MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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not an explanation, is at least a description, a more full description,
of what transpired." At one point Hilberg helps Lanzmann decipher
a requisition for a "special train" - not with horror but with the
pleasure of an archival historian poring over an original document.
Hilberg's dry manner may seem cold and pedantic, but it is a timely
antidote to a dozen handwringing articles by Elie Wiesel.
Like Hilberg, Lanzmann affects a cool detachment: how else
could he get through the day or get the work done? Like Resnais and
his scenaristJean Cayrol in
Night and Fog,
he brings together past and
present at the very site of the camps, avoiding rhetoric for under–
statement and allowing the subject to reveal its own meaning. Like
Marcel Ophuls in
The Sorrow and the Pity,
Lanzmann is an aggressive
interviewer, always present as the investigator-protagonist of the film,
prodding and probing his Jewish witnesses with a stubbornness that
seems cruel yet necessary. But the effect of Lanzmann's questions
and the feeling of the film as a whole are markedly different from
what we get in Ophuls. Lanzmann poses as the simple man, always
pressing for more explanation, more circumstantial detail. But with
those who helped operate the machinery or who stood by and did
nothing, his tone of voice often conveys anger, sarcasm, or weary
incredulity-reactions which usually escape his listeners. He never
takes on a tone of complicity with these people, as his translators do.
He comes to no pact of understanding with them. His cold determi–
nation to learn the full truth never flags. He badgers his Jewish wit–
nesses with the same firmness. Though they are visibly wounded men,
they are as instrumental to his quest as the Germans and the Poles.
Ophuls, on the other hand, has an instinctive knack for drawing
out a hateful point of view. The collaborators can open up with him.
As they lay bare their secrets and those of France itself, his empathy
complicates our moral calculus. His motto, it seems, isJean Renoir's:
"The really terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons." Taken to
an extreme, as in his flawed film
The Memory ofJustice,
this humanism
leads to an attitude of
tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner,
or worse still,
to the idea that everyone is guilty. By exploring atrocities in Algeria
and Vietnam committed
since
the war, he implies that the Allies could
not truly judge the Germans at Nuremberg, for they too have dirty
hands. This is not only illogical, it is wrong, for the scale, planning,
and technology of the Holocaust make it incommensurable, as Lanz–
mann and Hilberg seem to suggest.
By telling us exactly how it happened, stroke by stroke,
Shoah
invites us to see the Holocaust as a crime unique in human history.
