Shoah

(550mins - 1985)

Featuring:

Simon Srebnik, Michael Podchlebnik, Motke Zaidl, Pan Falborski, Rudolf Vrba, Abraham Bomba

This French documentary was shot on location all over Europe in Israel and America. Its aim is to be a testament to the genocide that took place against the Jewish people in Nazis occupied Europe.

It is a real eye opener. You will be taken on a journey that will inform you how quickly the same people can go from saying how terrible the holocaust was to proclaiming that it was a punishment for the death of Christ; who incidentally was also a Jew. To others who were motivated by the envy of Jewish wealth and laugh at the memory of wealthy Jews arriving at the death camps in expensive starched white shirts. To those who turned a blind eye to the killing and others who themselves killed. Then all you are left with are the survivors of this heinous crime who are trying to reintegrate themselves in to the human community that was so evil towards them. With such words as "if you were to lick my heart now, it would poison you" optimism dies.

The shoah was not the first time that mass murder has taken place, nor was it the last but through this film we can gain insight in to all such injustices. All the news reports of formerly friendly neighbours killing each other fall in to place. They were never friends. They just exchanged polite words in order to keep a fragile peace and that being the case one could argue , why bother.

You will not be presented with graphic pictures and news footage here, just a collection of interviews and this is enough. The most mortifying of all being the tales of death panic. Death panic being the act of emptying your bowels through fear because you know that you are about to die and couple that with the fact that this is being suffered by naked people as they queue up outside the gas chambers awaiting their turn.

This six hour long documentary works in chronological order to detail the progression made by the nazis as they educated themselves through a trial and error process of logistics in the task of successfully carrying out the final solution.

What you see and hear here will haunt you for the rest of your life.