MORRIS DICKSTEIN
37
too engrossed by the technical challenge these islanders represented,
their sheer distance from Auschwitz. A long, perhaps fascinating film
could have been made about the Jews of Corfu alone, but to Lanz–
mann, unfortunately, despite his empathy with their fate, their lives
carry little charge of personal reality. He shows little curiosity about
how they lived beforehand or even how these few escaped . In the in–
tricate mosaic of
Shoah,
as in the machinery of the Holocaust itself,
they make only a cameo appearance as a remote community, arbi–
trarily uprooted, that presented certain logistical problems to the
architects of elimination.
With his consuming interest in the Holocaust as a feat of impro–
vised technical organization, Lanzmann focuses far more attention
on Jewish deaths than on Jewish lives. Were it not for the quiet in–
tensity of his chief witnesses, survivors whose terrible histories are
etched indelibly on their faces and in the sound of their voices, this
might easily have become a film that was more about trains and gas
chambers than about people. Lanzmann's keen interviewing and in–
spired editing weaves these witnesses' stories together seamlessly with
testimony by Germans and Poles who were cogs in the machinery or
bystanders who watched it grind on. In large overlapping sequences
that never let up , we move from the rudimentary experiments in
mass murder at Chelmno (Kulmhof), to the "primitive but efficient
production line of death" (an SS man's words) at Treblinka, to the
perfected assembly-line techniques in Auschwitz, along with all the
associated problems of transportation and disposal, and conclude
with the Warsaw ghetto as another kind of factory whose product
was death. As each witness speaks, we see (as in
Night and Fog)
almost
lyrical color footage of the killing grounds and railroad tracks as they
appear today, tranquil , mute, at once anchoring and belying the
stories they tell, making them seem as incontrovertible as they are
unthinkable. (The printed text of
Shoah
is available from Pantheon
Books. Though it lacks all indication of the visual
mise en scene,
it is a
valuable record of the spoken evidence and gives a particularly good
sense of the film's intricate structure .)
Lanzmann has asserted in interviews and articles that he wished
to affirm the
presence
of the Holocaust and redeem it from legend by
confining his film to what can be heard or seen today. Some , espe–
cially on the French right, have debunked the killing entirely, just as
they long suppressed the truth about their collaboration with the Ger–
mans . Determined to bring the story home in more detail than we
have ever heard in a film before, Lanzmann establishes a slow, rivet-
