About Shoah
Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) is a monumental film about the Holocaust – a montage of interviews with survivors, witnesses and perpetrators cut with shots of landscapes, buildings, and railroad cars at sites of mass extermination.
Interviewees relive traumatic wartime events, some of them travel back to death camps.
Lanzmann reenacts encounters with the past: rents a train for a retired driver from Małkinia, takes a survivor of the Kulmhof camp on a boat on the river Ner, and asks Poles in Treblinka to repeat a gesture warning Jews about their imminent deaths. Using the outtakes Lanzmann edited four other films. A digitized collection of outtakes can be accessed online with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.