|
THE CURRENT
CINEMA
LOOK AGAIN
"Shoah"
and a new view of history.
BY DAVID
DENBY
Claude
Lanzmann's "Shoah," the shattering nine-hour documentary about the
Holocaust, which was first shown in New York in 1985, has, on its
twenty-fifth
anniversary, reopened here and will soon appear in museums,
universities, and
select theatres across the country. Back in 1985, the film left me
bruised and
sore, moved by its clarifying passions and its electrifying rhetoric,
and
amazed by its revolutionary form. Lanzmann, a French filmmaker and
intellectual
journalist, omitted photographs, newsreels, and documents (all the
usual
historical materials), and, instead, reconstructed the past from what
remained
of it in the present. He used the testimony of three groups of people:
saviors
of the death camps in Poland, most of them Jews who worked for the
Nazis and
either escaped or outlived the camps at the end of the war; Nazi guards
and
functionaries; and Polish witnesses, some of them farmers living near
the camps
who respond to memory with a bemused shrug and a few smiles, others
villagers
who make typical anti-Semitic remarks. And Lanzmann filmed, with
obsessive
precision and poetic eloquence, the physical remnants, the trains,
tracks, and
roads that conveyed prisoners to Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz-
Birkenau-camps that the Poles left standing, half as memorial sites and
half as
cursed and loathsome wastelands, and whose environs and interiors he
crosses
and crisscrosses. All this was fascinating, but I wondered whether
seeing
"Shoah" again could teach audiences anything new. And was there not a
possible moral danger in fascination-the habit of returning to the
Jewish catastrophe
over and over for an emotional workout without receiving further
illumination
from it?
There is,
however, a startling new interpretation of the period which makes
another
viewing of "Shoah" necessary not as an immersion in sorrows but as a
fresh experience. A few months ago, Timothy Snyder, a professor of
history at
Yale, brought out a stunning book called "Bloodlands: Europe Between
Hitler and Stalin" (Basic; $29.95), which chronicles not just the
Holocaust but also the many mass killings perpetrated during the years
1933 to
1945 by both the Nazis and the Soviets, especially in eastern Poland,
the
Baltic states, and areas nominally within the Soviet Union, such as
Ukraine and
Belarus. Parts or all of this vast territory were stormed by armies and
occupied no less than three times: first, by the Red Army, after the
Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 in effect ceded eastern Poland and the
Baltic states
to the Soviet Union; then, beginning in June, 1941, by the German
attack on the
same lands, an assault by three million men which subsequently advanced
deep
into the Soviet Union; and then, of course, by the Soviet counterattack
and
"liberation," which expelled the Germans from the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe in 1944 and 1945. Each army was accompanied by killing
units:
the Nazis by S.S. death squads, German "security police," and local
thugs who were recruited, or intimidated, into doing their part; the
Soviets by
the secret police-the N.K.V.D..which, in 1939 (and after), continued
the mass
exterminations begun on Stalin’s orders in the early thirties, when
five and a
half million people, most of them in Ukraine, were starved to death. In
all,
from 1933 to 1945, fourteen million noncombatants died in what Snyder
calls the
"bloodlands."
As Snyder
demonstrates, the Nazis and the Soviets may have been trying to destroy
each
other in the ferocious combat of1941 to 1945, but, if one looks at the
entire
thirteen-year period that he describes, the two totalitarian powers
occasionally acted in a kind of weird concert, in which each side
emboldened or
even enabled the other. For instance, when the Soviets murdered
twenty-two
thousand Polish reserve officers in the Katyn forest, in 1940, they
were mirroring
the German slaughter of the Polish professional classes in German-
occupied
western Poland. And when the Polish Home Army revolted against the
Germans in
occupied Warsaw, in 1944, the Soviets, who had encouraged the uprising,
fought
and defeated the Ger mans outside the city but then waited for months
as the
Nazis crushed the Poles inside it. When the Soviets finally entered
Warsaw,
they not only routed the Germans but, with the help of Polish
Communists,
suppressed the surviving anti-Nazis, thereby finishing the job of
subduing the
spirit of Polish independence. Without diminishing in any way the
Jewish
Holocaust, Snyder insists that it should not be seen as separate from
the many
other mass slaughters of civilians-the millions of Poles, Belarusians,
Balts,
and Ukrainians killed for political or ideological reasons, or merely
because
they were an encumbrance that needed to be cleared away to make space
for
German or Soviet occupancy.
That kind of
large-scale historical account is certainly not what Lanzmann intended.
"Shoah" is solely about the war against the Jews. It is, in fact,
devoted
to one aspect of that war-the transportation of Jews from various
corners of
Europe to the extermination centers in Poland and the killings by gas,
first at
Chelmno, where mobile vans were used, and then at Treblinka, Sobibor,
and
Auschwitz-Birkenau, with their gas chambers and crematoriums. From
Lanzmann's
movie, you would not know that by the time of the Wannsee Conference,
in
Berlin, in January, 1942, in which the Final Solution was openly
plotted by the
S.S., perhaps a million Jews had already been killed, mainly by
shootings in
the places where they lived, the bodies dumped into pits and buried.
Roughly as
many Jews were killed by bullets as by gas in the Holocaust, a fact not
widely
known to this day. Certainly, we need to know everything, understand
everything, feel everything. Snyder's book, by making an original
account of
the period in copious detail laid out in sombrely blunt declarative
sentences,
should expand these three faculties in anyone who engages its grim but
lucid
exposition. His point about the Jewish tragedy, as I understand it, is
that you
can't get the Holocaust straight if you don t get the entire history of
the
period straight.
What he
doesn't emphasize (he says it in passing) is that Hitler's war against
the Jews
was an attempt to eliminate an entire people--to efface their identity
altogether-whereas
Stalin's campaign against, say, Ukraine was an attempt to eliminate not
all
Ukrainians but those who conceivably might resist collectivization and
the
triumph of Communism. But it serves no purpose to get into a
competition of
horrors, or a competition of chroniclers. Snyder is a historian, and
Lanzmann
an artist; they are doing different things. Watching "Shoah" again, I
recognized, with Snyder's help, the specialized nature of what it
establishes,
but its force was not lessened. By relying on the testimony of
participants,
Lanzmann brought the past into the present-the eternal present, renewed
in the
act of existential re-creation before the camera. The Nazis offer
themselves
sometimes hesitatingly, sometimes proudly, with coy avowals of pity for
the
Jews, or with outrageous pity for themselves as overworked
executioners; the
survivors speak with hallucinatory vividness. One of them, Filip
Muller, a
Slovak Jew, was twenty when he was a member of a special work detail at
Auschwitz. He describes the layout of the gas chamber; at the same
time, Lanzmann's
camera, as if entering Hell itself, moves in flickering light through
the
chamber. In a second narrative, devoted to his time down the road at
Birkenau,
Muller describes his desolation when a group of Czechs, who had been
kept alive
for some months, suddenly faced death, and Muller, no longer able to
bear what
he was doing (clearing out and burning the bodies), joined them in the
chamber,
only to be told by several of the women about to die that he had to
survive and
tell the world what he had seen. Muller's two stories, in their
precision and
their melding of horror and emotional saturation, are beyond anything
that
fiction has given us in the cinema.
Again and
again, Lanzmann goes into Birkenau, filming with his camera on the
track,
passing first through the entrance-a squared-off opening in a long
horizontal
building-and then stopping at the ramp, where the passengers were
unloaded.
This is a visionary film that stubbornly traverses the ground. In
Pauline Kaers
almost comically obtuse negative review of the movie, published in this
magazine, she said of Lanzmann that "the heart of his obsession appears
to
be to show you that the Gentiles will do it again to the Jews if they
get the
chance." But the notion that the Holocaust might happen again is
exactly
what "Shoah" is not about. It's about the enormity of its happening
once. "Shoah" is a topographic work. Where, specifically, did the
trains stop at Sobibor? How many feet was it to the entrance to the
camp?
Sobibor is now just a scraggly field, but Lanzmann measures the
distance, paces
it off He doesn't ask how morality could have accommodated the
Holocaust. He
asks how reality could have accommodated it. Far from being a limited
work,
"Shoah' becomes an enraged metaphysical protest against the nature of
existence itself +
THE NEW
YORKER, JANUARY 10, 2011
|