 "Living to Tell the Story" | 2009-12-20 |
| - Reviewed By Randy Keehn from Williston, ND United States |
I have been reading and studying about the Holocaust for roughly 45 years. When I was young I couldn't understand how such a thing could occur and yet it did and on such a mammouth scale that comprehension still escapes us. I had heard about "Shoah" for anumber of years and would have watched it sooner except I could never find it on any available network or other outlet. Thus I bought my own copy and watched it over the course of a couple of months.
"Shoah" is a set of 4 DVDs that have approximately 125 "chapters" overall and a viewing time of 9 1/2 hours. It consists of a number of interviews with Holocaust survivors, witnesses and even a few participants. The series of interviews are generally in a loosely chronological order as far as the events they describe. This makes for a more orderly (if that is possible) and focused perspective. The overall cast of interviewees are somewhat limited (thanks largely to the SS and similar obstacles) yet they provide a great deal of detailed eyewitness accounts of their experiences. There are two or three German officials interviewed (one who was apparently unaware he was being recorded) and their information was also an important inclusion in the overall accounts. The interviews often took place indoors but the director used plenty of outdoor footage of the actual sites in which the events being described took place. The last part of the last DVD focuses on the Warsaw Ghetto and the subsequent uprising. The account of Simha Rottem, a survivor of the Warsaw Getto uprising, may have been the most impressive of the many soberly stunning accounts in the film.
There are some aspects of the movie that I found less absorbing than others but they were very few. I thought that the director, Claude Lanzmann, spent too much time talking to Raul Hilberg, an historian. Mr. Hilberg had some relevant things to offer but he was an outsider in a film made up of interviewers with insiders. There was also a Polish leader by the name of Jan Karski who had a real hard time getting himself up to talking about what he had witnessed in the Warsaw Ghetto. I thought that his reaction to the relatively "tame" events and observations he shared were also out of sinc with the rest of the film.
"Shoah" is essential viewing for serious students of the Holocaust. The greater monstrosities are all there as well as the day to day life and the acceptance that their survival may have been as incomprehensible as the events they survived. There were a number of times during "Shoah" when the survivor is relating his observations almost non-challantly only to come to a point where a sudden reminder of a person, a comment, or an incident emotionally overwhelms them completely. After a moment or two of sheer anguish, the speaker continues on with his account as though nothing had interrupted his "presentation". The mixture of Humanity and inhumanity is the ultimate greatness of "Shoah". |
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| "Stunning" | 2009-02-02 |
| - Reviewed By jayrayinnv |
I have a good friend who is a WWII veteran. He liberated one of the concentration camps. He has always refused to talk about what he saw there. He said he couldn't possibly put words together that would describe it. This film, with stunning simplicity, does just that. It shows us just how depraved and callous the Holocaust was, and just how easy it was for those who were not its victims to go along with it whether through indifference or malice.
This film should be required viewing for everyone, everywhere. The Holocaust is over, but similar acts are going on in the world each and every day. Seeing this film will impart a sense of alarm and urgency. If everyone saw this film the day when this insanity stops might come a little sooner.
If crying in front of other people makes you uncomfortable, then make sure you watch this alone. |
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| "A monumental examination of mankind's darkest period" | 2008-10-17 |
| - Reviewed By JfromJersey from Manalapan, NJ |
SHOAH is too exhaustive a study (9 1/2 hours in length) to be considered the definitive Holocaust documentary. In 30 minutes, NIGHT AND FOG, Resnais' searing masterpiece gives us a concise picture of that awful period with images that are etched in our minds with the psychic equivalent of a branding iron. Lanzmann's effort is not about images anyway. It is about words. Words from people who lived through the nightmare. That's not to say there aren't images here that lacerate the heart of any reasonable and compassionate human being. These images however, are not of walking skeletons, or corpses piled up and tossed into mass graves, but of people reliving moments too horrible for the brain to process rationally.
Lanzmann interviews a few Jewish workers at Chelmno, who somehow miraculously escaped the fate of all their relatives and friends in the gas vans. He interviews a barber who cut the hair of people who minutes later were gassed at Treblinka. He talks to Filip Muller, one of the Sonderkommando (special detail) at Auschwitz, a Czech Jew who had to clean out the gas chambers and cremate the bodies. He also interviews a former Nazi guard at Treblinka (who doesn't know his testimony is being recorded for posterity) as well as a former high Nazi official responsible for maintaining the Warsaw ghetto prior to it's liquidation, whose failure to take any responsibility is notable. Lanzmann talks to Greek Jews who were shipped to Auschwitz and lost families. He talks to Poles who now live in homes once owned by Jews, or who lived near Treblinka and could hear screams at night. One of the most poignant interviews is with Jan Karski, a former Polish resistance fighter and liason to the government in exile, whose job it was to spread the word of the Jewish extermination to a world that basically didn't care enough to do anything to end the slaughter before the war ended in Europe. Karski gives a heartrending account of a tour through the Warsaw ghetto. Finally, Lanzmann interviews 2 survivors of the Warsaw ghetto, resistance fighters who have the cruel memories forever etched on their faces.
SHOAH was a monumental undertaking, and it really should be used as a tool to educate young people worldwide..educate them on the depths of depravity a so called civilized society can sink to under the right conditions, and educate them on what it means to have a conscience, and live with the moral, and ethical values necessary to be considered part of the human race. |
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 "Problems with DVD" | 2008-09-19 |
| - Reviewed By An Amazon User |
Disc 1 has problems. During chapter 40 the film freezes and won't play that chapter beyond the point where it freezes unless you skip ahead to the next chapter. Haven't watched the remaining discs yet, so I'm not aware of any other problems with the other discs.
I've emailed the company to get a replacement copy and they have yet to respond.
Very frustrating especially for such a large ticket item and an amazing film. |
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| "The Banality of Evil" | 2008-08-11 |
| - Reviewed By An Amazon User |
In this carefully crafted documentary, Claude Landzman has shown all who have the willingness to listen and watch the tragic consequences of not believing ones own experience of events. Over and over the Germans, Poles, and others interviewed expressed their incredulity over what was transpiring before their very own eyes. Landzman is able to shine the light of day on the cultural anti-semitism that has become so pervasive in Europe that while it is expressed in genocide it is denied by those who witnessed, allowed and participated in it. The casual, matter of fact descriptions of the eye witness to mass murder are chilling. The attitude of the German guards, truck drivers and SS men is business-like. Over and over again the theme reverberates in the viewers mind, there were millions of people crying, screaming and then there was silence... a perfect silence. They were gone, they never were, where did they go. The Polish train engineer who had to get drunk everyday to go to work, the German Camp officer who spoke of his commander Capt. Wirth, beating his officers and men when they balked at their horrible tasks. The relish some of these people showed some forty years after the events in describing the "primitive but efficient assembly line of death" at Chelmo, Belzec and Treblinka.
The most remarkable feat of documentary cinematography is Lanzman's ability to capture the complete "normality" of these men and women. They do not fit the stereotype of the evil they perpetrated. The viewer will be amazed at the small scale of each of the murder camps and how hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were "processed" 50, 100 and 200 at a time.
This film should be required viewing for anyone who hates in the plural, who dismisses Christian, Muslim, Jew, Romany, Gay, Mentally Ill or Mentally Challenged, Communist, Socialist, as not quite human. Yesterday it was us, today it is them, tomorrow it is you. |
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| "Shoah" | 2008-06-19 |
| - Reviewed By N. Zeinelabdin |
This is the most powerful work of documentation. I doubt if much more can be said about it.
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