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The Nazis - A Warning from History DVD ~ Samuel West  (17)  $26.99

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To write a review of a film such as Shoah seems an impossible task: how to sum up one of the most powerful discourses on film in such a way as to make people realize that this is a documentary of immense consequence, a documentary that is not easy to watch but important to watch, a documentary that not only records the facts, but bears witness. We are commanded "Never forget"; this film helps us to fulfill that mandate, reverberating with the viewer long after the movie has ended. Yes, Holocaust films are plentiful, both fictional and non-, with titles such as The Last Days, Schindler's List, and Life Is Beautiful entering the mainstream. But this is not a film about the Holocaust per se; this is a film about people. It's a meandering, nine-and-a-half-hour film that never shows graphic pictures or delves into the political aspects of what happened in Europe in the 1930s and '40s, but talks with survivors, with SS men, with those who witnessed the extermination of 6 million Jews.

Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years tracking people down, cajoling them to talk, asking them questions they didn't want to face. When soldiers refuse to appear on film, Lanzmann sneaks cameras in. When people are on the verge of breaking down and can't answer any more questions, Lanzmann asks anyway. He gives names to the victims--driving through a town that was predominantly Jewish before Hitler's time, a local points out which Jews owned what. Lanzmann travels the world, speaking to workers in Poland, survivors in Israel, officers in Germany. He is not a detached interviewer; his probings are deeply personal. One man farmed the land upon which Treblinka was built. "Didn't the screams bother you?" Lanzmann asks. When the farmer seems to brush the issues aside with a smile, Lanzmann's fury is noticeable. "Didn't all this bother you?" he demands angrily, only to be told, "When my neighbor cuts his thumb, I don't feel hurt." The responses, the details are difficult to hear, but critical nonetheless. Shoah tells the story of the most horrifying event of the 20th century, not chronologically and not with historical detail, but in an even more important way: person by person. --Jenny Brown

From the back cover
Shoah is a magical film about the most barbaric act of the 20th century. Previous commentaries on the Holocaust, with its ravished skeletons and corpses, have left us shaken, but now for the first time, we experience it in our heads, in our flesh.

Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years spanning the globe for surviving camp inmates, SS commandants, and eyewitnesses of the Final Solution--the Nazi's effort to systematically exterminate human beings. Without dramatic enactment or archival footage, but with extraordinary testimonies, Shoah renders the step-by-step machinery of extermination: the minutiae of timetables and finances, the logistics of herding victims into the gas chambers and disposing of the corpses afterward, the bureaucratic procedures which expedited the killing of millions of people without mentioning the words "killing" or "people." Through haunted landscapes and human voice, the past comes brilliantly alive.

Shoah is a heroic endeavor to humanize the inhuman, to tell the untellable. It is an immensely disturbing, even shattering experience, yet in its solemnity and beauty it's not a morbid or disheartening one. There are few works of art that leave one with such a deep appreciation for the preciousness and meaning of life.

Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust [All-Region]  (2)

Night and Fog - Criterion Collection DVD ~ Michel Bouquet  (56)  $10.99

Auschwitz - Inside the Nazi State DVD ~ Samuel West  (35)  $26.99

Shoah: The Complete Text Of The Acclaimed Holocaust Film by Claude Lanzmann  (10)  $15.95

The Sorrow and the Pity DVD ~ Georges Bidault  (24)  $44.99

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