Shoah

Shoah is the text of Claude Lanzmann's nine-and-a-half-hour documentary film on the Nazi extermination camps. Shoah is the Hebrew word for Holocaust. The film came out in 1985, and this book sets down what is said in it.

Lanzmann uses no re-creation, no archival footage and no other visual record of the events. The film rests entirely on spoken testimony from Jewish, Polish and German witnesses. Their words lay out the bureaucratic machinery of the Final Solution in exact and unsparing detail, and events that belong to the past are heard as if they were happening now.

The book is a work of oral history and documentation. It gathers the testimony of survivors, participants, witnesses and scholars in a format meant to be easy to read. Those who speak are the only guides to what happened, so the text moves from voice to voice rather than following a single narrator.

This tenth anniversary edition appeared on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the camps. It has been revised and corrected so that it reflects the actual testimony of the people interviewed more accurately. The subject is the worst horror of the twentieth century, and the book treats it without softening.