Performing Arts, History & Criticism, Documentaries, England, World War II 

Here is the complete text of Claude Lanzmann's film, whose publication will coincide with eh American release, following the successful launching in Paris. With all that has been written about the Holocaust, Shoah is an extraordinary achievement. The result of years of research, the nine-and-a-half-hour film is an oral history of the Holocaust that brings together a full range of witnesses: the SS officers who served in the death camps; the Polish villagers who tilled their fields within yards the crematoriums; the Germans who resettled occupied Poland, moving into ht houses whose Jewish owners has been sent to their death; the state employee who sold Jews halter excursion tickets to the camps- one way; Western scholars of the Holocaust. And then there are the survivors themselves: a Polish barber shop cut the hair of women he knew were to dies in the next few minutes; a thirteen-year-old boy who was to work in the death camp's "special squad"; the Pole who was taken into the Warsaw ghetto so that he could report to the outside world what he has seen; a woman who lived in hiding in Berlin for most of the war, in anguish a that fate her people and her own escape from it. The film shows no archival footage, and it is thought the words themselves that the imagination recreates the world described in theses words- a way of getting at the truth that is far more shocking than the depiction of actual images. Shoah is unforgettable, and is is destined to become a landmark of film and history. - from Amzon