Ep. 32- Lanzmann's Shoah with Dominic Williams

In 1985, the nine-hour film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann hit theaters.  This powerful production featured survivor testimony as well as secretly filmed interviews with Nazi perpetrators.  

It’s length and the way it was shot challenges our understanding of what a Holocaust film is.  Is it a documentary film or something else? How has it impacted both our understanding of the event as well as the ways in which others have made films and movies about the Holocaust?  In this discussion with Dominic Williams, we dive into all these questions and more!

 
Dominic Williams is an assistant professor of history at Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK.

Williams, Dominic and Nicholas Chare. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando: Testimonies, Histories, Representations (2019)

Williams, Dominic and Nicholas Chare. Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz (2016)

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:01.08)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waipman Born. And today we're talking about Shoah, not the historical concept, but the epic film, the epic nine hour film by Claude Lanzmann, which is, think, a really, really interesting cultural production on a variety of different levels. And I'm very lucky to have with me my wonderful colleague here at Northumber University.

Dominic Williams is going to talk to us about this film and all the really interesting backstories and also its influence on our understanding of the Holocaust and also on the understanding of the Holocaust in film and probably lots of other things. So Dominic, welcome to the podcast.

Dominic (00:48.431)
Thanks, Whiteman. Really pleased to be here with you.

Waitman Beorn (00:51.438)
Cool, so can you tell us a little bit just about your background and sort of how you got interested in this particular film?

Dominic (01:00.407)
Right, so I am your colleague, as you said, Waightman, we both worked together in history at Northumbria University. But my background isn't straightforwardly history. I've worked in a number of different disciplines, did a PhD that was on Jewish literature, it wasn't about the Holocaust. And I ended up working on the Holocaust essentially because a friend and colleague of mine, Nicholas Chair, who's now at the University of Montreal, approached me and said,

There's set of manuscripts that I think are really interesting and not much has been done on them. And, you know, we could do something really interesting about them together. So these manuscripts written by the Zonderkommando, the people in the prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau who were forced to work in the gas chambers in Krematoria. And a very difficult topic. mean, a difficult topic within a difficult topic of the Holocaust. But we agreed we'd do it.

we did quite a bit of work on that and we ended up publishing a couple of books together on the Auschwitz Zonderkommando. And in the second of those books, one of the things we looked at was one of the key witnesses from the film show, a man called Philip Muller, who had spent a long time as a member of the Zonderkommando, actually in two phases, but had ended up being in the

the Zonda Kamano for several years. And the way in which that interview was shot and cut and edited, and as part of that, we made use of the outtakes that are digitized and available online at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. So that's really where I started engaging in depth with Shoah. I'd seen the film much earlier than that.

seen it. was televised in the 1990s. I'd seen it then. And actually, Nick, Nick chair and I tried to watch the whole thing in one go. He had a video cassette copy of it. That's how long ago this happened. We tried to watch it. And I mean, I have to say we actually ended up falling asleep, which will come to about you know, what the experiences of watching this film. So

Dominic (03:22.073)
But we came back to show and thought about it when we were writing this book. And then on the basis of that, I've done some other work. I've done some work collaborating with Sue Weiss, Professor Sue Weiss of University of Sheffield, published a couple of things about the outtakes there, particularly looking at the location outtakes. Sue is a real expert on show. She she's published several books on it. And that's really what I've done so far on show.

Waitman Beorn (03:50.926)
Well, I'm looking forward to hearing about it. mean, because it's, you know, it's probably to be understood that it's okay, I guess, if you fall asleep in a nine hour sort of epic film, nine and a half hours. mean, you know, that's an amazingly long, and we'll talk about that maybe as sort of the length as a feature or a bug, I guess. So maybe we could start with just Claude Lansman himself, because he's a really interesting guy, I think, and comes across as an interesting.

Dominic (03:59.375)
Nine and a half hours, think. Nine and a half hours, so yeah.

Dominic (04:05.986)
Indeed.

Waitman Beorn (04:20.238)
character in the film. like, who is he or was he and where was he coming from and why did he make this film?

Dominic (04:30.455)
Right, yes, I mean, he certainly is a very interesting person. So he's, I think it's probably best to think of him as a journalist, or that's his kind of background. But he was French, born in France in 1925. He came from a Jewish family, different sides of the family had immigrated to France at different times. So his father's side...

had immigrated in the 19th century, his mother's side in the early 20th century. And came from a family of people who had success in the public sphere alongside him. he had success as a journalist and filmmaker, but his younger brother Jacques was a writer and a song lyricist. His sister Eveline was an actor.

And, but in his childhood, I mean, he was born in 1925. So during the second world war, he was in the Vichy part of France, I think, and was part of the resistance joined at the age of 17. And then discovered afterwards, I think his brother Jacques was in the resistance as well, but he's discovered his father was in the resistance after the war in operating secretly.

Claude then became a student, studied, went to Germany very early between 1947 and 1949. He was teaching at a couple of different German universities, the second one in Berlin, and then decided to become a journalist. And one of his early journalism projects was that he went to East Germany in 1951 and published a series of articles in the French newspaper Le Monde, one of the main French newspapers, talking about his time there where he

He hadn't got accreditation as a journalist, so he was doing this illegally and talking to people in East Germany. That set of articles caught the attention of the French writer, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who ran a very influential and famous review in France, L'Eton Modern, a political literary magazine. And Sartre had been important to L'Homme de l'Homme.

Dominic (06:56.239)
already he'd read Sartre's book Reflections on the Jewish Question published in English as anti-Semite in 1947 and said, you know, this was something that was very important to him. I mean, there are ways in which you can certainly criticize what Sartre says about Jews, but for Lanzmann, he said he walked in the streets differently after he'd read it. It made him kind of feel proud of being Jewish. And so Sartre

reading this set of articles in 1951 invited Lanzmann to join Les Temps Modernes and he became part of the editorial team and sort of ensconced himself very tightly there. So the other person who was involved with one of the other people involved with Les Temps Modernes, Simone de Beauvoir, the feminist writer and philosopher, he started a relationship with her throughout the 1950s. They were in a relationship together.

supposedly he was one of the few people who was able to call her tu rather than vous, so address her intimately even ça, I call her vous. And did work there in Les Temps Morts d'Ain and other journalistic work as well, so he worked for the French magazine Elle, wrote articles for that, presented TV journalism as well, there was a program called Dîmes Dame D'Hommes which was Dimanche Dame D'Hommes, so

program to do that came out on a Sunday and it was about men and women, but it was aimed at women. And so there was a range of journalistic activity, but that included very, very left wing activity. So it's worth bearing in mind that in the fifties and sixties, Lanzmann was a very, very left wing figure. It almost was a lot left wing magazine, but Lanzmann, for example, agitated for Algerian independence. So that was puts him to the left.

example of the French Communist Party. was friends with François Nome, the right of revolutionary psychiatrist. And when there is a famous, infamous incident from 1961, sometimes called the Massacre of Paris, where Algerian protesters were attacked with great violence and a number of them were murdered by the French police.

Dominic (09:18.767)
and some of them were also rounded up. Lonsmann signed and probably also actually authored a letter that was published in Les Tomes en Dames that said, effectively, these people who are being attacked like this, Algerians being attacked like this, we don't make a difference between them and the Jews who are rounded up and held in the Vendee. Now, there seems to be a kind of shift that happens to Lonsmann, although it's

It's complicated as all these stories are, but you can tell a story that essentially says that when we get to 1967 and the Six-Day War, when I think, and this is true for a lot of Jewish people and a lot of left-wing Jews, this sense that Israel was under attack, was under great threat, and there was rhetoric that is often described as genocidal, the idea that Jews would be driven into the sea and slaughtered, this sense that the left was not supporting them.

was certainly something that Lanzmann seems to have felt. And although he was involved with other projects that include, for example, and it was published just around about the time of the Six Day War, there was a special issue later on, which was looking at the Israeli Arab conflict, as they called it. And he says that in response to that, in response, particularly to one article that talks about Israel as a colonial state,

He wanted to investigate Israel more. He'd been interested in Israel before he'd been to Israel in the 1950s. But he was interested in Israel more and he made a film about it called in English. It's got the slightly strange way of putting it. call it Israel. Why is but without a question mark. So so it's why it is that Israel exists. And he made that in the early 1970s. It came out in 1973.

And on the basis of that, a friend of his who was in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, he says came to him and says, well, we want you to make a film about the Shoah. Although he put it not quite like that. He said, we want you to make a film that's not about the Shoah. You could make a film that is the Shoah.

Dominic (11:31.759)
And so initially with funding that was going to come from the Israeli government, but that didn't last. Lanzmann started making this film and it took him a very long time. So he started in the mid seventies and the film was released in 1985. And this was something that involved him trying to scrape money together from different sources. As I said, the money from the Israeli government ran out, working with a set of filmmakers.

who, so Lansman did not have a strong background in filmmaking, his camera operators, for example, were people who were prominent people who had worked with other French directors, very famous French directors. So for example, one of his camera operators, William Lubchanski, had worked with Jean-Luc Godard, another famous director, Jacques Rivet, for example. And he spent...

10 years, a bit over 10 years working on this, although the phases in which this happened seem to be that an awful lot gets done at the end of the 70s. If you look at the outtakes, a lot of it is dated sort of 1978, 1979. And then certainly five years or something like that, editing it. What often gets talked about is a lot of material. We've probably overestimated it.

initially it's probably something like 220 hours of footage, 220 hours of our outtakes, gets edited down to nine and a half hour film.

Yes, so that's how he approached it and what his reasons were for making it.

Waitman Beorn (13:19.182)
And I don't want to, I mean, I'm not going to ask you to summarize the film because it's nine and a half hours, but can you give us a sense for people that haven't watched it, by the way, everyone, should go watch it potentially in parts or even just in sort of expert excerpts. There are some sort of well-known excerpts that are probably available, you know, for free online or something. But can you just give us a sense of kind of like what, how the film proceeds?

Dominic (13:23.203)
Hahaha.

Waitman Beorn (13:49.138)
and and kind of characterize what what the what the film is like and then we'll kind of get a sense more of the details of of the film itself

Dominic (13:56.963)
Yeah, so I mean, it's a very distinctive experience of watching it. I mean, for a start, this kind of duration is one of the things I think we can talk about that in a bit more detail later. But yeah, it's very long. It's very slow moving. And it's entirely on contemporary footage. There are some images that come from earlier, but very, very few of them. Almost all of it is what it is that Launceman

this team filmed in the 1970s. And that is interviews with survivors. And it's not something that takes a historical chronological approach. The idea is that in concert with this idea that I'm just going to use footage that I've taken at this moment. It's an idea that the Holocaust, the Shoah is something that exists in the present.

The aim of what Lansman is doing is circling around this thing, this event that he feels and as he shows it in the film is not something you can directly represent. It's not something that you can show photographs of it. It's not something you can show film footage of it for a number of reasons. It's something that you can find and see only as only in these interviews with survivors and usually very specific kinds of survivors, the survivors who

were close to and had to work in the gas chambers. There are other interviewees, but these are some of his key witnesses, the ones who are as close as possible to the gas chambers. And that, I think, is one of the things that's key about Shoah. He wanted to put murder, genocide, this particular method of murder by using gas chambers at the center of what the film is.

But he approaches that not by sort of putting that into some kind of chronology of how it is that gas chambers came about, not by kind of trying to work out how it is that gas chambers worked. It's by circling around it, approaching it in this kind of indirect way. As you slowly move through the film, you start getting a sense of what it is that this was like, and in some sense, what it means, although for Lonsman, really, it's meaningless. But it's that sort of sense of what the significance of this space is.

Dominic (16:23.641)
how that is central to this idea that what the Holocaust produced is absence, emptiness. There are no traces left, says Lawrence.

Waitman Beorn (16:33.184)
Yeah. And am I correct? And I haven't, haven't admittedly watched the entire thing, but I've probably watched a lot of it in bits and pieces. He, he doesn't spend, if I'm correct, he doesn't spend a lot of time sort of filming even at concentration camps. Right. I mean, like he films, people talking about them and you know, people outside of them, but he, it's not necessarily like walking and here we are.

you know, from place to place on a site. Is that?

Dominic (17:05.495)
Right, so he's certainly not interested in filming the whole of sites, right? You don't get a sense. mean, there's quite a lot of footage, I'd say, actually, from Auschwitz and from Birkenau. But it's not that you're supposed to get some sense of, right, this is what this site was like, and this is how it was put together. What you get is these moments that are talking about what people's experiences are. And that is essentially focusing on their experiences, they came up to and round the word by.

gas chambers in particular. So you see, for example, when Philip Muller first starts talking, he talks about when he was recruited into the Zon-the-Commander, the squad of people who were forced to work in the gas chambers and the camera follows his route from the block where he was taken to the crematorium in Auschwitz 1. Or when Muller is talking about how it is that the crematorium worked in Beer Canal, Auschwitz 2, the camera goes into

the ruins of one of the crematoria climbs through the ruins of the undressing room and then turns and looks at the area where the gas chamber was located, although it doesn't enter that. I mean, possibly for interesting reasons, although some of that is just it was it's covered in rubble that the crematoria were blown up when the Germans evacuated the camp. But

Yeah, it's not about trying to give you a sense of where all these things are located and how they functioned. Really, although there are practical, practical, but there are practical details of how things work. He's very interested in kind of little details of how things work as he's as he's interviewing people. But essentially, it's like, what is the experience that was taking place here?

this experience that is in some sense unimaginable and how can we approach it as close as possible.

Waitman Beorn (19:05.582)
But I think this kind of fits in this idea of sort of a lack of narrative consistency in the sense of it's not a sort of chronological, like in 1933, that's kind of power, et cetera, et cetera. So I guess there's two questions. One is sort of what is one of the big ones that I think is important. But the first one is why is it so long? And

And what does that mean about the film? Because the second question I have, which I think runs whenever you watch this film, is the extent to which, this a documentary or is this more of some kind of artistic performance, right? Because, you know, obviously a statement is being made with a nine hour film. You know, this is not a standard film-length film.

you know, the statement is already being made by the fact that it's sort of become a performance, both the film itself and actually potentially viewing the film is kind of a thing. And, you know, in the sense of kind of a tease, a weird analogy, but in the kind of the way that Rock Hill or a picture show is or something where there's something there's something more about just watching it. You don't just watch it. You have to go and sort of engage with it in a, you know, in a long in a long term sort of way. So I guess why is it so long? And then what is that?

that and the rest of the film, we can come back to this question of what is it throughout this discussion, but is it a documentary or is it an art film or art performance or something in between?

Dominic (20:45.421)
Yeah, those are two really good questions. So last month's own account, part of why he says why it's so long is that he found that he couldn't make choices or that he didn't want to make choices. He wanted things to be able to coexist. And so in some sense, had to be the length that it was. But I think as as you say, some of that is clearly about I mean,

for a start, right? It is edited. It's very carefully edited. And it's edited from a considerably larger amount of footage. So in some sense, he is making choices. And some of that, I think, is about trying to create a certain kind of experience for the which obviously is about sort of endurance and duration and which

think it's fair enough to say that there's something like a kind of performative, you know, performative as in a performance element to it that you feel like you're doing something very unusual and very

specific when you're sitting through the whole thing.

So the sum of that, that's so that's making a statement about this kind of topic that is different from other things that you could you could watch a film about. And I think it's also to do with the approach that he's taking to to the topic of the show, which is to say it's not about telling you the story that you can manage what it is that happened. It's trying to get you to in a sense that you could say kind of encounter something, something that this is going to do to you. These moments when people are essentially reliving.

Dominic (22:38.907)
some of the most difficult, the most painful points of their time in a camp or during the Holocaust.

And that time, that duration is partly about kind of managing that experience. So it's partly about that. You know, this is these these are moments that are very uncomfortable. mean, clearly incredibly painful for for the witnesses, the survivors themselves, but very uncomfortable for us as viewers as well. And I think if you put them into a sort of shorter time frame, they would become very different viewing experiences when they're in this.

extensive experience in itself, experience of sitting there and watching it for nine and half hours. I mean, with a break, even Lansman in the initial showing of it, although he, I think he took out all the lights for the exit signs, which I think was illegal and didn't want to let anybody leave. You know, this included the French president, think, but there is a break in the middle, but even so this kind of in

intensive duration is part of managing the experience of the

these particularly painful moments. So there's a kind of rhythm to it. And there's a kind of pace to it. That's part of what he's trying to say and part of the way that he's trying to deal with the material that he's he's presenting to you.

Waitman Beorn (24:10.796)
And so, yeah, so the documentary piece, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Dominic (24:11.843)
So yeah, you were gonna ask the question about documentary, but yeah, I mean, so as I'm saying there, right, and as we've said several times, it's not chronological, it's not really giving you a kind of overview. It gives you lots and lots of facts, right? But the way that it's presented and the way that it's put together does mean that you have to be careful about thinking about it as a documentary. So he himself,

didn't talk about it in that way. He said that he called it himself a fiction of the real. And certainly, I think a lot of almost kind of misunderstandings or wrong headed approaches, perhaps to to what the film is to think of it as straightforwardly a documentary, there clearly is a kind of personal artistic, I think is fair enough vision that

Lansman had that he wanted to realize. So I think we need to acknowledge that in seeing what it is that Shoah is and partly what it is that makes Shoah so so significant. That doesn't mean, as I said, right, that doesn't mean it's completely wrong headed to think about it as a documentary. Right. There are facts in it. There are things that you can learn from it. There are ways in which you can learn from it as a piece of history.

But I think you need to see that in context of and make sense of that in the whole of it, what it is that the film's doing.

Waitman Beorn (25:42.866)
And ultimately, you know, it is a, and we'll talk about this too probably, you know, it's a form of testimony because he literally is documenting testimony by eyewitnesses. And so in that sense, you know, it's, I think it's wrong probably to say raw testimony because he's clearly, you know, edited it and thought about it, but it is individuals telling their story as they understand it.

to him, so there is that piece of it as sort of, but it's interesting because you point out the lack of sort of historical narrative coherence, and it's almost like on the one hand, know, it's an experience you sort of immerse yourself in for an emotional effect, but one that you would be better served, like having had some...

understanding of the Holocaust before you go in to really understand what it is that you're that you're getting because if you don't have that then you're sort of missing some of the the things that he's putting down but then maybe that's what he's trying to do.

Dominic (26:50.765)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's always a question of where it is that you should start and where it is that you should finish in learning about the Holocaust or learning about any historical event. Yeah, certainly, if you're coming to it with a lot more knowledge, then you'll experience the film in a different way. And that includes if you know some things about how it was put together. I would say that it's a

It's powerful enough and it's important enough that it's worth watching however much it is that you know. But yes, I mean, it is worth remembering it is not. And we really do need to be clear about this. It is not the last word on what the meaning or the lack of meaning of the Holocaust is. It's a person's way of thinking about that coming to terms with it in a really powerful, really important way. But it is not, you know, I mean, there's ways in which

just the history that he's presenting, right? And as I said, it's not that it is a history, but there are interviews with a historian, although he didn't call himself a historian, Raoul Hilberg, so one of the earliest historians of the Holocaust, or publishing in English at any rate. And some of the historical facts of the way that they presented in the film are not in line with current thinking about the history of Holocaust. So for example, they talk about the Wannsee Conference.

as essentially, as Lanzmann understands it, the place where the decision for the final solution was made. And I don't think that's a position that most historians would have now. So there's that, right? mean, it's some of the facts there are not quite what the historical consensus is now. But there's also ways in which you, you

Dominic (28:43.929)
The.

the testimony itself, right? I mean, you're absolutely right that it is, this is people telling the truth, their truth about what it is that they've experienced. But we do also there need to bear in mind that this is as it was framed, as it was.

Dominic (29:09.817)
positioned as it was filmed by by Lonsman himself and also how it was edited and it depends a little bit on the What the person is and who they're talking about as to how heavy-handed that editing is and in some cases is quite heavy-handed heavy-handed And that that's also worth bearing

Waitman Beorn (29:27.074)
And I should pause here just to note that, I mean, Raul Hilberg, for our listeners, it may not be aware, is kind of in some ways one of the founding scholars of the history of the Holocaust in a certain sense. But from this film, I'm not sure if it actually shows up in the film, but I think it comes from, at least it comes from the outtakes. Raul Hilberg gives one of my favorite quotes about the Holocaust, which is that I, I'm gonna get it right here before I...

He says, in all of my work, I've never begun by asking the big questions because I was always afraid that I would come up with small answers. And I just think that's such a fantastic way of thinking about the history. But it's interesting that, you know, he's there, but he just appears as like another person, you know, in a way that if you watch a modern documentary, oftentimes the talking head historian types, you know, which I am one and, you know, have been, you know, are sort of privileged.

Right. It's like, you know, we get we get a studio with a a, close up and we talk to the camera directly and sort of what we say is really. then if there's historical people, then they are either voiced over or they appear as sort of as as another smaller piece. And I think it's probably something interesting in there as well. But I want to go back to what you're talking about with regards to the testimony and how he interacts with survivors, because I think

and we talk about this you know in in the past you and i but i mean i think it's a big thing for the audience as well you know that at times to be honest you know he's kind of asshole and he comes off that way you know with the way he engages with these people in trying to elicit from them something and i'm gonna leave it at that and let you sort of talk about you know the way he interacts with with survivors to try to you know get there

get their story because I think it's an interesting way of doing it.

Dominic (31:30.127)
Yeah, and I think, I mean, some of this, I think, seems to have been part of his practice as a journalist from before when he was working on the Holocaust. So for example, there's a film from the 1960s, 67, I think, where he was one of the people who was interviewing Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. One of the questions he asked de Beauvoir is, well, some people would say that you're a woman who hasn't had any children.

and that's kind of failed to live up to. I mean, I'm paraphrasing it, but you know, think he uses the term you're mutilated by the fact that you haven't fulfilled this, this fundamental function. So the idea of provoking people's clearly seems to be something that he, he brought to this project, let's say. And I suppose the other thing that's worth bearing in mind is that he, he's the same generation, right?

He's the same kind of age as the survivors mostly. Most people who survive are fairly young. So he sees himself, he sometimes described himself as, want to be their companion. I want to go with them. He sees himself in some ways on a fairly kind of equal level with them. And so that is also worth bearing in mind. He wants to be their friend, even if sometimes they don't actually want him to be. But yes, as you say, what he's doing when he's interviewing them,

is he's trying to push them to effectively relive what it is that they underwent. One of the things he also said is this isn't a film without memory, right? Because memory is not something you can trust. But these moments when they are essentially having a traumatic flashback are moments that you can trust. Now, of course, there's a lot of ethical questions there and problems there.

But that's one of the ways that he justified what he was trying to do. So these moat...

Waitman Beorn (33:29.538)
What to give an example, to give an example that we can sort of talk through, you know, he interviews, I think it's Abraham Bomba, right, who is a, was a member of the, well, essentially of the camp prisoners at Treblinka, right? And his job was to cut the hair of the people right before they were sent to the gas chambers. And in the film, Lanzmann is interviewing Bomba.

in Israel, I think, right? While he's while he's cutting hair, right? And with a person just sitting there having his haircut while this really intimate and horribly traumatic interview is taking place. and Lanzmann is sort of pushing him further and further to talk about his experience. you know what? Can you use that maybe as a way of talking through how he approaches, you know, eliciting

memory from his interview partners.

Dominic (34:29.783)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, this is this is a great example. And it's probably the most famous moment in show. Yes. So Bomber was someone who had been a prisoner in Treblinka, who then emigrated from Poland, emigrated to the US, lived in New York. And that's where Lansman first met him. And then he moved to Israel after he'd retired. So in order to

set up this scene, they had to stage it. In other words, they had to hire this barber shop and put on an apron and started cutting or I think probably really we could say sort of pretending to cut somebody's hair while he's being asked about what he did in Treblinka where he was forced to cut women's hair. He's cutting men's hair and Lonsman himself said that's important that there's a difference there. would be unbearable if he was cutting women's

Although it's not exactly that easily bearable in the format that it is. And Lonsman asks him a set of questions about what was going on. He's trying to get him to recreate and relive as much as possible what he was doing when he was cutting these women's hair. And then there's a moment where Lonsman asks him, well,

What did you feel? Bomba had just immediately been talking about a friend of his was had met his own family there and was having to deal with him. What did you feel when you saw that? How did you feel when you were dealing with that and Bomba?

stops and he's not able to to carry on talking about it he says right I can't it's too horrible and the man keeps pushing him says I know this is difficult I know and I apologize but we have to do it we have to do it and the camera keeps rolling all of it stays in the film Bomber has to at times he's sort of trying to turn away

Dominic (36:36.719)
But in the end, he says, Okay, yeah, we'll carry on. And he, says, you know, he answers it as best he can, and sort of says how he feels about it. And in some ways, is the answer that Bomba gives is less important, I think less important to L'Anse Man, than this moment where he's not able to answer. And of course, that's incredibly painful and difficult for us as an audience to watch. It is very, very uncomfortable. But there's clearly a question about what he's

done to Bomber when he was when he was asking those questions and essentially not cutting, not stopping, not giving him a break saying, no, we've got to carry on.

Waitman Beorn (37:19.822)
Yeah, I I think it's really interesting too, because there's this question that goes throughout the film, and I'm gonna let you talk about this as well, for the audience, I'm spoiled because I've heard Dominik talk about his work in other venues that you haven't yet. But there's the thing of him literally dragging a drunk Polish guy into the frame, we'll talk about that. But this idea of like the stage managing of...

Dominic (37:43.567)
You

Waitman Beorn (37:49.76)
of a film, because again, it goes back to this really interesting question of like the extent to which this is a documentary versus more of a sort of artistic kind of expressionistic sort of thing. You know, because obviously even if you're a documentary today, you may want to have like a train in the background. You know, that's a good thing if you're talking about the train journey to the camps or something, you know, you may want to be on site or whatever, but at some point, I'm not sure where this is, and this is Dominic, where you can sort of weigh in, you

At some point, almost it becomes like you are creating a fictional film in the sense of, you're like literally in this instance with Bomba, you know, you have you have essentially bought a set and you're kind of paying extras to be the guy that's getting his hair cut. mean, and you are you are creating a false sense because if you didn't know all the stuff we just mentioned and you're watching the film.

you're kind of thinking, yeah, here's Bomba. You know, he's still cutting hair after all these years. you know, Lanzmann just kind of stumbles upon him in his barbershop cutting hair, which is a much different, it lends a much different understanding of what's going on in the interaction, if that's all you think. So, I mean, how do we balance, less so even just the stage managing, because as I said, like,

Documentaries do this today. You know, they may say, hey, like, I want you to go stand over here or let's wait until, you know, the train comes by or whatever, you know, and that's okay. I suppose, but I guess part of it is the idea that we don't, you're the, the viewer doesn't know when they're watching it. The extent to which this is just sort of, he stumbled, he's, he's depicting sort of reality versus he's, he's really stage managing it.

Does that make sense as a question or?

Dominic (39:46.989)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and I think this is part of this way that I'm saying, you know, it's very easy or it's possible to misunderstand what's going on in Shaw. Look, Lansman himself, you know, I've sort of quoted or paraphrased a number of times when he's talked about the films. He was pretty upfront about all of this, right? It's not that he was hiding it, because his principle, I think, is not so much that it's the kind of

The barbershop, in a sense for him is is a means to an end. It's a means to to some degree manage, although how well managed that that is. That is a question, but to some degree, manage what it is that Bomber is going through and in some to some degree, kind of provoke a certain kind of reaction. And it's that reaction that's the important thing for Lonsma. That's the truth. Right. There's another.

example where he interviews Philip Muller. And Muller is calm for most of it, but a one moment breaks down and starts crying and then and Lozner says, you know, in the tears was, does he say it's the truth? He said it was worth more than gold to him anyway, but this is essentially saying, right, that is the moment that I'm really, interested in. So he's quite clear that he's setting things up in order to reach moments that are true. And that's where the truth is. And the rest is

know, when you're talking about this idea that it's the fiction of the real as he says himself, that's the kind of fictional element. It's you get back to what the truth is, by if you like indirect means. But yes, I mean, absolutely. It's, it's, it's always surprising people get surprised by how much things are staged, that the incident with Bomber is fairly well known. But for example, and again, this is something that they talked about. So Lonsman worked particularly with there are a few editors, but the

the key editor of key film editor and receive a post deck and she wrote about and talked about how when she was interviewing Philip Muller. Not when she was when she was editing Philip. That you have the camera that's been moving as I said as he's going towards the crematorium crematorium one in Auschwitz one and Muller was talking about it and said you know as I was watching.

Dominic (42:10.539)
camera approach I saw you see the crematorium and you see the chimney but Muller didn't mention the chimney in this bit of this bit of the interview so she says so I went and I found a part point where he said with a chimney and she spliced that into it so in the original Muller says I saw a crematorium and she spliced it and said I saw a crematorium with a chimney and she was completely upfront about that but people are very very surprised when they hear it

And if you look at Mueller's testimony, you if look at the moments where it's voiceover, it's, and particularly actually when it's talking about the kind of the machinery, the buildings, the kind of layout of the crematoria, they edit that quite very heavily to be able to be able to sort of explain how it is that it was laid out. Moments where he's talking about his personal experiences, less so, but nonetheless, there's a strong editorial hand.

hand there. So that they're not, they're not hiding it. But it, seems people find it hard almost to kind of take it in and believe that that's what's happening. But you know, you need to bear in mind that this is, this is a kind of this is a particular vision that Lonsmann and working with other people's zika prostate is realizing through the material that is filmed.

It's not something that he thinks is misrepresenting what's going on. He's not that he misrepresents any facts. I don't think really even with Muller, right? He's not misrepresenting what Muller says about it. It's just that he made it easier for him to explain what the kind of technology of the gas chamber is by editing it this way. And of course there ethical questions there. So there's ethical questions about what he's doing to people when he's interviewing them. And one's about once he's done what he does to them after he's got into the editing suite.

Waitman Beorn (44:07.768)
And I think, think it's interesting to add, to add to this, because we live now in an age where Holocaust survivor testimony is very much a thing, right? I mean, we have like the Shoah Foundation with, you know, with the Steven Spielberg archive. You know, it's something that you really, it's everywhere. You know, we understand and we understand to a certain extent what that means, which, you know, for a lot of the general public, you know, is an old person comes to your school or your community center and, know, they, tell their story.

to you or it's one of these where you go and you look on the website and there's a video, a testimony of someone and someone asks them questions and they answer them, which is, you know, obviously that also has its own sort of structural, you know, constraints and things. But, you know, it's very much this idea at least that we are getting sort of the straight truth from the survivor, you know, unedited, you know, it's what they, it's what they, what they're saying, what they think.

But when when Showa was being recorded, we didn't really have that same kind of relationship, I think, with testimony, right? I mean, this is, this is in the, in the seventies, right? And it's, right at this moment where you have the Holocaust mini-series coming out. You have the creation, the beginnings of the creation of Holocaust Museum in DC, in the United States. But there isn't this culture of survivor testimony, recorded survivor testimony.

that we sort of have today, right? And so how does this film and Lanzmann sort of work fit into maybe the history of recorded survivor testimony, or does it?

Or is that a stretch?

Dominic (45:55.215)
I think it's a perfectly fair question. mean, yes, obviously there are ways in which you can certainly say it's quite different from what we have with video testimony or the experience, which of course, like, I mean, you say that people, the normal experience people have now is of an old person turning up at their school. I mean, I think if you talk to our students now, very few, very few of them have now met.

Waitman Beorn (46:20.696)
Well, not anymore, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Dominic (46:24.575)
survivors you know that that was you know that was different 10 years ago right but it's it's much less the case now and this idea that testimony is something kind of

sacred, right? That it's it's something that's that's unquestionable in the sense of right, you have to let this person tell it in the way that they want to tell it is not something that's existed the entire time. Of course, one of the main places where testimony is taking place is in courtrooms. And there's been a lot of scholarship that's done on it. A lot of things that people are aware of ways that courts shape and force witnesses to talk in particular kinds of ways.

And question of how much agency those witnesses have is something that people dispute. I mean, I think there is a case that they do have agency, even in those kinds of settings. And if we're thinking about in film, right, I mean, there are examples in French film of testimony from survivors that I think in some ways you could say

Lonsman is building on that the one that's that's particularly well known among scholars, I mean, it probably won't be noted to most listeners is a film from the 96 is called Chronicle of a Summer, where one of the people is involved, there is a Holocaust survivor, Marcel L'Oreal d'En Yvonne's, and she

is involved actually as an interviewer, there's a certain sort of sociological experiment as part of it. But it's one of the first examples people sometimes talk about as where a survivor talked about what happened to them. And it's done quite an interesting way that it's not just that she stands and she talks, she walks, and she's filmed walking, and she's kind of filmed as if she's talking to herself about what it is that this experience is. So this is this kind of element of what you might say staging there as well.

Dominic (48:32.123)
or there's, another French film, the time of the ghetto whose precise date escapes me. But I think again, it's in 1960s and there is where there's testimony from people who survived the Warsaw ghetto, and filmed in this very stark and striking way where, they were effectively kind of black polo neck.

shirts in a black background and they're lit very starkly and filmed either straight on or in profile and they talk about what their experience was in the the Warsaw ghetto and again there you see that there's a kind of artistic intervention that's going on there that's saying right we need to film this in a certain way right i mean it looks like something from a kind of Beckett play or something like that it looks like not i i mean not quite as extreme that that's just a mouth that gets highlighted there but it's that kind of thing so

Lonsman is certainly coming from a context where there's a much more of a sense of this is stuff that gets the testimonies is material that gets gets shaped that needs to be so mean stuff in some ways is a sort of a slightly lazy and turn to use but I think it actually sums up how it is that it's thought about right it's not something that's got its own shape it's got something it's something that you need to shape yourself okay a court needs to do that a film needs maker needs to do it and that's

Waitman Beorn (49:53.058)
Well, it's worth pointing out.

I yeah, I think it's worth pointing out too that I've been kind of hard on Lanzman, I suppose. But what he's doing is also, I think he's modeling one of the challenges of working with survivor testimony, particularly when you have a survivor, and this is probably something that maybe is more relevant to people who were working on this 10 or 20 years ago than when he was in the 70s. But when a survivor or anybody,

Dominic (49:57.593)
That's what it's coming from.

Waitman Beorn (50:25.942)
who has lived through an event that people are interested in, tells their story over and over and over again, they also enforce upon it sort of a beginning, a middle, and an end. And these are the important takeaways of the story. And I have to these points in this order, because like all of us, they get in habit of sort of this is how they do it. And as a researcher or a scholar, or in this case, lansman, oftentimes to get

more of the story, you have to kind of bump them a little gently out of that, out of whatever rut they're in of sort of, this is the normal path that my story takes. And so at a certain level, that's what he's doing also, you know, is he wants, there are things he wants them to talk about that may not be on sort of the, the guided tour route that they normally take you on. And so he wants to sort of bump you off of those.

Dominic (51:17.731)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe not quite so gently in his case. But but yes, I think that's absolutely true. Right. And of course, this, you know, this is getting at the fact that any kind of testimony will have some kind of shape to it. There will be a way in which you're thinking about as the person is asking the questions, but also as the as the survivors, they're talking about it. How is it that I can tell this story in a way that my audience will be able to make something of it? There's something

Waitman Beorn (51:19.776)
Not gently in his case, no.

Dominic (51:46.805)
know, there's a reason why they're telling this story and they shape their testimony to, to, to work with that reason. That's of course not to say we're talking about misrepresentation here. It's saying that, you know, any kind of set of facts need some kind of shape of it to be put on.

Waitman Beorn (52:03.95)
Well, and any kind of memory, you know, is, is, is, is, and it's also impacted by, you know, what you've lived through recently and when, what, and the history. And while we're still talking about testimony, I think it, it's worth mentioning a little bit about perpetrators, because one of the things that he does that I think is really, it's really powerful in the film in a certain sense is he interviews Nazis and some of the really worst

Dominic (52:06.337)
Right, absolutely.

Dominic (52:11.128)
Absolutely.

Waitman Beorn (52:31.726)
of the worst perpetrators, know, oftentimes with sort of covert means. Can you talk a little bit about that and sort of how that role that that plays in the film itself?

Dominic (52:46.391)
Yeah, so there are a number of people who, as you say, perpetrate a suit, Lonsman interviews. So it's worth saying that we've been talking a lot about just survivors who we interviews and there's a range of people that he interviews. And it's often that the way that it's edited together, you have a sense of different kinds of perspectives, obviously perspectives that have different worth and but different perspectives on events. So for example,

he interviews a number of survivors from Tripolinka. He interviews someone who was a was a guard at Tripolinka, Franz Zuckermel, which was done secretly. Or at least in that case, he promised Zuckermel that he would do an audio recording, but then took a camera in secretly to film him. And we see that he's he's filming him in a not particularly good quality image.

But in a lot of ways that kind of adds to the to the effect of what it is that you're seeing and includes in there the fact that Zuchermel says to him, well, OK, all right, I'll tell you about this, but don't say my name. No, no, no. I won't let anybody know who you are. And of course, this is with on the screen, Franz Zuchermel, but including the fact that he promised him that he wouldn't tell him. And I think in Zuchermel's case as well, paid him.

the interview which the camera operator, William Lubchanski, was not very happy about at all. Lubchanski was also Jewish.

There's ways in which there's a similar kind of strategy, although, I mean, Lonsman obviously is addressing them in very different ways. Although there are ways in which he's quite forward with survivors and kind of pushes them in ways that we find, I think often as viewers, quite uncomfortable to watch. He's much more aggressive and much more kind of sarcastic, as you might expect with people who are perpetrators.

Dominic (54:57.187)
But one of the things that he's trying to get them to do is also do this sort of reliving of these these events. Lonsman himself called this incarnation embodiment where they kind of live out in front of you what it is that they were doing. And in Zuckermil's case, this is when he's singing a song that prisoners in Treblinka were forced to sing. And Lonsman

I'll sing it again several times, get louder.

Dominic (55:30.863)
And then at the end of this, Zuckermil finishes singing and says, well, we're laughing about this now, but actually it was quite sad. And Lansman says, nobody's laughing about this. But one of the things that you see there, of course, is that he reveals. And again, there's a question about this because, you know, the editing has been done in, I mean, it's editing is necessary process.

But the editing has been done in such a way that Zuckerman was presented in a certain kind of way. But there certainly are these moments where you clearly see something that's about the kind of mentality of someone, how they maybe were involved in perpetration, but certainly how they're living with it now and how it is that one of the ways is simply sort of downplaying it.

Dominic (56:23.015)
or even taking a kind of pleasure in it. I think that's how Lonsman saw it. That's what Zuckerman was doing.

Waitman Beorn (56:31.65)
Yeah, I think it's a really, and that's a really great summary of it. And I think it's interesting because, you know, this is a film, as you said at the beginning, you know, it's all testimony, basically. You know, even when we're getting the closest to sort of pure history, which is Hillberg, it's still testimony. You know, it's still like asking the historian to say something, you know, rather than a narrator or anything like that. Like there is...

Dominic (56:50.669)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (56:58.54)
I think really no narrator, right? mean, the whole thing is basically it.

Dominic (57:01.571)
No, no, no, there is no narrator. It's purely through, I mean, there are moments where there's a moment where he reads something out, but he's standing in front of the camera. But no, the meaning, the kind of overall sense that's being drawn in so far as it's sort of perceivable is in the way that it's edited.

Waitman Beorn (57:23.214)
And so speaking of the way that it's shot, how does he shoot the film? What choices is he making as a director in terms of environment and sound and literally the way that the camera work is done? Because I think that's also an important piece of what he's trying to do, right?

Dominic (57:43.725)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely. So some of this is about kind of

Dominic (57:55.565)
talk about it. Well, mean, some of this is clearly about the kind of speed, right? There is a pace at which this moves and some of this is achieved by the fact that the camera moves very slowly. So it often is panning and tracking and pushing in, but often at a very slow pace. And that fits with the kind of pace of the film. There's

The way that he films the interviews is often in quite a wide way. So he's not always and he sometimes is, but he's not always just focusing on the interviewee. He often includes himself in the shot. And that includes also the fact that he when there's an interpreter, the interpreter is often included. And these moments where the person is speaking in one language and the interpreter translates belongs, man, all of that's left in.

And you see moments, for example, where he argues with his interpreters as well. What does he mean when he said that? No, no, no, you are you've got to ask him or I heard them use this word. mean, but you didn't you didn't translate that. And so there's ways in which he's he's trying to show the kind of the context in which these interviews take place, the process of how the interview takes place. And a lot of that often gets left out in documentaries.

So when I'm talking about it as when we're talking about as a very heavily edited film, it's not straightforwardly that then it's just some kind of smooth surface that you can't kind of see the joins in the cracks in. One of the things that he's really interested in doing is showing the process by which these these interviews have come about. So there is this element of staging it. I think it's it's fair enough to call it staging in some cases. But there's also a way of showing how it is that

you know, an interview with someone who's where you don't share the language with them is is a more complicated process than the way it's often shown in a documentary. So that that's an important thing as well. I think it's also worth mentioning and just just a brief thing. I mean, when you're talking about sound, just a simple thing that's worth bearing in mind. So you see a lot of you sometimes see location shots, say, for example, of a station or a field.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:02.444)
And so, yeah, go ahead.

Dominic (01:00:17.743)
shots where a survivor from Colmno, for example, is walking around the site where bodies were burned, dead bodies were burned. And you hear birdsong. If you look at the outtakes, that was filmed without sound. So the sound is edited in. So even simple things like that, you know, there's an approach that's going that, yes, I want you to hear the sound. I want you to hear the environment. But that's something that I have to create.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:47.01)
Yeah, and so speaking of speaking of these, these moments, can you tell us maybe a couple scenes or moments in the film that you think are particularly interesting or important or insightful for some reason that we might look out for?

Dominic (01:01:05.377)
Right, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, okay. So I think we've already talked about one of the key scenes that the interview with Abraham Bomber, I think is...

Waitman Beorn (01:01:06.378)
It's only nine hours, so sure you could find...

Dominic (01:01:20.047)
is a very, very important part of the film. it's the thing that probably strikes people the most because it's so shocking. But perhaps, yeah, I'll include, because there is one thing that we haven't talked about yet, which is, okay, we've talked a bit about interviews with perpetrators. We've talked rather more about interviews with survivors. But there's another group, a controversial term to use, but that term probably comes out in a sense from show, which is bystanders.

right to the people who saw what was going on, but weren't directly involved. And Raoul Hilberg is famous for this three way categorization. He said he drew the bystanders idea from watching show. And so there's an interview with Cheswok-Borovin, a farmer, often thought about as a man in a red t-shirt and a sort of pot belly.

standing outside Triblinger station. And again, we sometimes watch it and think that's very close to Triblinger camp, but that's a couple of miles down the road from the camp. But standing close to Triblinger station and talking about what he witnessed when he saw train carriages coming in.

Dominic (01:02:44.301)
I mean, this is in some ways one of the more controversial elements of Shoa, the way it is that Polish non-Jews are shown in the film. But Barowe is certainly someone who doesn't come across as a sympathetic character. He talks about how he in some sense warned people about who were in the Jewish people who were in the train carriages about what was going to happen to them.

by drawing his finger across his throat. This gesture becomes really important in the film. You see a number of people doing it. And then he does that and he laughs.

again, there's something very difficult to see about that. And I think there is something to say about these kind of moments where he's where Lanzmann is talking about talking to bystanders, there's certainly some work that said, well, he's kind of misrepresenting what they're saying. Lanzmann himself didn't speak Polish, his editors, even Postek didn't speak Polish. So the way that it's edited, sometimes you don't, you don't always get the words that the people say that are translated, right, because they don't know what matches.

to what. But certainly a moment like that makes you think about what it is that the people who were there, who weren't carrying out the murders, weren't the victims of those murders, but were in some sense forced to witness it. It wasn't their choice to be there or to see it, how it is that they responded. And I think that's quite difficult to watch and make sense of. So I think that's important.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:23.406)
And that's a good point. I there's also, I use some of those clips when I'm teaching even about, about bystanders, you know, because it goes back to the, a comment that you made at the beginning of the, of the episode where you said, you know, that he was looking to show the Holocaust is like a current, a current event, like a current, a current thing. Cause he goes to visit these towns, some towns, villages where the only, yeah, where the only people left are Poles.

Dominic (01:04:48.589)
villages, I mean, it's often very, very remote areas.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:53.186)
you know who the Jews are gone. And I remember, you know, there's a scene where he talks about, there's a whole group of people coming out from church, you know, and they're talking about the Jews having had gold and stuff. mean, you know, repeating sort of some problematic, you know, antisemitic sort of beliefs. And there's another one where, you know, the women are talking about, you know, they don't have to compete with pretty Jewish women anymore. know, there are lots of these moments, but again, he's pointing out that,

Dominic (01:05:17.177)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:22.382)
these are the people that remain because the people that they're talking about, you know, aren't there anymore because they're murdered, which I think is, you know, another interesting element. And again, you know, we have to be fair as you've already have done, you know, that, you know, these are edited too, right? And sometimes potentially in ways that might, you know, misconstrue or misrepresent though. mean, I'm not.

I guess that comes to one of the other questions that I had, was, because I think this bears directly, how is this film received when it comes out? And then maybe we can move from that to sort of the impact it's had on film in general, Holocaust film in general.

Dominic (01:06:08.641)
Yeah, so mean, obviously, how it's received depends a little bit on where you're talking about. So in France, for example, I think it's seen as a major event, a major film.

Waitman Beorn (01:06:11.798)
on who's receiving it.

Dominic (01:06:26.585)
the first screening of it. think I'm right in saying that the French president attends it, but certainly no senior politicians attend it. And it is something that is met with a great deal of acclaim. And it's had an awful lot of influence as we're going to go on and talk about in ways that the Holocaust has been conceived. And one of those, as has often been said, particularly in French, it's changed the name that they use to talk about this event. So

when lansman started filming show it was called Holocaust Holocaust and you see on some of the film slates that that's that's the title that's there by the time he got to the end of it it was called sure and by the time people watched it that is the word that is now used in France they call it a sure not rollercoaster okay so that's one of the the signs that it was a very influential

Not entirely surprisingly in Poland, it had a different kind of impact, although some of that was to do with the fact that it was released in itself a very heavily edited form. So when it was first shown on Polish television, it was edited. So it just included the interviews with the Polish bystanders. And there was a lot of criticism that Lonsman was prejudiced against Poles and that he

was misrepresenting them and that he was only talking to, you know, less sophisticated, prejudiced people from the country, from the countryside, who, you know, were uneducated, ignorant, bigoted, whereas, you know, there were plenty of Poles who weren't like that.

Why didn't you talk to people who had been involved in rescuing Jews and those kinds of criticisms? So I think it's it's had a different kind of reception in different places entirely understandably. But it's it has been seen as a major, the major film about the Holocaust, the shower in a lot of places. And so it has had a very, very strong influence on filmmaking.

Dominic (01:08:49.308)
Yes, I think so. I think you can say that. But also the kind of intellectual life in the way that it gets it. The Holocaust is talked about, particularly by people who are thinking about how it is that it's this is an event that's representable. Or essentially, if you if you go along with Lanzmann's terms, that it's not represent.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:08.878)
Yes, I mean, I guess that that leads us sort of to the the end point, which is maybe can we talk a little bit more detail about, you know, how or does maybe I'm maybe I'm just assuming, you know, how how does the film, whether it be sort of its content or the mode of filming, how does it or does it influence Holocaust film in general?

And I guess a separate related question is, how does it influence sort of a popular engagement or encounter or understanding of the Holocaust after? In ways it may not be sort of clear from just looking.

Dominic (01:09:59.759)
Well, I mean, in some ways, what you could say is that the influence on filmmaking is not that obvious, right? If you think about the kinds of films that are well known and that were successful after Shoa, I suppose the most obvious one to talk about is Schindler's List, which is what, eight years later, 1993? I think that's right, isn't it? Right, and L'Ensemble.

denounced it as he denounced many films about the Holocaust and said, you know, Spielberg had completely failed to understand the Holocaust. If he'd understood it, he'd have made sure. Right. Yeah, he was not a man who underestimated his own abilities and capacities. But he so that kind of sense that other people are going on and making films that are in the same sort of tradition that you could see. I mean, you

Waitman Beorn (01:10:40.206)
you

Coincidentally.

Dominic (01:10:58.413)
you talk about the TV series Holocaust from the late 1970s made at the time, released at the time that Lonsman was working on his film. He denounced that and said that there were things wrong with that. OK. And you're seeing something that's a similar kind of thing.

a similar kind of approach by Spielberg, which is you need to humanize it. You need to tell these in receivable stories. You need to give people some kind of hope. You need in some sense to have a plot with a beginning and a middle and an end. And these are all things that Lonsman is saying. This is not the way that you can think about it. So it's not an influence that's direct, certainly in kind of popular filmmaking. I don't think that's

where he was pitching to have an influence. I mean, you can see the fact that he weighed in on debates about it shows that he felt that...

he had a right to talk about them and to denounce them. think that though that what you're seeing in later dramatized films, so a film like Son of Saul, which has had a much smaller audience, but nonetheless has had some kind of reception, people are aware of it and it won an Academy Award and Oscar. These ideas about, what can you represent? What can you show? What's the central site of the

the Holocaust. Both of those are things that are going on in Son of Saul. Son of Saul is a film about a member of the Zonda Commando who is and it stays almost entirely within the crematoria of Beer Canal with a very brief break outside and filmed in a way that all you see is this person's face for a lot of it, although that varies a little bit. in

Waitman Beorn (01:12:32.046)
Mm-hmm.

Dominic (01:12:56.623)
with a very shallow depth of field. the background is often not always actually, but often a kind of blur and what you hear instead of just sounds of what's going on. These sort of vague blurs of what's happening behind it. And those kinds of terms, I think, you know, it turned into something that's dramatized, but it's clearly something that the director, Lasslan Nemesh, was thinking about showers as he's doing it right. There are things that I can't show. He's kind of the face, the fact that,

is often about the kind of faces of people as they're talking about the experiences they've gone through. That is a kind of film that I think is quite heavily influenced by Sherlock. You could...

Waitman Beorn (01:13:38.862)
And I wonder if, sorry, I wonder, and this is gonna maybe be heretical. And I know that it's based on a book, which in and of itself is deeply problematic, so this is not necessarily an endorsement, but the Tattoos of Auschwitz, both the film and the book, they do have this element of stepping out of the time, where the...

Dominic (01:14:05.327)
Mmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:07.616)
you're seeing the survivor talking in the present, being interviewed in the present by the author, et cetera. And again, this is not a commentary on the content of the book because I think it's deeply problematic in all kinds of ways. But I wonder, there is this element of testimony that's made explicit in that film, that that film is about

Dominic (01:14:28.665)
Mm.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:34.614)
or the TV series whatever, it's about testimony. mean, it's a testimonial film. It's not a narrative film like Schindler's List where you have the characters. The fact that this is testimony, this is memory is made explicit. I wonder, and again, maybe Tattooist of Oswald isn't self-aware enough to be referencing Shoah, but I wonder if this idea, because there other films too, like The Debt and I think other ones where the...

the testimonials slash present circumstances of the survivor is actually not an explicit part of the film rather than just telling the story. I wonder if maybe that is some vestige of what Shoah brings. Or maybe I'm just overanalyzing.

Dominic (01:15:21.743)
I think that's an interesting way of thinking about it. And I think there's probably something to it. I probably have to think about it a bit more. But I think you're right. Right. There's this kind of shift in how it is that we see testimony and what its value is and what its importance is. That show is certainly part of, let's say, this idea that what you should be doing is not, you know, not trying to find, you know, archive footage or photographs of the Holocaust and build your

build your understanding out of that or building your understanding out of perpetrated documents or things like that. Right. There's a place for all of that. But I think this idea that testimony, what survivors say, something that we need to listen to and we need to try to understand and, you know, we can build a history out of that. That I think is certainly something that comes out in very, different ways, of course, in Shoah and something like the Tattooist of Auschwitz. But there probably is something

to it to say that it's part of a wider cultural shift. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can buy that.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:27.086)
And certainly, think it's at least fair to say that Shoa puts survivor testimony on the stage in a way that nothing had done before. The idea that, mean, again, this is probably a conversation for another podcast, it's not to say that survivors hadn't been giving testimony before Shoa, but I think the idea that they...

the idea in the general public that there are these people out there that can tell these stories and the way that they're put on the screen in video, I suspect was a new thing that Lanzmann does, least in sort of a big budget, or maybe not big budget, but big impact kind of way, right? maybe I wonder if there's some impact on a lot of the...

beginnings of the rush to collect testimony that happened sort of around that time period you know in the eighties you know the people are if people watch this film like well these people are telling a really important histories we should go out and collect more of them to make sure that we have we've conserved these things but it may be i'm not that yet i'm not the film expert so

Dominic (01:17:34.777)
Yeah.

Dominic (01:17:53.647)
Yeah, I mean, obviously, the way that it's often talked about, you know, again, any kind of account that sort of sees a simple straightforward shift is going to be a simplification. But the way it is often talked about is that it's the Eichmann trial, right, in 1961, that becomes that, inaugurates the era of the witness, the era of testimony. Because this is the moment where

Jewish survivors are talking about their experiences and you hear them talk about them at length and they're given the space to do that. But so I my feeling probably is that you'd want to see that as part of a kind of wider set of shifts, as I say. I think surely, surely that there is something to be said. Like this seems to be one of these moments where testimony

becomes a key way to understanding something significant about the Holocaust. Even if it is something that's gathered in a way that we might feel quite uncomfortable about and certainly wouldn't pass any academic ethics review or something like that. And of course, mean, there's that kind of relationship between Schindler's List and video testimony that, you know, Spielberg, it's after that that Spielberg funds the

Waitman Beorn (01:19:02.766)
you

Dominic (01:19:17.163)
show about foundation and all those interviews and those.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:17.228)
Yeah. And even, and even in the film itself, you know, the way the film ends with the actual survivors being included in the film, you know, is an interesting, it's not testimony per se, but it does, it does lend, and it's not about Sinner's List, you know, but it does lend that film an interesting sort of gravitas because it's, it's, literally saying like, here's the actor that played this human being, but here's the actual human being. And so, you know, this is, this is in some way a sort of truer.

Dominic (01:19:22.66)
Uh-huh.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:47.48)
kind of depiction of the story because we actually have people here.

Dominic (01:19:52.249)
Which goes back to what the book, right, Schindler's Ark, that that is something that was a documentary novel that's based upon the author interviewing survivors.

Waitman Beorn (01:20:04.758)
Yeah. Well,

Dominic (01:20:07.331)
That's their stories that come up.

Waitman Beorn (01:20:09.08)
Thank you so much for coming on. want to end with our final question that we normally do, which is sort of what is a book that you'd recommend or that's been influential for you on the Holocaust? And again, as always, you are not contractually committed to this book beyond this five minutes when you've mentioned it, but what would you recommend?

Dominic (01:20:31.021)
Well, okay, so I thought about this. I mean, there is a lot of very interesting recent work that's been done on Shoah and talking about the outtakes. And so in some ways that I could say, well, you should go and have a look at that. These are academic books, there's some absolutely fascinating work that's being done there. But I thought in addition to that, instead of that, the one that I'd recommend is only just come out.

And it's by Hannah Pauling Goli. And it's called Occupied Words, What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish. And I think it's that kind of focus on the victims survivors in this book's case, the victims, right, because it's not just talking about testimony that comes after liberation, after the end of the war, but some that was produced within it. But she's talking about

the language that was spoken by the majority or the largest group of victims of the Holocaust, Yiddish, and how it is that it changed in the Holocaust, in the Horm, as it's called in Yiddish. And so how it produced a different kind of language, which Hannah calls Horm Yiddish, so Holocaust Yiddish, and how that reflects

both what was done to those people, but the ways in which they again navigated it made sense of it created a kind of culture, although it's in many ways a kind of uncomfortable and difficult culture to think about, but a kind of culture that people afterwards, several Yiddish language researchers soon after the war said this might be a kind of basis for a Yiddish language culture for us to build on. So it's something that we want to preserve and want to understand.

I think it's a really extraordinary piece of work, looking in a lot of ways just at particular words and saying, well, this is this word. OK, where did it come from? What does it mean? How was it used? Why did it come about? What were people trying to express by using it? This is really an important way of getting insight into the lives and the deaths of people who were living and dying through the Holocaust.

Waitman Beorn (01:22:58.21)
Well, great. That's fascinating. And I'll put that in the show notes, as always, folks, and also on the reading list, which is also linked to the podcast. For everyone, thanks for listening. As always, I keep saying it, but I'd love to hear more of your thoughts and comments and evaluations on iTunes. Give us a rating. It really helps us. Algorithms is a positive algorithm. isn't a creepy Twitter algorithm. It's one of the good ones.

If you can, give us a rating, give us a comment, let us know what you're thinking. And thanks for listening. And again, Dominic, thanks so much for coming on. was really great talking about this.

Dominic (01:23:38.297)
Thanks for having me on.