Shoah: Special screening

The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and the end of World War II—a war in which six million European Jews were exterminated by the Germans. In recognition of this anniversary, the organizers of Timeless Film Festival Warsaw have chosen to screen the rarely shown and hard-to-find film Shoah by French director Claude Lanzmann. Premiering in Paris on April 30, 1985—exactly 40 years ago—Shoah is widely regarded as one of the most significant films of the 20th century. Lanzmann himself would have turned 100 this year.

“Shoah is not an easy film to talk about. There is magic in this film that defies explanation. After the war, we read masses of accounts of the ghettos and the extermination camps, and we were devastated. But when we see today Claude Lanzmann’s extraordinary film, we realize we have understood nothing. In spite of everything we knew, the ghastly experience remained remote from us. Now, for the first time, we live it in our minds, and hearts and flesh. It becomes our experience.” — from Simone de Beauvoir’s introduction in Shoah by Claud Lanzmann, Editions Fayard, 1985.

Shoah is a monumental, nine-and-a-half-hour-long “train of memory for the victims of the Holocaust” (a phrase coined by Tadeusz Lubelski). The film took twelve years to make, with five years dedicated to editing alone. Filming took place between 1974 and 1981 at the sites of former death camps. Lanzmann believed that cinema should not attempt to recreate the Holocaust, as it is impossible to act out or depict. Instead, his approach was to focus the camera on the eyes of those who experienced it firsthand. The film contains no archival footage, no historical photographs. Instead, survivors, bystanders, and even perpetrators speak. While landscapes—with their empty spaces, stone monuments, overgrown fields, and abandoned railway tracks—serve as silent witnesses. In this way, the director wanted to reconstruct traumatic memories and ask questions about the nature of memory. The film is more concerned with the memory of the Holocaust than with historical facts.

The subject of the film is not how Jews managed to survive, escape, nor about those who helped them. Lanzmann is interested in the living, as witnesses to death. As he himself explained: “I was interested in the living as witnesses to death. (…) I didn’t make a film about Poland or about saving Jews, let alone about those who saved their lives. The subject of my film was death—in the gas vans of Chełmno, in the gas chambers of Bełżec, Treblinka, Sobibór, Majdanek, and Auschwitz. And I included Polish peasants in Shoah because they lived near these death camps and knew exactly what was happening there. (…) I have nothing against Poles or Poland. There was nothing they could do. A few suffered deeply, witnessing the Jews’ tragedy, but most were indifferent. Such is human nature.” – Claude Lanzmann, interview with Gazeta Wyborcza, March 24, 2010.

Lanzmann made Shoah out of fear that the genocide, committed just 40 years earlier, was already fading from memory, and that the crime was being absolved and treated as distant history. His uncompromising, monumental work is both epic and intimate, direct and definitive. It is a triumph of both form and content, exposing hidden truths while redefining the art of filmmaking.

The reception of Shoah in Poland has evolved significantly over time since its premiere in the mid-1980s. Dorota Głowacka explores this transformation in her book Po tamtej stronie: świadectwo, afekt, wyobraźnia [From the Other Side: Testimony, Affect, Imagination] (Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2016), she writes:

“The Paris premiere of Shoah on April 30, 1985, provoked a storm of protests in Poland. (…) Of course, the primary controversy centered on the film’s portrayal of Poles as complicit in the tragic fate of Polish Jews while omitting references to the heroism of the Polish underground and their ‘persistent struggle against the Nazi invaders.’ Similar allegations appeared in both Polish opposition media and in Catholic publications. Such a consensus of opinion on both sides of the ideological barricade was unique in Poland in the second half of the 1980s. According to Ewa Ochman, this was caused by the fact that the image presented by Lanzmann was not only harming Poland’s reputation internationally but also threatened Polish national identity—which had long been built on the myth of Polish martyrdom and resistance.”

“(…) The reactions to Shoah inaugurated a public debate about Polish-Jewish relations and Poland’s responsibility for the fate of the Jews during the Holocaust. As Piotr Forecki observed, the controversy surrounding the film ‘uncovered the blank spots in Polish memory and, above all, outlined a map of the contents of the witnesses’ repressed memory.’ There is, therefore, a grain of truth in Lanzmann’s boast that he did the Poles a favor, as his film provoked ‘an examination of conscience, which will be continually taking place in Poland from then on.’”

“(…) In post-communist Poland, Shoah was not broadcast in full until 1997 (…). By then, the film’s reception had shifted significantly. Its reevaluation coincided with the Polish equivalent of the German Historikerstreit, as scholars and journalists debated the historical narrative of Polish-Jewish relations over the centuries. Positive references to the film were thus linked to the public reckoning of the past provoked by Jan Tomasz Gross’s Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne and the research of Polish Holocaust scholars such as Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Anna Bikont, Jan Grabowski, Jacek Leociak, and Barbara Engelking, who called for a fundamental reassessment of Poland’s wartime history in light of the ‘Polish Jewish issue.’”

“(…) A somewhat more interesting aspect of the third installment was the fact that a new generation of Polish scholars, such as Tomasz Majewski, Sonia Ruszkowska, and Katarzyna Liszka, included the film in the general reflection on the Holocaust issue, instead of discussing it, as was the case before, only in relation to the Polish matter. At the same time, works such as the aforementioned Od Shoah do Strachu. Spory o polsko-żydowską przeszłość i pamięć w debatach publicznych [From Shoah to Fear: Disputes over the Polish-Jewish Past and Memory in Public Debates] by Piotr Forecki and a text by Ewa Ochman were published, placing the Polish reception of the film in the context of dissecting the historical policies of the past communist regime. It should be noted that right-wing circles have not changed their hostile attitude toward the film in the meantime.”

Roman Gutek

Shoah screenings at Timeless Film Festival Warsaw (the entire film lasts 9 hrs. 28 min.):

Part I (4 hrs. 35 min.) — April 12, 2025 (Saturday), 2 p.m., Muranów Cinema, Gerard Auditorium

Part II (4 hrs. 53 min.) — April 13, 2025 (Sunday), 2 p.m., Muranów Cinema, Gerard Auditorium

Additionally, the 22nd Millennium Docs Against Gravity festival (May 9-18, 2025) will feature the French documentary I Had Nothing but Emptiness: Lanzmann’s Shoah by Guillaume Ribot, which explores the making of Shoah using unused archival material. For more information, visit mdag.pl.