Editor’s Note: Freeline Media’s movie critic, Mike Fried, reviews one of the most impactful films ever made about the Holocaust on this week that marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27.
By MIKE FRIED
So when I told editor-in-chief Michael Freeman that I watched all 9 and one half hours of Shoah in one day, he said to me “You should review it.” And I was thinking that, “Well, it is a thoroughly unconventional movie because it is not a documentary, it is not a drama, but it is more of a reminiscence of both survivors and local eyewitnesses to the events of the Holocaust” and I really did not know how I would accomplish this.
But after I watched all of the films included in the Criterion Shoah set (the titular film, the Karski Report, Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. and A Visitor from the Living), I watched Frank Pierson’s extraordinary political drama Conspiracy, in which the Third Reich’s “Final Solution” was discussed and planned with all the vivaciousness of a corporate business meeting — and that gave me my hook.
If you haven’t seen Conspiracy, first of all, you should. It so directly addresses the “banality of evil” that Hannah Arendt warned about. Certain liberties have been taken with the story but nothing that affects the story itself. It is a 96 minute movie that describes a 90 minute conference. The Emmy-winning screenplay is based on the sole remaining transcript of the Wannsee conference and it is an extraordinary pseudo-documentary. Populated by an extraordinary A-List cast including Kenneth Branagh (Emmy Award winner) as Reinhard Heydrich, Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann (Golden Globe Winner), Colin Firth as Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, Ben Daniels as Josef Bühler, and David Threlfall as F.W. Kritzinger. Hell, it even has Tom Hiddleston in one of his first roles as a telephone operator.
As they discuss what to do with the Jews, there are often interruptions, as with every meeting, and the men at the table make jokes. And then it is down to business. What makes this movie so chilling is the matter-of-factness with which Heydrich wants to deal with the staggering number of Jews that confronts them. Branagh and Tucci are the souls of the piece — or, more accurately, the soullessness of the piece — and these men sit around the table making these decisions. “Let us have some refreshments in here and pretend we are the Board of I.G. Farben,” says Heydrich. It is done cold and unemotionally, and done in such a way as to be a warning that these type of decisions are made similar to business decisions. And it is a movie that everyone should see because we are at an inflection point in history.
That brings us to the Shoah and its aforementioned offshoots.
Like I said, these are not documentaries but, rather, preserved testimonies.
The film deals primarily with three death camps: Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Chelmno.
And while there is a heavy aura surrounding all of the testimonies, the one thing that the two movies have in common is that they are both chilling precisely because of their directness. There is a scene with a Survivor named Abraham Bomba who, while cutting hair in a barbershop, speaks as to how he cut the hair of women in the gas chambers in a quietly dispassionate manner. He explains in great detail how he had two minutes to cut the hair off the head and shows how he does it with his customer in his chair. He explains how the women came into the gas chamber — which they thought were showers — totally naked and vulnerable and that they were to sit on these long benches, have their hair cut, and then get up and stand in a corner. It is sad portion of the film that goes on for about 15 minutes and my thought was how could Mr. Bomba remain so calm and impassive. The fact is, he needed that customer in front of him so he could provide his story in an impassioned fashion. But once he was finished with his customer, Mr. Bomba just breaks down.
That is the secret behind Claude Lanzmann’s film. It is a view of an event that took place 30 years before, yet which still brings pain.
Or there is Filip Müller, a Slovak Jew who was required to incinerate the bodies that came from the gas chambers. So close was he to the gas chambers was Müller, that he could hear the prisoners singing as he was told they were going into what they thought were the showers.
One of the more interesting blowbacks to the film, which is a stone-cold masterpiece, was from the Polish government that accused the film of making it look like it was complicit in the genocide.
Well, I can’t say that I saw that but one of the more interesting sections of the film were interviews with Polish citizens who three decades earlier did not do anything to prevent the atrocities — but could they have? Nevertheless, many of the comments from these middle-aged and elderly people shows a certain ambivalence when it comes to the issues of the Jewish people. Many of the comments are downright anti-semitic and shows the ignorance of small town people in Poland.
Lanzmann contrasts that with an extended 40-minute interview with Jan Karski, a non-Jewish Polish resistance fighter, who became the face of the Polish resistance. He was not only a fighter but also an emissary to other countries in order to help turn the tide against the Nazis. Karski snuck into the Warsaw Ghetto and broke down in tears several times during his interview. He was such a forceful personality that a separate documentary The Karski Report was produced by Lanzmann that detailed Karski’s meetings with President Roosevelt and, even more interestingly, Justice Felix Frankfurter.
But it wasn’t only Jews and Jewish allies that were interviewed. Certain Germans were interviewed, most notably Franz Suchomel, an Unterscharführer in the SS at Treblinka. He did not want to be recorded so Lanzmann used secret cameras and he described in clinically precise and detached detail how the mechanics of the unloading of the trains were done. But while his narration in this respect seems reliable, his protestations that he did not know of the extermination before he arrived at Treblinka and that he cried when he first saw the corpses fall on deaf ears — at least my deaf ears.
One of the most interesting parts of the film was the interview with Henryk Gawkowski, a Polish railway worker who drove the locomotives to Treblinka. Lanzmann hired a train to run on the same track and had Gawkowski piloted the train to the camp; he said that had he not agreed to drive the trains. It was likely that he would be sent to a work camp or, worse, shot. German officers gave the train drivers alcohol and Gawkowski drank himself into a state of inebriation to in order to make his work bearable. He is a highly believable witness and for this he becomes the face of the movie, being liberally featured in the film’s poster.
I’ve mentioned The Karski Report but I should also mention the companion piece “Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m.” about the uprising of 600 prisoners against the Nazi officers, 12 of the Nazis being killed as many prisoners escaped with nearly 60 prisoners surviving the end of World War II. The story is told through the words of Yehuda Lerner and it is an awakening as to the power of a few. It’s purely an interview with clips of modern day Poland.
And that brings us to a final and very interesting point. Lanzmann makes his points without showing any historical footage; there are no pictures of Nazi atrocities, there are no past references except the words of the interviewees, some of whom are subjected to a static camera shot of many, many minutes. It’s as if testimony is being given.
And, in a way it was.
What Conspiracy and Shoah have in common is proven by the old saying: “Evil prospers when good men do nothing.”
Yes, I do wear my heart on my sleeve, but I don’t choose to make this political, except to say Holocaust Deniers are idiots.
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@yahoo.com and mike.fried@yahoo.com.
