Customer Reviews

Shoah

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I saw Shoah on PBS around the mid-80's and have never forgotten the experience. The documentary was shown in weekly installments. At first, I was just curious, but then I was drawn by the powerful testimony I was witnessing. I remember that while watching the last installments, I was weeping over the depravity and evil that was discussed by the aged survivors. At that time I was a Staff Sergeant with 15 years military service. We are tempted to turn away from the horrendous images and ignore the Holocaust as an anomaly or as something best left in the past. We want to move on. But listening to the stories and watching the faces of the survivors I knew that I must listen very carefully. I must not miss one moment of their testimony. Neither can you. Listen, watch, and learn what evil men can do to fellow man. It's a long, long film but it must be seen in its entirety.

Immensely powerful, disturbing, accurate and heart-rending. The most absorbing production relating to the Holocaust that I have seen.

Here the horrors of the Holocaust are presented by real people in real time. Holocaust survivors, their captors, torturers & executioners are all interviewed on camera.

Any detachment that the reader might have felt in reading books on the subject is destroyed as everything comes to life before your eyes. To actually see apparently 'ordinary' human beings who were responsible for such atrocities, speak about these events with such 'matter of fact', carefree abandon makes one's blood run cold.

This footage is all the more real to me, having personally visited most of the concentration camps referred to and having seen at first hand what is being referred to. Nevertheless, this footage will shock even the most hardened viewer & educate the least informed amongst us on the subject. It really is a 'must view' on the Holocaust.

It is quite lengthy, some 9 hours in all & with subtitles, yet this does not diminish from it's veracity and impact. It is such a shame that this production is not required viewing in our schools. We all need to be educated about this period in our not so recent history, before it happens again.

Recommended.

Lanzmann has fashioned a documentary that should be required viewing in every modern European history class, despite its length. Eschewing archival footage from the '30s and '40s, Lanzmann presents the slaughter of European Jewry through the testimony of the survivors ... surviving inmates, surviving guards ... even surviving neighbors of Auschwitz, who claim to have been unsure just WHAT was going on. For me, the most affecting interview is that with the Jewish Auschwitz barber who tells of how, in a period of 10 minutes, he silently shaved the heads of his wife, best friend and best friend's wife just prior to them being gassed ... none saying a word, so the barber can survive and offer his testimony. I wish I could give this film SIX stars ...

It's been 17 years since I watched this movie in a hotel room in Munich on German television. Since that time Hollywood has made their own Holocaust movies, the latest being "The Pianist." By far , "Shoah" is the most meaningful movie that was made about the Holocaust. The shear hypocrisy of the Nazi's false promise to every death camp inmate of "Arbeit Macht Frei" is revealed through the words of the apathetic hypocrits who watched from the sidelines.

It answers the question: Why could this global tragedy happen? It also answers the question: Who were these people who committed the atrocities and where were all the people who bore witness?

The movie asks these questions of the real people who we want to know the answers from. Mr. Lanzman interviews the wife of a concentration camp commandant. Her attitude and her carefully chosen words speak volumes for what she doesn't say. She embodies evil to the nth degree. Her lack of empathy and gross disdain for the 10,000s of Jews that her husband murdered makes you sick to your stomach. And yet she is not guilty of anything more than being an accessory to mass murder and she has never spent a day of her life paying for the sins of her husband. She complains that her life after the war has been hard on her. She wants our pity.

Mr. Lanzman interviews a peasant who lived along the rail line to Birkenau and Auschwitz. The jolly old peasant was proud of how he gesticulated to the hapless souls in the packed railcars how they would have their throats slit soon enough. The peasant made fun of how he convinced many a desparate Jew to throw him their jewelry in exchange for a cup of water - only to not give the Jew the promised water.

There is no ray of hope. There is no triumph of good over evil. There is only the sheer will power and determination of the few survivors that now live in comfortable flats in Israel, the United States and other parts of the world. After the war, they picked themselves by their bootstraps and mentally blocked the horrors that befell upon them by the Nazis and they succeeded to live their lives.

The conclusion I draw from this movie is to remain forever vigilant. Evil is banal. Evil can be overwhelming. Only a clear conscience, an open mind and a consistent collective voice against the darkness of evil will we keep men like Adolf Hitler from propagandizing his fellow countrymen and women into similar acts of atrocity.

I am about to buy this DVD. I watched this "documentary" about a dozen years ago and have not viewed it since. It has lived with me all these years and often comes to mind. This "documentary" belongs in a category of its own. It is more a human experience than a work of documentary art.

I first viewed Shoah when I was off sick from work. I was recovering from minor surgery that left me immobilized for several days. I rented the entire film and began to watch it over several consecutive days.

For the first hour or so (yes, a long time for most films) I was not really engaged by what I was hearing and seeing. The structure is so simple it borders on boredom. Where many films create "noise" this is not what this subject deserves. With little to distract, the words you hear will pierce the deepest recesses of your being.

Watching and listening I was drawn in by the voices and the cuts from scenery to speaker and back. What you see is not the horrific scenery you might conjure up of sites where the darkest evils took place, but scenes of nature as it would have been and as it is every day, now and then. After all, the darkness of evil is internal.

Try hard to keep watching, do not turn away, and you will change forever. But be prepared emotionally. Like others that have watched this, I wept throughout, it would be hard not to. This is not entertainment and it rises about art. Viewing this film results in a very powerful human experience that will stay with you for the remainder of your life.

First of all, I teach a semester course on the Holocaust in a Florida high school. I wrote the course and the curriculum for it. Teaching this course has become one of my passions, for it teaches concepts that move beyond history. Lessons like compassion, the true impact of hatred and tolerance and respect. The first time I read about Lanzmann's film was in the book "Explaining Hitler" by Ron Rosenbaum. I finally bought the VHS which was horribly expensive ($300), and later bought the DVD. The DVD was less expensive and a great deal easier to work with in the classroom format. As I began to study this document, I was prepared to disagree and not to like it at all. Rosenbaum's comments seemed to put me in that mindset. But as I worked with the film, over several years, I began to see what Lanzmann was doing and how he accomplished it. Today, it is a film that I use selected parts of in class, and I wouldn't be without it. Also, in my Master's program in Liberal studies at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, SHOAH is required viewing for their course on the Holocaust.

In the film, Lanzmann does some remarkable things. He first has you listening in several languages, while reading another (esp if you speak english). You get a whole education in European languages. Then, he does many interviews with both survivors and scholars. Some of these are long sections, but well worth the time, for the deep learning involved. Another thing I developed watching this film as a phobia about railroad tracks! To this day railroad tracks absolutely haunt me! Also, the interview with the barber has had a profound impact on 5 years of my Holocaust students.

I would not recommend this DVD for the person just beginning to study the Holocaust. I think one needs some knowledge, and some experience, especially emotional, with the material before attempting this. But once there, I recommend this film enthusiastically. Watch all the other films, and there are many out there, but come back to this one!

Watching the 9.5 hour documentary Shoah one goes through a plethora or emotions: sadness, anger and finally triumph. Shoah is living history one that we will no likely to be able to repeat as time goes on.

Claude Lanzmann gives us a history of the Holocaust from the point of view of the participants. The survivors, the guards, the townspeople who witnessed the Final Solution firsthand. The thing that makes the film amazing is that we do not see the grisly images that were so prevalent in films like Renais Night and Fog. We simply hear voices and see faces.

The interview technique is what makes this film so important. We are forced to look into these people's faces as they tell their stories. And they do have important stories to tell. Also we literally visit the places of destruction as they are now. We see green meadows that were once killing grounds like Sobibor or Chelmno. We see the village of Grabow now reduced of its Jewish population; we bear witness to the railside horrors of Treblinka, and the haunting desolation that was and is Auschwitz.

The startling thing is that the people of the film have been able to rebuild their lives and go on. This is the triumph of the film. We hear horrible things to be sure but these people are true survivors.

The DVD does not offer many extras, but then not many are needed. The end result is a sort of numb silence and this prevades the viewing. The transfer could have been a little clearer but I feel that this was more of a flaw in the source footage than a problem in the DVD creation. The only real problem with my set was on the fourth disc where there were numerous sound fall outs.

All in all Shoah is not an easy film to watch. It takes patience and careful listening if one is to truly understand but it should be regarded as essential viewing for any would be student of history.

[...] One of the great and moving aspects of this film is that it has NO footage from the Holocaust - no grizzly emaciated faces, no burned or rotting bodies, no marching Nazis, no shooting, no war...only a relentless, spellbinding and enlightening parade of interviews with the victims, perpetrators and spectators of the events: all contemporary to the making of the film. In this film when we see the camps, we see them as they are NOW; when we meet the pro/antagonists they are (only!) real people in wool and polyester. The real horror of this film is when you realize that any of these people (good, bad or indifferent) could have been your father, mother, uncle, aunt or cousin. A truly magnificent work of Art.

After the Holocaust most survivors' chose for their memories to remain unspoken. They opted to repress the horror and move on with what remnant of life they could. Fortunately, their silence did not persist, for if it did, enemies of humanity who choose to falsify and revise history, declaring the Holocaust never existed, would be armed with devastating ammunition..."where is the victims' testimony?".

With Shoah we finally get to hear, en masse, the devastating account of civilization's most heinous crime. While every memory of the horror cannot be captured, most, like the unfortunate lives consumed in the madness, are lost for ever. Yet gratefully we have this document to mark society beginning to come to terms with and document honestly what humanity is capable of.

As the last survivors are rapidly dying off with age, soon we will be without first hand witnesses. Thankfully through Shoah and other efforts, we are documenting and preserving in perpetuity the Holacaust to forever encase the evidence in an envelope of truth and righteousness where it forever belongs. Let Shaoh along with Yad Vashem, The Sorrow and the Pity, and the precious few other venues of masterpiece historical documentation persevere. They have captured the immense odiousness, horror, insanity, and pure evil that humanity is capable of and should not only never be forgotten but taught to all presently and for posterity so all of humanity can bear witness. Only through dedicated vigilance to awareness can we hope to avoid recurrence.

This is essentially the best movie I have seen on the Holocaust! It is necessary that everyone possible see this movie due to the Inevitable fact that these type of things will occur again, and at a Greater scale. We cannot avoid it, but it will be possible to react in the appropriate manner, as human beings, to circumstances so inhuman. Lanzmann's film is a insight to how low the human mind can go, but at the same time we can individually receive a lesson from it all! Its worth the money, PLEASE.....IT IS A MUST SEE!