42
PARTISAN REVIEW
then tried to alert the outside world, and the quiet voice of Simha
Rottem, a rare survivor of the desperate Jewish uprising. Lanzmann
is telling us with subdued eloquence that only talking heads can
evoke a place that was "not a world . . . not a part of humanity" but
merely streets full of creatures about to be corpses. Tightly edited
until now, the film turns open-ended, as if Lanzmann hadn't the
heart to tie any more threads together.
In the end Lanzmann achieves the unusual feat of letting the
Jews, the Poles, and the Germans all speak for themselves . By hunt–
ing up articulate survivors and making them relive their experiences,
he gives voice to the dead and draws a complete picture from only the
faintest of traces. Several of these Jewish witnesses-Abraham Bomba,
the stoical barber who finally breaks down under Lanzmann's prob–
ing, Richard Glazar, a more austere, more analytical storyteller,
Filip Miiller, who speaks with child-eyed wonder and disbelief at the
things he saw, and Rudolf Vrba, altogether too self-satisfied, who
daringly broke out of Auschwitz and tried to warn the Jews of Hun–
gary - speak with such cogency, such precision , that their memories
form the backbone of the movie . Each of them a distinctive presence ,
they make
Shoah
a character study in spite of itself. By giving them
large segments of his even larger mosaic, Lanzmann grudgingly
undercuts his own operational bias and softens the film's disquieting
impersonality. All the while, the babble of languages and translations
brings home to us the vast European scope of the killing and the far–
flung dispersal of its few survivors. By piecing all this together on
such a scale, and making it more emotionally vivid to us than any
printed work or melodrama can,
Shoah
itself joins these survivors in
bearing witness to the most momentous deeds of our time.
