Israelis use the same Hebrew word, shoah (holocaust), for the liquidation of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, as they do for Hitler's killing of six million Jews in Europe.
On the occasion of the re-release of Claude Lanzmann's film "Shoah," one of the summits of cinematic history, I wrote a Critic's Notebook (available to subscribers) for the magazine this week about the philosophical implications of the filmmaker's methods.
Mikhail Gorbachev ordered a few public screenings in the Soviet Union, in 1989; Václav Havel saw "Shoah" in a Czechoslovak prison; the film's ongoing travels around the world remain newsworthy, as when, in January, it was shown on state television for the first time in Turkey.
Lanzmann also refers (as he has on other occasions, as in the autobiography) to the choice of the word itself, "Shoah," instead of the familiar term "Holocaust": I worked for twelve years on the film without having a name for it.
"Shoah" — a film that, though conjuring death, is centered on discussions with survivors — evokes the reappropriation of violence by Jews facing extermination.
Yet without "Shoah" "Son of Saul" would be meaningless; in the light of "Shoah," "Son of Saul" — though useful and provocative — is, nonetheless, nearly superfluous.
Among the heroes of "Shoah" (and "heroes" is just the right word; the movie has villains, too) are Filip Müller, who, as part of a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, took part in getting people into gas chambers and getting corpses out of them; and Abraham Bomba, one of the barbers in Treblinka, who cut the hair of Jews who were about to be murdered in gas chambers.
He was one of the minority of Slovak Jews to survive the Shoah: 80% of the country's Jewish population was murdered during the second world war.
"Remember", said President Jacques Chirac, as he unveiled a Shoah Memorial in Paris that features a wall engraved with 76,000 names of those sent to their deaths from France.
For Israelis, as Mr Bird remarks, "the Shoah [the Holocaust] always trumps the Nakba [the catastrophe, or dispossession]".
The New York Times called the film "intellectually repellent", but Claude Lanzmann, the director of a landmark Holocaust documentary, "Shoah", praised Mr Nemes for making the "anti-'Schindler's List'".Mr Lanzmann congratulated Mr Nemes personally inside Cannes's Grand Théâtre Lumière, the event's main temple.
