Shoah (1985 Claude Lanzmann)

Well. That took a while to watch. I started it on Monday - Holocaust Memorial Day. It's true what they say - it's the accumulation (and at times repetition) of the detail that ultimately makes it so overwhelming. Lanzmann (a Jew who fought with the Resistance in WWII) particularly thanked Ziva Postec, "who worked beside me day after day for five years on the editing of the film".

The thirteen year old at the extermination camps who sang on the river. Knowing the Russians were coming, the guards shot every one of them left in the head - but somehow he still survived. (Was he in fact brain damaged?) One of two survivors out of 400,000 killed at Chelmno. "Why do you smile so much?" "I'm alive, and it's better to smile." That the town of Auschwitz was 80 % Jewish - the irony. Lanzmann and his invaluable Polish translator Barbara Janicka, who's never fazed by anything she's translating.

For those who disbelieve - the evidence is all in the 'special train' reports.

The Jews' stolen property and possessions were used to pay for their transportation to the camps - they financed their own annihilation. The irony. "There was no budget for the extermination of the Jews." And by extension, they had also payed for the construction of the camps and the gas that killed them.

Often dispassionate testimonials. A calm camera. Its endless journey across country, on railways, filming often in bleak winter. Trains as instruments of death. The secrecy of the whole thing.

The ex-Nazis, secretly filmed. None seem regretful / aware. The Special Trains boss who claimed he knew nothing of Treblinka.

The scale of it all - so horrifyingly big. The brutality of the guards. How did the survivors cope? "By shutting down". But you can't unsee what you've seen.

The Poles who were aware what was going on. "Before the war, the Jews and the Germans ran all the businesses." Some definitely thought they were better off without them.

A Czech worker at Auschwitz was so appalled he stepped into the gas chamber - but a woman who knew him said "What good would that do?"

It was the above section of the film, beginning with Rudolf Vrba trying to get the healthier Czechs to revolt, ending in the gas chambers, that I found the most upsetting.

Raul Hilberg, preeminent Holocaust scholar

Vrba was the Auschwitz escapee. I read the publication of his co-authored Vrba-Wetzler report in 1944 probably prevented the extermination of 200,000 Hungarians who were destined for a death camp.

And through the nine hours I hadn't really thought about my own quarter-Jewish connection to the material. It was only after that I remembered once having a conversation with my mum about how the Holocaust had affected my family. She reassured me that her husband's family had immigrated from the Netherlands before World War One, way before Hitler.. but that some of the extended family left back there had been.. what's that word in the film? "Processed". So thinking about that was quite a kick in the gut.  (Yes - the euphemistic language. In one memorandum about the gas trucks the Jews are referred to as the "merchandise", and the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto aren't being sent to their death in Treblinka but being "resettled".)

But the single thought I was left with was how could the German / Ukrainian / Lithuanian soldiers, the guards, have gone through with their endless horrifying treatment of the people without objecting or rebelling? How could they live with their actions?