At the beginning of Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 Holocaust documentary Shoah, Szymon Srebrnik, a Polish survivor, stands on the peaceful grounds of what was once the Chełmno extermination camps and says, in bleak wonder, “No one can describe it. No one can recreate what happened here.”
Srebnik’s words serve as a kind of thesis, or statement of purpose, for the documentary (or at least for the first 150 minutes of it which I viewed.) Lanzmann spent eleven years assembling his nin- hour documentary, interviewing survivors, bystanders, and war criminals, asking careful questions about dates, times, logistics, reactions. But his goal is not really to describe or recreate the experience or the horror of the Holocaust. It is more like the opposite—to show the inability of words, or images, or imagination, to make the experience and the horror present. The documentary documents, at great length and with meticulous sadness, its own absence, which is also the absence of meaning, and of those who were killed.
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No images, no words
Shoah is composed almost entirely of interviews. There are no reenactments. But there are also no photographs from the period; no audio or period radio broadcasts; no quotations from letters or memoirs written by people at the time. This is not a Ken Burns series which tries to give you a flavor of the period or puts you in the moment. You are trapped, with Lanzmann and his interviewees, relentlessly in the aftermath; there is no going backwards. What has happened has happened and cannot be recaptured.
Instead of images from then, the visuals focus on the camps in his own now of the early 80s. The camera pans across empty fields, follows abandoned railroad tracks, gazes at quiet woods. Polish men stand and gesture to show where Jewish people disembarked, or walk Lanzmann and his translator into the former grounds, showing exactly where the border used to be. One survivor, Filip Müller, describes the Auschwitz crematoria while the camera moves through the empty but still standing building. The main impression is that the gas chamber is much smaller than you might imagine, and that there is nobody there.
The film visuals refuse to show you the past. The words are similarly alienating. Interviews are conducted in English, German, French, and Polish; almost anyone watching is going to face a language barrier at some point, and there is no voice-over translation, only subtitles. Lanzmann himself does not speak Polish, and you hear him interacting with the interpreter; her words are translated on screen, rather than the words of the Poles who are speaking, so there are substantial stretches where you are simply watching someone speak who you cannot understand, waiting for someone to tell you what they mean.
Those meanings are also contested and uncertain. Lanzmann clearly doubts the testimony of some of his sources. Did some wealthy foreign Jews shipped to Treblinka actually travel in luxury passenger cars rather than cattle cars, as some Polish informants insist? Did Poles risk their lives to give water to Jewish people on the trains? When Poles drew their fingers across their throats, signaling to Jewish peopel on the trains, were they trying to warn them of their fate or were they mocking them? Did Germans guards actually weep at the fate of those they were murdering, as Nazi guard and convicted war criminal Franz Suchomel claims?
There is no omniscient narrative voice to answer those questions; you simply have to weigh motive and evidence as best you can. The Nazis killed most witnesses, and many of those who remain have a vested interest in not telling you the whole truth about the crimes in which they were implicated. The truths the victims could tell died with them; they can not be recuperated.
What is not there
Jacques Derrida, a French Jew, like Lanzmann, is a philosopher whose (post-Holocaust) work breaks apart the logic of representation and presence. In his inquisition into the meaning-making of writing, he argues that writing is defined by the absence of the writer and the reader from each other and themselves.
To write is to produce a mark … which my future disappearance will not in principle, hinder in its functioning… . For a writing to be a writing it must continue to ‘act’ and to be readable even when what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written… . The situation of the writer is, concerning the written text, basically the same as that of the reader.
Or to put it another way, writing (or film) assumes, and is built upon, the distance between writer and reader; the whole point of writing is that when you write, what you write can be read by someone who is not there. Writing communicates even when writer and reader are apart, which means it communicates also when the writer is dead.
Writing in one sense makes writer and reader present to each other; here I am, Noah Berlatsky, right now, speaking to you. But in another sense, the writing presupposes the absence of the writer; what writing says is that I, Noah Berlatsky, am not here. In writing, in film, presence is always absence; absence is present. Representation is always representation of the dead.
Holocaust Hollywood films like Schindler’s List are obsessed with bridging this gap—with overwriting absence with presence, and making the Holocaust live. That means bringing the dead to life and insisting on their ongoing existence in the world.
This is why Hollywood gentile savior Holocaust films always end with a list of the number of the saved, and an insistence that those survivals outweigh and out-mean the 6 million dead. Representation is salvation is breathing next to you; you are there in the past as the black-and-white images show you the ghetto being cleared, and you are here in the present with the survivors in full color brightness putting stones on Schindler’s memorial in Israel. The movies present themselves as an unmediated experience of presence which means, often quite explicitly, that the dead are not dead, but are risen to be with you and to thank you for saving them.
Lanzmann, quite rightly, thinks that this assertion that the dead of the Shoah are not dead is morally and aesthetically despicable. Shoah’s refusal of representation is a statement about the impossibility of describing or recreating the Holocaust. But it is also a way to honor the dead by treating their death as having moral weight. “Everything I refrained from showing in Shoah is shown in Spielberg,” Lanzmann writes in his devastating critique of Schindler’s List. And he adds, “Shoah is a film about death, not about survival.”
In Shoah, you do not see the Jews who were killed because the Nazis engineered their erasure, both from the present and from the past. Their absence is the tragedy of the Shoah, and that tragedy cannot be healed by film or by words or by representation. It can only be not said and not shown.