Should you watch Shoah?
Who it’s good for, who it isn’t, and what’s in it. No ratings, no scores.
Shoah
Documentary · 1985
Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single frame of archival footage. Dividing Holocaust witnesses into three categories – survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators – Lanzmann presents testimonies from survivors of the Chelmno concentration camp, an Auschwitz escapee, and witnesses of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as well as a chilling report of gas chambers from an SS officer at Treblinka.
The sides of Shoah
- Survivors, bystanders and perpetrators interviewed
- The sites of the camps filmed decades later
- No archive footage at all
Shoah is good for you if…
- you want the Holocaust told by those who were there.
- you can sit with long silences and slow train journeys.
- you can be moved to tears by a barber breaking down as he recalls Treblinka.
Shoah is bad for you if…
- you can't give more than nine hours to one film.
- you won't read subtitles, and the film moves between many languages.
- you can't hear first-hand accounts of mass murder.
About: memory · testimony · genocide
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