Shoah, Shoah, Shoah, Shoah. Hebrew for: abyss, destruction, darkness, great catastrophe, disaster, doom. In the mid-1980s, the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann presented SHOAH, one of the most radical and comprehensive film works about the annihilation of European Jewry under National Socialism. 12 years of work, 350 hours of material, 9 1/2 hours of film against forgetting. This epic large-scale project dispenses with music, any form of commentary and, above all, historical archive material - the images of mass graves, gas chambers, emaciated bodies. The focus is not on the documents of the past, but on the presentness of remembrance. Lanzmann visited the places of extermination, the "death factories" of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz, and found places over which grass had grown. Hence the insistence with which he tracked down the last eyewitnesses of the catastrophe in Poland, Israel, the USA and Germany - rare survivors of the "Sonderkommandos", bystanders and also Nazi perpetrators - and questioned them about deportation and everyday life in the camp. But the experience pushes with all its might into oblivion. It took a great deal of psychologically trained effort and a sophisticated questioning technique to get the respondents to speak and to elicit from them what could not be managed. Without chronological order and deliberately presented in fragments, the interviews result in a subtly woven network of intertwined perspectives on the incomprehensible. Completed 40 years after the end of the war, the film caused a sensation and admiration.

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