Route of the exhibition Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, the unpublished recordings

Photography: Audio cassettes from the Lanzmann collection; Jewish Museum of Berlin, photo: Roman Trick.

First Part – “It’s a Holocaust inquiry.”

The research

In these recordings, Claude Lanzmann explains his film project while answering the questions of his interlocutors. He addresses his methods and perspectives, but also the psychological challenges encountered, personal motivations or financial and organizational conditions.

PART TWO – "You can remain perfectly silent in front of the camera." 

Inaudible voices.

Some of the interviewees do not wish to speak in front of the camera. Here are three people that Claude Lanzmann did not manage to convince to participate in the filming. Ilana Safran, who recounts her deportation from the Netherlands to Sobibor (Poland), her arrival at the extermination camp and the revolt of the prisoners. She also describes how, in the mid-1960s, when she was called to testify at the trial of Sobibor, she had to identify the culprits.

Entrepreneur Hermann Gräbe describes the circumstances in which he witnessed massacres committed by the Nazis in occupied Ukraine and how he managed to protect hundreds of forced workers from the Nazis. To do this, he was helped in this task by Maria Bobrow, herself a forced worker employed in his company.

PART 3 – "I can’t talk about the ghetto." 

The Holocaust in Lithuania

From the beginning of his research, Claude Lanzmann took a particular interest in the massacre of Lithuanian Jews. The audio recordings retrace the chronology of the deadly events that took place under the German occupation since the summer of 1941. Eyewitnesses recount pogroms perpetrated by the local population. They talk about the massacres committed by a mobile killing unit (SS Einsatzkommando) in Fort 9 of Kaunas and in the forest of Ponary, near Vilnius: during the first half of 1941, these units assassinate three quarters of the Jewish population. In their stories, the survivors also try to find the words to describe life in the ghettos of Kaunas, Šiauliai and Vilnius. The film will finally address this subject very little.

Fourth Part – “No, it’s over for me!” 

The criminals

Claude Lanzmann understood very early that he also wanted to question the criminals for his film. Thus he sought in Germany high-ranking officials, those who implemented the genocide, but also bureaucrats, profiteers, those who testified in post-war trials. The director and his collaborators visit criminals at their home without informing them. In many cases, the conversation stops on the doorstep. When they are received, they hide the recorder at the bottom of a pocket. Criminals, when they agree to speak, get entangled in justifications, seek to protect themselves through egocentric claims, distort the reality of their involvement and deny their guilt.

Fifth Part – “It was a macabre march.” 

First trip to Poland

The first trip to Poland was decisive for Claude Lanzmann in his approach to the genocide of the Jews and Jewish women of Europe.  Indeed, to make this trip, he will wait until he has arrived at the end of his research. When, at the beginning of 1978, he went to the places of persecution and extermination, he was imbued with knowledge acquired in books, archives and through countless interviews. The presence of history, which he is confronted with in Poland, strikes him with an unexpected force. The sound recordings made on site document not only the conversations with the witnesses, but also the impressions felt by Lanzmann during his visits to the premises. The same year, Claude Lanzmann returns to Poland and begins filming Shoah.

Sixth Part – “This cannot be done painlessly.”

The sound and the image

Only a few people appear in the audio recordings, in the film Shoah and in the important filmed material of the film: Jan Piwoński, whose interview sequences at the station of Sobibór play an important role in Shoah. Leon Kantarowski, who appears briefly in a scene before the church of Chełmno where he was organist. Tadeusz Pankiewicz, the non-Jewish pharmacist of the Krakow ghetto, whose video recordings were not used for Shoah. As well as Hillel Kook, who, in his interview, present only in the audio archives, reproaches the American government for not having committed itself to the rescue of the Jews and Jews of Europe.

Insights and perspectives

The audio recordings reflect only part of the work of several years that preceded the film Shoah. The conversations conducted in the context of this research were not always recorded. The private archives of Claude Lanzmann contain letters, lists, notes and files dating from this period of research, which give an additional insight into the practical work of the director and his collaborators.

For an in-depth approach to the Lanzmann collection, the exhibition interviews are transcribed in their entirety, translated and contextualized by the Jewish Museum of Berlin. This digital edition is continuously enriched and will be fully available by the end of 2027 on the website of the Jewish Museum Berlin. 

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