreate the rhythm of speech within my mind of those who spoke, as reasonably as I saw fit. And perhaps that is a limitation of literature: our not being able to properly attach unique and living faces and voices to each and every instance of humanity within what we read. Central to any work is the human spirit, and this always feels to be more poignant when reading on the brutalities of war, disenfranchisement, enslavement, and genocide – I so strongly desire to rehumanize these voices and to see them. I want to see them not just as words, or as limited within my own head by my language, but as flesh and bone. It’s gravely upsetting, disgusting, and depressing. The singular phenomenon of optimized and efficient mass slaughter is utterly unimaginable – our curiosity is piqued by the imagery of the gas vans, the floors and roads caked in inches by the excrement and blood of its victims, and the guttural scream which scorches unto silence, precluding the death of millions. We do our best to see it, but it is totally alien. Perhaps, at most, I can conceptualize the killing of a room of people – something like 30-50 bodies on the floor, at maximum. But to think to oneself of 12-foot pits filled with the bodies of naked men, women, and children is an exercise in impossibility. The thousands fit into gas chambers every day, who later fell out of the doors like pallets that had been leaning up against a support beam which had been removed. May I never forget the names of Simon Srebnik and Rudolf Vrba.

To contemplate is a privilege, and perhaps this rings so well given the current state of the Israeli state’s slaughter of Palestinians. I wonder how many Palestinians echoed those voices of the Jewish, who knew what was going to happen to them as the Germans feigned a defense of ignorance, coated by the blood their power has shed. Bushnell sure knew that contemplation was a privilege, and he himself relinquished it. And no one can truly know, especially upon the same week that such a thing happens, what impact it may have. And perhaps we ourselves who, similarly to the Germans within this work, felt powerless to do anything only because we ourselves have never actually been deprived of our privilege and comfort which we claim are not forms of power. What weighs on our minds today, and what will weigh on them tomorrow? Though even then, tomorrow is a privilege which those in Rafeh cannot be afforded with great certainty or security.

One does not escape from these struggles in reading Shoah, and that lends to what makes it so utterly necessary.

[Stephen Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in conjunction with viewing the nine hour film, in several sittings over a period of a couple weeks. I would recommend watching the film first, although I can't say what effect the book might have on its own. The five stars are for the movie, technically, although the book serves as a useful supplement. But it's the documentary that is the masterpiece.

Of all the different ways in which I've been exposed to the Holocaust--at least two in-person guest lectures from survivors, dozens of movies like Schindler's List and Life is Beautiful, documentaries like Night and Fog, memoirs like Night and Survival in Auschwitz, fictionalized books like Kaddish for a Child Unborn, history classes, at least two Holocaust museums, photographs, and even the graphic novel Maus--this is the first thing that made it startlingly clear to me that the Holocaust happened in this exact same, normal world that we're living in. A world where people wear Hawaiian shirts, where children sometimes walk alongside their bicycles, and where old men pay to get haircuts. A world where people are overworked and complain about their jobs, where not having a flush toilet in your home can seem appallingly primitive, and where children under four can ride trains for free. A world with railroads and moving vans and travel agencies and typewriters. The grass was green at Auschwitz in the summertime, then and now, a living body exposed to exhaust fumes will suffocate, and a dead body exposed to ash will turn to flames.

An unprecedented and devastatingly horrible thing happened, but it happened among trees and highways and very boring looking people who just wanted to keep on doing their jobs without worrying too much about the world outside of themselves.

[Jack Markman · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Simone De Beauvoir's review of the documentary film of which this is the transcript, she says the following:

"Shoah is not an easy film to talk about. 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."

Comfortably settled in my industrial state-funded public schooling and enlightened higher education, sometimes I feel like I understand the nature of the Holocaust and the atrocities of which humans are capable. Then I pick up a book and am made to sit down. "We have understood nothing." This is one of those books.

I have not yet committed to watching the full 9-hour documentary film, but I can confidently say that the transcript provides a hauntingly effective reflection. The spare text, feeling as it does incomplete, has a cold brutalism that works (I can only imagine) as a fitting and powerful companion to the film. What was done imperfectly by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem reaches its ethical and aesthetic zenith with this documentary. This is not a text solely focused on the philosophical "banality of evil;" it is a reflection on the banality of it all - the indifference, the bureaucracy, the suffering, the bodies, and death.

Simone de Veauvoir again, at the end of her review:

"In my view the end of the film is wonderful. One of the very few survivors of the ghetto uprising stands alone among its ruins. He says he experienced a kind of tranquility as he thought, 'I'm the last of the Jews and I'm waiting for the Germans.' And the film immediately cuts to a train hurrying another consignment to the camps."

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I appreciated about this book was its honesty about its own advantages and limitations. The introduction sets out that this is a record of the subtitles for the 9 1/2 hour feature film of the same name, and as such is diminished in the scope and impact it can provide. And this is true. Divorced from the imagery of the places, people, and things that are described by interviewees, some of the magic is certainly missing from the telling of this tale. But, at the same time, as the introduction mentions, the bare reality of the words on the page strikes at the mundane core of evil that pervades documents and documentaries about the Holocaust. The preface reminds us that we will hear the same stories told over and over again, and that this is not to bore us but to get us to understand that this happened, it was real, it was experienced in the same way by many people in a variety of places, and it matters that this was so. The film and the book, Shoah, revel in the fact that telling people about the realities of the Holocaust should not be about surprising people or pandering to their curiosities about the tragedy, but ought to hit people with the reality of it in sometimes as simple a manner as possible.

In the end, then, this book is a perfect example of the distinctions of form and function in various artforms. It lacks the magic of the beautiful imagery of its accompanying documentary, but manages to accomplish similar aims in its own format.

[rossygram_ · Rating 5 out of 5]

(5/5)
•
«Shoah» en hebreo significa catástrofe, desastre. Y se usa de forma común para referirse al Holocausto judío.

Claude Lanzmann estrenó en 1985 «Shoah», un documental de más de 9 horas sobre el exterminio judío en Europa a manos de los nazis. Y este libro, con el mismo título, contiene el texto íntegro de ese documental.

Hay testimonios de supervivientes, de algún SS, de habitantes vecinos a los distintos campos de concentración y exterminio, de algún trabajador de las estaciones de los trenes usados para transportar judíos, de historiadores…

Todo es desgarrador. Triste. Inhumano. Y, por desgracia, verdad e historia.
•
¿Qué encontraréis en este libro? Un viaje a la barbarie y el horror.
•
Erratas encontradas: 39 (¡psicoanalista ven a mí!).
•
FRASES SUBRAYADAS:
➰«La continuidad es la única salvación».
•
#LeoYComparto #bookish #DimeUnLibro #bookaholic #booklover #instalibros #bookworm #bookstagram #libros #BlogLoQueLeo #GalaxiaGutenberg #Holocausto #SegundaGuerraMundial
•
#Shoah @galaxia_gutenberg #ClaudeLanzmann // Traducción: #FedericoDeCarlosOtto // #ColecciónNarrativa

[Loocuh Frayshure · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost completely supplants the film for one reason: This entirely circumvents the IMMENSE waste of time of listening to someone talk at length and then a translator real-time trying to translate it. For something this important, I don’t want that shit. I want everything precise and measured. Nine and a half hours? This can be done in less than 3.

Essential reading. Hard to not consistently compare things being said in this to other genocides, particularly Israel’s genocide in Palestine. The text ends with a Warsaw ghetto freedom fighter describing moving around all the bodies into packed shelters—ring a bell? Sure did for me.

If you want to save yourself the frustration of dealing w/Lanzmann’s horrid cinematic choices, pick this up instead.

[Nathan Kabara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the information in this book is extremely important and it was interesting to see it presented in the format of different interviews. With that being said, the format made it a little difficult to understand because the organization of the interviews was not very clear. However, as I said this is very important information for everyone! I have never really taken the time to think about the German or Polish point of view and it was horrifying to hear so many Nazi leaders deny the fact that they knew Jews were getting murdered.

[Hilary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a text of the movie which I have not yet seen. It is shocking, horrific, and inhuman at times. It is hard to believe the nazis who were interviewed could take such a blase attitude about murder and death. I guess after seeing it day in and day out, one becomes immune. How people could do this to others simply because they were different than you is, unfortunately, something that our current president ran his campaign on and won. Be afraid, be very afraid.

[Wiebke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brutal, honest - no filter. You need a thick thin to read this book but it’s a must read. Pure Eyewitness accounts - one after another. It opened my eyes to the fact that even though I thought I did, I didn’t know the true extend of the holocaust’s evil. Moreover, it emphasizes the fact that non-Jewish people living close to the KZs knew more than they cared to admit.

[Barbara Q · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with all information about the Holocaust, this book (and film) bears witness. Not one single person should ever ever forget the human capacity for evil and how one man can seduce other powerful and intelligent men and women to follow him and enable his wicked ways.

[Lisbeth Sundman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know if I had managed to read this book if I hadn't seen the film. It's not literature, it's only the testimonies from the people that are interviewed in the film. Still, it's an unbearable, uncomprehensible historical document over the nazis terrible cruelty

[Jarrod Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important and necessary read, but obviously a difficult one.

I've seen portions of the documentary, but the text has made it easier for me to digest this oral history at my own pace. Some of the accounts are truly harrowing, but it's something I feel everyone should read.

[S1990 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't seen the docu (yet) but just reading what is told, is so so impressive! I just have no words for it, only respectfull silence

[Terri Vargas · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's one of those books that you're shocked and appalled by the abuse of human beings and the things these individuals went through. A classic.

[Q A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each year feel more of a connection between myself and the Jews at that time.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great documentary account

[Margaret · Rating 3 out of 5]

Without the pictures, the voices, the facial expressions this story is not nearly as compelling

[Francesca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Libro di dialoghi trascritti dai sottotitoli dei film di Claude Lanzmann.
Un'opera di testimonianze fondamentali.

(Essenziale, e crepacuore.)

[Jenny Wiley]

Very interesting read. Also hard to read due to subject matter