Shoah, the Hebrew word for annihilation, is the title of Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film on the Holocaust, and of his book[1] containing the complete text. The film caused a stir in Paris, where it was released this spring, and in the United States, where it was shown for the first time at the New York Film Festival in October.

Not a professional film director but a medical doctor, Lanzmann worked on Shoah for ten years and selected finally nine and a half hours from 350 hours of material. The film brings together the interviews Lanzmann himself conducted with Jewish survivors, their Nazi persecutors, and predominantly Polish onlookers, all of whom speak in front of his camera. It also includes an extremely skillful montage of images connected, in some way or other, to their testimony. The film contains no archival footage but shows the sites of extermination camps, railway stations, villages, cities, and landscapes mostly situated in Poland and recorded exactly the way they looked when Lanzmann visited them.

Upon reading about Shoah, one feels at first reluctant to see it. One fears that one will be confronted, as many times before, with an unsuccessful attempt to deal with a chapter of history that, at once stereotypical and unique, resists comprehension. The difficulty results from the gap between the banal truth that human beings are capable of anything—that they have been each others prey throughout history—and the sheer novelty of the form and scale of