Shoah (1985) on Netflix
NR19859h 26mDocumentaryHistoryWar
Interviews with survivors, bystanders and perpetrators of the Holocaust, filmed at the camps and ghetto sites in Poland. No archival footage is used, only testimony and the places themselves.
- Netflix4.7/5
- IMDb8.7/1011,738 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single frame of archival footage. Dividing Holocaust witnesses into three categories – survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators – Lanzmann presents testimonies from survivors of the Chelmno concentration camp, an Auschwitz escapee, and witnesses of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as well as a chilling report of gas chambers from an SS officer at Treblinka.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Shoah (1985)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- While covertly recording former SS officer Heinz Schubert, Lanzmann was discovered by Schubert's family, physically attacked and hospitalized for a month, and charged by German authorities with unauthorized use of the German airwaves.
- Israeli officials commissioned Lanzmann to make a two-hour film about the Holocaust "from the viewpoint of the Jews" in 18 months; they later withdrew as his backers, and Shoah took him eleven years to complete.
- Franz Suchomel, an SS officer who had worked at Treblinka, agreed to be interviewed for 500 Deutschmarks but refused to be filmed, so Lanzmann recorded him with hidden equipment while assuring him his name would not be used.
- The film provoked a protest in Poland: government newspapers and state television criticized it, and the Socio-Cultural Association of Jews in Poland called it a provocation and delivered a protest letter to the French embassy in Warsaw.
- President François Mitterrand attended the first Paris screening of Shoah in April 1985, Václav Havel watched it in prison, and Mikhail Gorbachev arranged public screenings of it across the Soviet Union in 1989.
- Lanzmann staged the settings but not the words: Abraham Bomba was filmed cutting a friend's hair in a working barbershop, a steam locomotive was hired to recreate the death-train route, and Simon Srebnik sings in a rowboat in the opening scene.
