“We were taken to a barracks. The whole place stank. Piled about five feet high in a jumbled mass, were all the things people could conceivably have brought. Clothes, suitcases, everything stacked in a solid mass. On top of it, jumping around like demons, people were making bundles and carrying them outside. It was turned over to one of these men. His armband said ‘Squad Leader’. He shouted, and I understood that I was also to pick up clothing, bundle it, and take it somewhere. As I worked, I asked him: “What’s going on? Where are the ones who stripped?” And he replied: “Dead! All Dead!” But it still hadn’t sunk in, I didn’t believe it. He’d used the Yiddish word. It was the first time I’d had heard Yiddish spoken. He didn’t say it very loud, and I saw he had tears in his eyes. Suddenly, he started shouting, and raised his whip. Out of the corner of my eye I saw an SS man coming. And I understood that I was to ask no more questions, but just to rush outside with the package.”

The director of the nine hour long Shoah (1985), Claude Lanzmann, disliked the use of the word ‘documentary’ to describe his work – and you can see why. Every part of Shoah recoils from the idea of memorialising or documenting the past. Instead, Lanzmann’s approach is to focus entirely on the state of the Holocaust at the time he was making the film.

He spent over ten years travelling around Europe and America, interviewing survivors of the Nazi death camps, witnesses from the villages where the camps were built, the Nazis who worked in the camps and those who supported them. The framework of the film are these interviews – arranged non-chronologically – and intercut with slow, lingering shots of the locations they are talking about – not historical footage but as they were in the 1970s and 1980s – overgrown, empty and abandoned. Shoah is not a film that attempts to recreate the past, but one that pinpoints the magnitude of the Holocaust by demonstrating how is affects people in the present: the survivors recount their experiences stoically and often abstractly until invariably a particular memory breaks them and Lanzmann apologetically but firmly makes them continue. The perpetrators  are equally abstract, recounting the past like it is another world and (in their equivalent to the cracking emotions of the survivors) only reacting personally to Lanzmann’s questioning by claiming their ignorance of the horrors. The interviews with the witnesses  from the Eastern European villages are the strangest, recounting the events almost nostalgically.

Unlike Alain Resnais’ groundbreaking and raw Night and Fog (1955) or Marcel Ophüls’ micro-historical double bill The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) and Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), Shoah is not a documentary about the  Second World War or the Holocaust – it’s an act of witnessing. It’s a demonstration of how the Holocaust didn’t end with the liberation of the camps. The construction of Shoah and the epic feat of Lanzmann’s journey exposes how the Holocaust carries on, scaring the emotions of those involved: as alive in their memories and their every day acts as the locations of the camps are decaying and sinking beneath the grass.