Shoah

Shoah

The number of people that lived through the Second World War and the Holocaust dwindles significantly every day. Shoah--a Hebrew word variously translated as annihilation, cataclysm, chaos, or catastrophe--approached the tragedy of the Holocaust in a new and novel way: no archival footage, no newsreels, no black and white still photographs. There are instead interviews with ordinary people speaking in ordinary voices of days that had become ordinary to them: Jewish survivors, former Nazis, Polish peasants, American scholars, and others. Each person describes details which are woven together to present a Holocaust much larger and much more complicated than a viewer could begin to imagine. It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not political. It is an act of witness.

LANZMANN, Claude

1985

DVD

Documentary (D)

S56 1985 DVD

566 mins