Today at 4 p.m. at the Sobibór Memorial Site, on the grounds of the former German extermination camp, a panel discussion entitled "40 Years After ‘Shoah’. The Holocaust in the light of Claude Lanzmann's documentary.“ The event inaugurated an international conference entitled ”Death trains – rail transports to German death camps. State of knowledge and research proposals," organized in cooperation with the State Museum at Majdanek and the PolishMinistry of Culture and National Heritage.
The conference is not only a space for the exchange of the latest research knowledge, but also an opportunity to reflect on the cultural and educational dimensions of Holocaust testimonies. The highlight of the first day of the event was a panel discussion on the film Shoah – Claude Lanzmann's 1985 documentary, which lasts over nine hours and has been considered one of the most important testimonies of the Holocaust for decades.
A new way of thinking about the Holocaust
The panel participants emphasized the groundbreaking nature of the film, which not only set a new paradigm in documentary storytelling, but also had a profound impact on their personal and professional experiences.
Dr. Katarzyna Person, director of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, admitted:
"It was a film that completely changed my thinking about the Holocaust. (...) When I saw it for the first time at the age of 18, it shook me deeply. (...) From a historian's perspective, I can say that the film gave me, above all, perspective and helped me understand the interrelationships between victims, perpetrators, and witnesses, who are never separate from each other."
According to Person, Shoah transforms the testimonies of survivors—previously treated as secondary sources—into a guide to the “landscape of death and the Holocaust.”
Topography of Remembrance
Dr. Piotr Witek (UMCS) drew attention to the unique, almost research-like nature of Lanzmann's work:
"For me, this film is a research project, a work of research art, where the director is the researcher. He goes into the field, conceptualizes it, conducts interviews, and has clear tactics for conducting them. (...) Lanzmann does not hide behind the camera; we see the entire process of his work."
He also added that the Shoah film set is a kind of laboratory—a place where knowledge is not only organized, but actually produced. “It is a staging that does not diminish the historical value of the film.” Dr. Bartosz Kwieciński (Jagiellonian University) emphasized Lanzmann's influence on the development of oral history:
“Lanzmann opened up the entire category of oral history, the creator of our story about the Holocaust.”
A document of historical value
Although, as dr Kwieciński admitted, the memories of witnesses more than three decades after the Holocaust were sometimes inconsistent, their testimonies “were extremely important as a source of the topography of the Holocaust.” The participants agreed that Shoah is not a classic documentary film, but a polyphony of witnesses – a staging that does not obscure the truth, but brings it out.
However, it was also acknowledged that Lanzmann's work had certain flaws resulting from his character. The film was Francocentric, which affected the quality of translations from other languages, the way witnesses and Poland were portrayed, which was in line with the stereotypes that prevailed in Western countries after the war. Despite these significant flaws, the participants agreed that the importance of the film, which presents the testimonies of so many eyewitnesses to the Holocaust, cannot be dismissed, nor can the fact that it was a revolutionary and unique production. According to Dr. Tomasz Kranz, director of the State Museum at Majdanek, who led the debate, Lanzmann's documentary has not only stood the test of time, but continues to raise fundamental questions about the nature of memory, testimony, and representation.
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