554
PARTISAN REVIEW
burned two thousand people-Jews-every day it was just as peaceful." The
flames, he recalls, reached "zum Himmel" (to the sky); yet, everything was
quiet. Nobody ever raised his voice around here.
Lanzmann, a relentless interviewer, asks Simon Srebnik to sing one of
those songs. And Simon sings amid the Polish landscape. His tenor voice is
still very pleasant, and the peasants stop to listen. These peasants live in
houses that once belonged to Jews.
Now silence reigns all over this land of death
And brightness and light and the song of birds and many colors.
Strings of small towns along rivers and woods.
The cities in the plain exalt the cross...Ivan and Stepan are dwelling in
our homes there-
-Uri Zvi Greenberg, "Streets of the River"
Mordechai Podchlebnik is the second survivor of Chelmno. "It's not
good for me to talk about this," he says with a smile. Lanzmann, as usual,
presses for details: numbers, locations, methods, facts. How did they kill?
Where did they do the killing? How did they dispose of the bodies? And
Podchlebnik, although "it's not good for me to talk about this," begins to de–
scribe everything, in detail, without losing his smile. "Ask him," Lanzmann
says to the interpreter, "why he smiles all the time." And the man, like aJew
from a story by Sholom Aleichem, still smiling, answers the question with
another question : "So what does he want me to do? Cry?" And , after a
moment of reflection, he adds, "And if you're alive, it's better to smile."
Motke ZaidI did not go to Poland with Lanzmann. He is interviewed in
a forest in Israel, not in the woods of Ponari. (The place resembles Ponari, he
says, except that there were no stones in Ponari. Also, the Lithuanian woods
are much, much denser than this forest
in
Israel.)
"How did you react the first time you unloaded corpses, when the gas
van doors were opened? Lanzmann asks.
"What could I do? The third day, I put my wife and children in the pit
and asked to be killed also. But the Germans said I was strong enough to
work, that I wouldn't be killed yet."
Lanzmann: "Was the weather very cold?"
ZaidI: "It was very cold-in the winter of 1942, early January."
We hear this question and the answer many times throughout the film.
Even an SS man agrees without hesitation: "Yes, sir, we were very cold.
The poor Jews, who were completely naked, might just have been even
colder. But maybe they warmed themselves in the railroad cars, during the
ride, because it was very crowded in there and that created a little body
