Photo: Claude Lanzmann's Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 P.M.
Omitted from the classic Shoah, this 1979 interview between director Claude Lanzmann and Holocaust survivor Yehuda Lerner is an unsentimental celebration of Jewish perseverance at the Sobibor concentration camp. Lanzmann's slow-crawling camera stresses how Poland is still haunted by Hitler's slaughter: the moans of the dead seem embedded in blades of grass and pieces of stone. Lanzmann focuses on a field of geese as Lerner recalls the twisted poetry of Nazi pathology; spectators claimed that the Jews "cried like geese" when they were slaughtered (the animals were reared at some camps, provoked into quacking during exterminations). These are minor yet tragic asides to Lanzmann's stringent gaze, which hardly moves from the stoic face of Lerner, whose story of survival is an affront to the shameful notion that Jews accepted their fates without struggle.
Omitted from the classic Shoah, this 1979 interview between director Claude Lanzmann and Holocaust survivor Yehuda Lerner is an unsentimental celebration of Jewish perseverance at the Sobibor concentration camp. Lanzmann's slow-crawling camera stresses how Poland is still haunted by Hitler's slaughter: the moans of the dead seem embedded in blades of grass and pieces of stone. Lanzmann focuses on a field of geese as Lerner recalls the twisted poetry of Nazi pathology; spectators claimed that the Jews "cried like geese" when they were slaughtered (the animals were reared at some camps, provoked into quacking during exterminations). These are minor yet tragic asides to Lanzmann's stringent gaze, which hardly moves from the stoic face of Lerner, whose story of survival is an affront to the shameful notion that Jews accepted their fates without struggle.
