This is not your History Channel 1-hour perspective, still images voiced-over with dramatic emphasis from a studio in Burbank, interrupted at 13-minute intervals by Billy Mays and Kentucky Fried Chicken commercials. This is the real deal, the story of the Holocaust as it was drawn out by those both eager and reluctant to talk about it, survivors, witnesses, perpetrators.
Those looking for grisly images of the horrors inflicted by the Nazis on the Jews in the course of World War II should look elsewhere. What is presented is much more devastating. Lanzmann takes you instead to the sites of the perpetration as they stood at the time of the shooting, and the voice-overs are the interviews of people who made it through, who saw it happening, who were on the scene, who saw the flames of bodies burning leap into the skies, who farmed fields within 100 yards of the fence and heard the cries and screams of the victims. You see the crimes of the Holocaust in the sad eyes of those who, against all odds, and even against their own will, lived to tell about it, though it's obvious they would prefer to keep it to themselves and not have to relive what they went through.
Listening to these people as they describe what they went through and saw, it's a wonder to me that any Nazi apologist, that any Holocaust revisionist, can believe their own theories, that anyone could make this stuff up. And the question kept coming back to me, why would these people lie?
Lanzmann stops at nothing to get at the truth. He lies to a sergeant who witnessed the gas vans, he ekes out the story of the barber who lived through it, he takes the boy who at 13 had to sing for the Nazi guard while his countrymen were gassed and burned back to where it all occurred, the locomotive engineer runs down the same tracks and relives the experience of taking Jews to their deaths. There is no way to prepare for the emotions that may arise in the course of watching this film. The humanity of the victims and the human sympathy for them that rises in the breast of anyone with any conscience is a recipe for any kind of reaction. The further one goes, the deeper the reaction is likely to be. Be prepared for anything as you navigate through this most devastating documentary achievement.
Those looking for grisly images of the horrors inflicted by the Nazis on the Jews in the course of World War II should look elsewhere. What is presented is much more devastating. Lanzmann takes you instead to the sites of the perpetration as they stood at the time of the shooting, and the voice-overs are the interviews of people who made it through, who saw it happening, who were on the scene, who saw the flames of bodies burning leap into the skies, who farmed fields within 100 yards of the fence and heard the cries and screams of the victims. You see the crimes of the Holocaust in the sad eyes of those who, against all odds, and even against their own will, lived to tell about it, though it's obvious they would prefer to keep it to themselves and not have to relive what they went through.
Listening to these people as they describe what they went through and saw, it's a wonder to me that any Nazi apologist, that any Holocaust revisionist, can believe their own theories, that anyone could make this stuff up. And the question kept coming back to me, why would these people lie?
Lanzmann stops at nothing to get at the truth. He lies to a sergeant who witnessed the gas vans, he ekes out the story of the barber who lived through it, he takes the boy who at 13 had to sing for the Nazi guard while his countrymen were gassed and burned back to where it all occurred, the locomotive engineer runs down the same tracks and relives the experience of taking Jews to their deaths. There is no way to prepare for the emotions that may arise in the course of watching this film. The humanity of the victims and the human sympathy for them that rises in the breast of anyone with any conscience is a recipe for any kind of reaction. The further one goes, the deeper the reaction is likely to be. Be prepared for anything as you navigate through this most devastating documentary achievement.