Shoah: The Complete Text Of The Acclaimed Holocaust Film

Shoah: The Complete Text Of The Acclaimed Holocaust Film
by Claude Lanzmann

Shoah: The Complete Text Of The Acclaimed Holocaust Film
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Book Summary Information

Author: Claude Lanzmann
Introduction: Simone de Beauvoir
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1995-08-21
ISBN: 0306806657
Number of pages: 196
Publisher: Da Capo Press
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Book Reviews of Shoah: The Complete Text Of The Acclaimed Holocaust Film

Book Review: Broad-Based but Rather Superficial: Corrections Provided
Summary: 2 Stars

This book includes interviews with Jewish sonderkommando survivors of Auschwitz, Polish peasants, Jan Karski (the legendary Polish Underground courier who tried in vain to warn the world about the Holocaust), Holocaust historian Raul Hillberg, a German official at Treblinka, and others.

Lanzmann should have examined fewer topics, and done so more thoroughly and objectively. He used only 9.5 hours out of 350 hours of taping, making one wonder what he left out. His work comes across as anti-Polish. Students of the Holocaust deserve better, and I now provide some context, a few of the necessary corrections, and links for further study from solely Jewish sources. From there, read my reviews.

The Polish peasants interviewed by Lanzmann exhibit a "Jews owned everything" mindset. (pp. 89-90). In fact, there were many wealthy Jews and, even with the formal and informal discriminatory policies enacted to reverse Jewish economic dominance, the average Jew remained wealthier than the average Pole. See Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919-1939 (Studies in the social sciences). In Poland, most peasants lived in poverty, and were stuck in it because the next-higher economic niche (the shopkeepers, tailors, shoemakers, etc.) was largely pre-occupied by Jews. This, rather than simple prejudice against or jealousy of Jewish successes, explains frequent Polish peasant resentments against Jews. Also, the employer-employee, buyer-seller, and lender-borrower relations are partly adversarial ones. When there are different ethno-religious groups on each side of the divide, this will naturally generate frictions between groups.

One interviewed German tries to relativize German conduct. (pp. 182-183). In fact, despite the fact that anti-Semitism existed in countless nations since time immemorial, it was only in Germany (Haman excepted) that it ever developed into a never-before-seen effort to exterminate the Jews. Also, the sources and course of anti-Jewish policies in pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany, and those in prewar Poland, were entirely different. See The Jewish war front.

Poles are portrayed as generally laughing at Jewish deaths (p. 31) and mocking Jews with the you-will-die gesture. (p. 34). Against both misrepresentations, see Am I A Murderer?: Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman.

As for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the conduct of the Polish Blue Police is incorrectly conflated with that of the collaborationist Ukrainian police. For the truth, see Martyrs and Fighters. Also, mention is made of some Poles turning-in Jews who had fled after the Uprising (p. 198), but not the circumstances behind it. Besides imposing the automatic death penalty for the slightest assistance to individual Jews, the Germans had created draconian collective terror against the Polish population of Warsaw for any semblance of assistance to, or connection with, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Some Poles made life-or-death decisions to turn Jews in rather than risk large groups of Poles shot by the Germans in reprisal for the Germans killed by Jews during the Uprising. See Muranowska 7: The Warsaw ghetto rising.

Finally, Lanzmann's analysis is so Judeocentric that it is completely sanitized of any reference to Polish suffering. Did you know that Poles lived in daily fear of their lives, under near-starvation conditions, during the German occupation? Did you know that 3 million Polish gentiles (including about half of all educated Poles) were murdered by the Germans? There's much more: See the Peczkis Listmania: FORGOTTEN HOLOCAUST...

For further analysis of Lanzmann, please click on Claude Lanzmann's Shoah: Key Essays (Casebooks in Criticism)

Summary of Shoah: The Complete Text Of The Acclaimed Holocaust Film

A nine-and-a-half-hour documentary on the Nazi extermination camps, Shoah (the Hebrew word for "Holocaust") was internationally hailed as a masterpiece upon its release in 1985. Shunning any re-creation, archival footage, or visual documentation of the events, filmmaker Claude Lanzmann relied on the words of witnesses-Jewish, Polish, and German-to describe in ruthless detail the bureaucratic machinery of the Final Solution, so that the remote experiences of the Holocaust became fresh and immediate. This book presents in an accessible and vivid format the testimony of survivors, participants, witnesses, and scholars. This tenth anniversary edition, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the camps, is newly revised and corrected in order to more accurately present the actual testimony of those interviewed. Shoah is an unparalleled oral history of the Holocaust, an intensely readable journey through the twentieth century's greatest horror.

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