Adam Kirsch reviews a memoir by Claude Lanzmann, who is best known for Shoah, the 9-hour documentary on the Holocaust:
One of the most famous scenes in the film is his interview with Abraham Bomba, the so-called "Barber of Treblinka," a Jewish prisoner who was forced to cut women's hair before they were sent to the gas chamber. … [Bomba] finds one memory too hard to share—the day when a fellow barber saw his wife and child enter the undressing room. At this moment in the film, for the first time, Bomba breaks down and can't go on, until Lanzmann insists: "You have to do it. We have to do it."
There is something cruel about this insistence—most of us could not force a Holocaust survivor to return to the worst moment of his life. But for Lanzmann, Shoah was not just a film, it was a historical mission and a life work, and he was willing to do just about anything to get it made. "Abraham's tears were as precious to me as blood, the seal of truth, its very incarnation," he writes. "Some people have suggested some sort of sadism on my part in this perilous scene, while on the contrary I consider it to be the epitome of reverence and supportiveness, which is not to tiptoe away in the face of suffering, but to obey the categorical imperative of the search for and the transmission of truth."
The full 15 minute scene is here. David Rieff explains how Lanzmann understood the project:
“Like most Jews of my generation,” he observes, “I felt that I innately knew about [the Holocaust], that it was in my blood and hence I did not have to learn about it, to come face to face with the terrifying reality.” The sentence is even stronger as Lanzmann wrote it, for the translator omits two key words after “face to face”: sans échappatoire, “with no way out.” Lanzmann condemns himself before condemning anyone else. The reality, he writes, was that he “knew nothing, nothing but a statistic, an abstract number: six million of our people had been murdered.” Over the course of the twelve years that he worked on it—as an artist, Lanzmann has always been a marathoner rather than a sprinter—by what he calls a process of “trial and error,” he came to believe that the real subject of his film was “death itself, death rather than survival,” which had been the theme of the greatest works by survivors of the camps, of whom the most eloquent was almost certainly Primo Levi.
The Dish 