Yesterday TCM played Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary Shoah in observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day. I saw it when it was released in 1985 and took the opportunity to watch it again yesterday. It’s a powerful film.
Over a period of 12 years Lanzmann compiled the testimony of Holocaust victim/survivors, perpetrators, bystanders, and a few who don’t fit those categories. All in all, Lanzman filmed some 230 hours of footage and drew on “the astonishing and often historically anomalous interviews [he] conducted in more than half a dozen languages in over ten countries with many dozens of people…” I want only to add a few notes on supplementary reading.
One of the most memorable of the survivors in the film is Rudolf Vrba. Vrba was a Slovakian Jew who escaped from Auschwitz with Alfred Wetzler in 1944 to tell the world what it was all about. That they did in a sixty-page typed report on the camp.
Their report provided a thorough analysis of the Auschwitz complex including its layout and administration. “Most critically,” writes Nikolaus Wachsmann in KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, “Vrba and Wetzler gave a thorough account of Auschwitz as a death camp, detailing the arrival of Jews from across Europe and the selections, gassings, and cremations. The sober tone and the mass of details made the report all the more devastating.”
Vrba told his own story in I Cannot Forgive (as my edition of the book was titled) or I Escaped From Auschwitz (1963). It’s still in print, now with a foreword by Martin Gilbert.
Most recently, the British journalist Jonathan Freedland has retold Vrba’s story in The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz To Warn the World (2022, just out in paperback). In the author’s note that prefaces the book Freedland explains his interest in Vrba: “When I was nineteen years old, I went to the Curzon cinema in Mayfair in London to see the nine-hour epic documentary Shoah…The film left a deep mark with me, but one of the interviewees stayed with me more than any other. His name was Rudolf Vrba.” I like Freedland’s book. However, the Canadian journalist Alan Twigg attacks it at RudolfVrba.com.
Referring to Vrba and Wetzler, Wachsmann judges that “the prisoners who escaped from the KL [concentration camp system] did not risk their lives in vain.” Saul Friedlander reaches an unsettled conclusion on the impact of the Vrba-Wetzler report in The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. In any event, Vrba did about as much as any one man could do. Nothing except the defeat and surrender of Nazi Germany was enough.
Lanzmann also tracked down the historian Raul Hilberg for the film. Professor Hilberg spent a career teaching at the University of Vermont. In 1961 he published his ground-breaking three-volume history The Destruction of the European Jews. Hilberg subsequently wrote several related books while revising and updating his three-volume history. Its third edition is published by Yale University Press. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum pays tribute to Hilberg here.
Hilberg escaped with his family from Austria in 1939 and immigrated to the United States via Cuba. A tone of anger suffuses his filmed comments on the Nazi murder machine. In the clip below Hilberg reviews a “special transport” order that belies the denials of German railway official Walter Stier. Stier was responsible for making sure the trains ran on time to the concentration camps.
For me the most striking of Shoah‘s speakers is Jan Karski. Here I am drawing on my own previously posted comments on Karski. I am afraid he needs to be rescued from obscurity. His story cannot be told often enough.
I first learned of Karski in Walter Laqueur’s The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth About Hitler’s “Final Solution,” (1980), and first learned of Laqueur’s book from George Will’s excellent syndicated column on it that year. Karski told his own story in the best-selling 1944 memoir Story of a Secret State: My Report To the World, published in updated form by Georgetown University Press.
Karski was an incredibly brave, dignified, and self-deprecating man. He performed heroic service in World War II and moved to the United States, where he earned a Ph.D., became a citizen, and taught at Georgetown University. Joshua Muravchik was one of Karski’s many students at Georgetown. He wrote about Karski in the 2014 Mosaic essay “A tree grows in Lublin.” It is a moving and instructive essay.
When the war broke out Karski served in the East as an officer in the mounted artillery. He was taken prisoner by the forces of the Soviet Union. Because the Soviet forces routinely held back Polish officers, most of whom never returned, Karski disguised himself as a private and was repatriated to Poland, where the Germans put him on a train to a labor camp. He escaped from the train and made his way to Warsaw where he joined the Underground, for which he worked as a courier.
Work as a courier was of course a high-risk affair. On one mission in June 1940 he was caught by the Gestapo and tortured. Unsuccessfully attempting suicide in captivity, he slit his wrists. He was sent to a prison hospital from which he escaped. Karski lived underground in Warsaw in 1941-1942. Prior to his last mission as a courier, Karski met with Jewish leaders, whose message he solemnly promised to convey to the West.
He visited the Warsaw ghetto in October 1942. This did not, in Karski’s words, present any special difficulty; the area of the ghetto had shrunk after the deportations of June-September 1942. The tramways that crossed the ghetto reached the streets which had been taken over by the “Aryans.” Elsewhere one could enter or leave the ghetto through the cellars of houses which served as the ghetto wall.
Karski was taken to a shop nearby the Belzec death camp by a Jewish but “Aryan-looking” contact. The contact provided both a uniform (of an Estonian guard) and a permit. He entered Belzec with his contact through a side gate. There he saw “bedlam” — the ground littered with weakened bodies, hundreds of Jews packed into railway cars covered with a layer of quicklime. The cars were closed and moved outside the camp; after some time they were opened, the corpses burned and the cars returned to the camp to fetch new cargo.
After watching the scene for some time he began to lose his nerve. He wanted to escape and walked quickly to the nearest gate. His companion approached Karski and harshly shouted: “Follow me at once!” They went through the same side gate they had entered and were not stopped.
Karski arrived in London to convey his message to the West in November 1942. In July 1943 he traveled to the United States and met with President Roosevelt and many others. The message he conveyed to Anthony Eden, President Roosevelt, and others is reproduced in Laqueur’s book at pages 232-235, which I am closely following here. Karski reported to Laqueur that Roosevelt’s response was “Tell your nation we shall win the war” and some more such ringing messages. He also met with Justice Felix Frankfurter. Frankfurter’s response was: “I don’t believe you.” It’s not that he thought he was lying: “I did not say this young man is lying. I said I don’t believe him. There is a difference.”
Karski patiently submitted to Laqueur’s detailed questioning in a September 1979 interview and even wrote out for him the message that he (Karski) conveyed to President Roosevelt, Anthony Eden, and others in 1942 and 1943. According to Laqueur, the message could not be published during the war. Karski’s message is included in Appendix 5 to Laqueur’s book. Laqueur comments elsewhere in the book:
Democratic societies demonstrated on this occasion as on many others, before and after, that they are incapable of understanding political regimes of a different character….Democratic societies are accustomed to think in liberal, pragmatic categories; conflicts are believed to be based on misunderstandings and can be solved with a minimum of good will; extremism is a temporary aberration, so is irrational behavior in general, such as intolerance, cruelty, etc. The effort needed to overcome such basic psychological handicaps is immense….Each new generation faces this challenge again, for experience cannot be inherited.
Before the war Poland was of course home to a thriving Jewish community of some 3,000,000. By the end of the war the Nazis had eliminated the community through the death camps they operated in the country with German efficiency.
For reasons that Muravchik discusses in his essay, Karski maintained a despairing silence about his wartime experiences until he was interviewed for Shoah in the 1970s. Video clips of Lanzmann’s interview have been posted on YouTube. The clip below represents the opening of the interview.
The Holocaust Museum’s Spielberg video archive has posted a compilation of video clips with Karski here and a transcript here.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.