Overview

The film is concerned chiefly with four topics: the Chełmno extermination camp, where mobile gas vans were first used by Germans to exterminate Jews; the death camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau; and the Warsaw ghetto, with testimonies from survivors, witnesses and perpetrators.

The sections on Treblinka include testimony from Abraham Bomba, who survived as a barber;^[9] Richard Glazar, an inmate; and Franz Suchomel, an SS officer. Bomba breaks down while describing how he came across the wife and sister of a barber friend of his while cutting hair in the gas chamber.^[10] This section includes Henryk Gawkowski, who drove transport trains while intoxicated with vodka. Gawkowski's photograph appears on the poster used for the film's marketing campaign.

Testimonies on Auschwitz are provided by Rudolf Vrba, who escaped from the camp before the end of the war;^[11] and Filip Müller, who worked in an incinerator burning the bodies from the gassings. Müller recounts what prisoners said to him and describes the experience of personally going into the gas chamber: bodies were piled up by the doors "like stones". He breaks down as he recalls the prisoners starting to sing while being forced into the gas chamber. Accounts include some from local villagers, who witnessed trains heading daily to the camp and returning empty; they quickly guessed the fate of those on board.

Lanzmann also interviews bystanders. He asks whether they knew what was going on in the death camps. Their answers reveal that they did, but they justified their inaction by their fear of death. Two survivors of Chełmno are interviewed: Simon Srebnik, who was forced to sing military songs to entertain the Nazis; and Mordechaï Podchlebnik. Lanzmann also has a secretly filmed interview with Franz Schalling, a German security guard, who describes the workings of Chełmno. Walter Stier, a former Nazi bureaucrat, describes the workings of the railways. Stier insists he was simply managing railroad traffic and was not aware that he was transporting Jews directly to their deaths, though he admits to being aware that the destinations were concentration camps.

The Warsaw ghetto is described by Jan Karski, a member of the Polish Underground who worked for the Polish government-in-exile, and Franz Grassler, a Nazi administrator in Warsaw who liaised with Jewish leaders. A Christian, Karski sneaked into the Warsaw ghetto and travelled using false documents to England to try to convince the Allied governments to intervene more strongly on behalf of the Jews.^[12]

Memories from Jewish survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising conclude the documentary. Lanzmann also interviews Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, who discusses the significance of Nazi propaganda against the European Jews and the Nazi development of the Final Solution and a detailed analysis of railroad documents showing the transport routes to the death camps. The complete text of the film was published in 1985.

Franz Suchomel

Corporal Franz Suchomel, interviewed by Lanzmann in Germany on 27 April 1976, was an SS officer who had worked at Treblinka.^[13] Suchomel agreed to be interviewed for 500 Deutschmarks, but refused to be filmed, so Lanzmann used hidden recording equipment while assuring Suchomel that he would not use his name.^[14]

Suchomel talks in detail about the camp's gas chambers and the disposal of bodies. He states that he did not know about the extermination at Treblinka until he arrived there. On his first day, he says he vomited and cried after encountering trenches full of corpses, 6–7 m deep, with the earth around them moving in waves because of the gases. The smell of the bodies carried for kilometres depending on the wind, he said, but local people were scared to act in case they were sent to the work camp, Treblinka I.^{[15]: p.7–8}

He explained that from arrival at Treblinka to death in the gas chambers took 2–3 hours for a trainload of people. They would undress, the women would have their hair cut, then they would wait naked outside, including during the winter in minus 10–20 °C, until there was room in the gas chamber. Suchomel told Lanzmann that he would ask the hairdressers to slow down so that the women would not have to wait so long outside.^{[15]: p.19–20}

Compared to the size and complexity of Auschwitz, Suchomel calls Treblinka "primitive. But a well-functioning assembly line of death."^[15]: p.16

Man in the poster

The publicity poster for the film features Henryk Gawkowski, a Polish railway worker from Malkinia, who, in 1942–1943 when he was 20–21 years old,^[16] worked on the trains to Treblinka as an "assistant machinist with the right to drive the locomotive".^[17] Conducted in Poland in July 1978, the interview with Gawkowski is shown 48 minutes into the film, and is the first to present events from the victims' perspective. Lanzmann hired a steam locomotive similar to the one Gawkowski worked on and shows the tracks and a sign for Treblinka.^[18]

Gawkowski told Lanzmann that every train had a Polish driver and assistant, accompanied by German officers.^[19] What happened was not his fault, he said; had he refused to do the job, he would have been sent to a work camp. He would have killed Hitler himself had he been able to, he told Lanzmann.^[20] Lanzmann estimated that 18,000 Jews were taken to Treblinka by the trains Gawkowski worked on.^[19] Gawkowski said he had driven Polish Jews there in cargo trains in 1942, and Jews from France, Greece, Holland and Yugoslavia in passenger trains in 1943. A train carrying Jews was called a Sonderzug (special train); the "cargo" was given false papers to disguise that humans were being hauled.^[21] The Germans gave the train workers vodka as a bonus when they drove a Sonderzug; Gawkowski drank liberally to make the job bearable.^[22]

Gawkowski drove trains to the Treblinka train station and from the station into the camp itself.^[21] He said the smell of burning was unbearable as the train approached the camp.^[23] The railcars would be driven into the camp by the locomotive in three stages; as he drove one convoy into Treblinka, he would signal to the ones that were waiting by making a slashing movement across his throat. The gesture would cause chaos in those convoys, he said; passengers would try to jump out or throw their children out.^[24] Dominick LaCapra wrote that the expression on Gawkowski's face when he demonstrated the gesture for Lanzmann seemed "somewhat diabolical".^[25] Lanzmann grew to like Gawkowski over the course of the interviews, writing in 1990: "He was different from the others. I have sympathy for him because he carries a truly open wound that does not heal."^[26]

Awards

The film received numerous nominations and awards at film festivals around the world. Prominent awards included the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Non-Fiction Film in 1985,^[6] a special citation at the 1985 Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, and the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary in 1986. That year it also won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Non-Fiction Film and Best Documentary at the International Documentary Association.

Critical response

Hailed as a masterpiece by many critics, Shoah was described in The New York Times as "an epic film about the greatest evil of modern times".^[8] According to Richard Brody, François Mitterrand attended the first screening in Paris in April 1985 when he was president of France, Václav Havel watched it in prison, and Mikhail Gorbachev arranged public screenings in the Soviet Union in 1989.^[28]

In 1985, critic Roger Ebert described it as "an extraordinary film" and "one of the noblest films ever made". He wrote: "It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not political. It is an act of witness."^[33] Rotten Tomatoes shows a 100% score, based on 37 reviews, with an average rating of 9.2/10. The website's critical consensus states: "Expansive in its beauty as well as its mind-numbing horror, Shoah is a towering – and utterly singular – achievement in cinema."^[34] Metacritic reports a 99 out of 100 rating, based on four critics, indicating "universal acclaim".^[35] As of July 2019, it is the site's 20th highest-rated film, including re-releases.^[36]

Time Out and The Guardian listed Shoah as the best documentary of all time in 2016 and 2013 respectively.^[37] In a 2014 British Film Institute (BFI) Sight and Sound poll, film critics voted it second of the best documentary films of all time.^[38] In 2012 it ranked 29th and 48th respectively in the BFI's critics' and directors' polls of the greatest films of all time.^[39]

The film had detractors, however, and it was criticized in Poland.^[40] Mieczyslaw Biskupski wrote that Lanzmann's "purpose in making the film was revealed by his comments that he 'fears' Poland and that the death camps could not have been constructed in France because the 'French peasantry would not have tolerated them'".^[41] Government-run newspapers and state television criticized the film, as did numerous commentators; Jerzy Turowicz, editor of the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, called it partial and tendentious.^[42] The Socio-Cultural Association of Jews in Poland (Towarzystwo Społeczno-Kulturalne Żydów w Polsce) called it a provocation and delivered a protest letter to the French embassy in Warsaw.^[43] Foreign Minister Władysław Bartoszewski, an Auschwitz survivor and an honorary citizen of Israel, criticized Lanzmann for ignoring the thousands of Polish rescuers of Jews, focusing instead on impoverished rural Poles, allegedly selected to conform with his preconceived notions.

Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, a Jewish-Polish writer and dissident, was puzzled by Lanzmann's omission of anybody in Poland with advanced knowledge of the Holocaust.^[44] In his book Dziennik pisany nocą, Herling-Grudziński wrote that the thematic construction of Shoah allowed Lanzmann to exercise a reduction method so extreme that the plight of the non-Jewish Poles must remain a mystery to the viewer. Grudziński asked a rhetorical question in his book: "Did the Poles live in peace, quietly plowing farmers' fields with their backs turned on the long fuming chimneys of death-camp crematoria? Or, were they exterminated along with the Jews as subhuman?" According to Grudziński, Lanzmann leaves this question unanswered, but the historical evidence shows that Poles also suffered widespread massacres at the hands of the Nazis.^[44]

The American film critic Pauline Kael,^[45] whose parents were Jewish immigrants to the U.S. from Poland,^[46] called the film "a form of self-punishment", describing it in The New Yorker in 1985 as "logy and exhausting right from the start ..." "Lanzmann did all the questioning himself," she wrote, "while putting pressure on people in a discursive manner, which gave the film a deadening weight."^[47] Writing in The New Yorker in 2010, Richard Brody suggested that Kael's "misunderstandings of Shoah are so grotesque as to seem willful."^[48]