There are six Nazis in Shoah. Of those, three were filmed without their knowledge, the other three with a standard camera. But I filmed five others who do not appear in the film for reasons relating to the structure and composition of the film. What they had to say is in a safe place. The greatest loss in the Schubert affair is that no members of the Einsatzgruppen appear in Shoah. This was crucial to me. I had tried everything with the Einsatzgruppen executioners and I had failed. The footage I obtained by violating Ahrensburg airspace could not be used, both because the terms of my agreement with the prosecutor precluded it and also because most of the footage was of feet and ankles. As to the substance of the interview, we were still at the preliminary stages, I had barely had time to bring Schubert out of his shell. Not prepared to give up entirely, I hoped I might be able to film one of the Einsatzgruppen’s victims whom I had located in Israel, a woman named Rivka Yossilevska. She was a tall, very thin woman with a deeply sorrowful face, her whole being was pain. With several bullets in her body, she had found herself still alive, buried under a pile of bloody corpses in a mass grave in Liepāja, Latvia, and had managed to drag herself from a pit perfunctorily covered in earth. Nothing in the world would persuade her to tell her story in front of my camera, she did not have the strength and would not give in to my pleas.
One of the reasons why, in spite of my reservations, I was kind to Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes [The Kindly Ones] was because, in the first part at least, he depicts the Einsatzgruppen with a precision that the breadth of my work allowed me to understand. I met, in the flesh, many of the people he writes about, people he had never met; for the others we had read the same books, principally Hilberg, and I found his fictional re-creation of Babi Yar, for instance, of the forced march of the Jews of Kiev to the ravines of death, utterly convincing, as I did the monologues he attributes to Paul Blobel, one of the two men hanged after the trial. The same Blobel who one day, driving past the mass grave while the soil was still shifting from the gas released by the corpses, proudly said to his passenger, ‘Hier sind meine Juden begraben’ [‘This is where my Jews are buried’]. Having read the passages about the Einsatzgruppen in Les Bienveillantes, I said, ‘Only two people are capable of understanding it all the way through: Hilberg and me.’ This, needless to say, was misunderstood and stupidly attributed to some sort of conceited outburst. The important part of the phrase was ‘all the way through’. To Hilberg and to me the names Streckenbach and Pretzsch and Düben, which I mentioned earlier and which appear in the novel, are not fictional, interchangeable names, or real but abstract names, they are the echo of an immense objective study that grounds them and gives them life.
This was not the only case of spite and unwillingness to understand, far from it. The photographic image, it seems to me, has become a new idol: people need images, need them of everything and of everywhere, they alone are the measure, the only witness to truth. It is commonly agreed that there were no photographs of the gas chambers, by which I mean images of men, women and children actually being gassed inside them. Some free-thinkers still claim that, with time and a good investigator, they will be flushed out. Why not? The fact is that people died in darkness and in the sixty-five years since the events, not one image has been found. A few years ago, in a blaze of publicity, there was an exhibition of photos at the Hôtel de Sully in the heart of the Marais, in Paris, an exhibition that claimed to assemble everything, to gather together the entire experience of the camps, and was indeed entitled Mémoire des camps. The exhibition was accompanied by a huge catalogue of images and texts written by a ‘historian of photography’, a ‘director of photographic heritage’, a photographer, an ‘art historian’ and a simple ‘historian’. The exhibition itself was a confusing ragbag that purported to be exhaustive – though every photograph here had been seen a thousand times before – and it haphazardly conflated the various periods of Nazism, the killers and the victims, the piles of corpses and the living. Two photos of beaten, swollen faces were exhibited side by side, one of a prisoner beaten by an SS officer, the other of a Nazi killer with a black eye given him by a prisoner who had just been freed after the liberation of a camp. Obviously, there was nothing on the extermination camps in Poland: Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibór or Chełmno: no images there.
Even if one is prepared to grant that the motives of those organizing the exhibition were pure, there was, in the very principle of this exhibition, something profoundly shocking that made one extremely uneasy about its realization: the tangible subconscious pleasure that had gone into the selection and the display of the photographs in the various rooms. Outrage rumbled and finally exploded, for me as for many others, when I discovered that this jumbled collection was intended to showcase, like precious stones, ‘four photographs, ripped from hell itself’; these were presented in the special, final room where lighting effects, sweeping spotlights panning slowly over the subjects, an immoral attempt at deconstruction with pedagogic pretensions, like some silent son et lumière in Birkenau, intended to pierce the visitor’s heart at the end of his tour. The four photographs in question had all, of course, been known for years, and not just by specialists, but by numerous others, as they had been frequently exhibited. They were taken by members of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando and depict, in the sweltering heat of the summer of 1944, Jews in shirtsleeves and caps outside Crematorium V, burning the bodies of those who have just been gassed because there were so many victims that the furnaces alone could not cope. Another photograph showed a sparse thicket of birch trees in Birkenau with naked women waiting their turn to go into the gas chamber. Here the panning spotlights went to town. These photographs were taken, at great risk, by a number of men in the Sonderkommando: I have met some of them, including David Szmulewski, who worked as a Dachdecker – a roofer – which, together with that of locksmith, was one of the most prized positions in Birkenau since it meant one could move about the camp with relative freedom. In the exhibition catalogue, the psychic novice who took it upon himself to comment on these photographs declares, without a shadow of proof, that they were taken from inside the gas chamber of Crematorium V. This claim was presented as a remarkable discovery: there are images of death from inside the gas chambers! Let us dispel once and for all this fantasy that photographs were taken from the inside of the gas chamber of Crematorium V – the real raison d’être for the exhibition at the Hôtel de Sully. To do so, one only need refer to the remarkably precise account given by Filip Müller in Shoah2: the gas chamber of Crematorium V did not open to the outside. In order to reach it, it was necessary to go through the huge Auskleideraum [undressing room], where the victims had to undress before going into the death chamber, a room that was used, after the gassing, as a morgue or repository for corpses awaiting incineration. The photos could have been taken only from the door of this undressing room, which looked out on to the grassland where bodies were burned. Or, in the case of the photograph of naked women, it could only have been taken by a camera held at hip level on the roof of the same building. But our commentator is a trickster: if these four photographs were taken from inside the gas chambers it is possible, by twisting the truth and confounding the readers through association, deviation, confusion and distortion of meaning, to lead people to imagine that there exist photographs of death in the gas chambers, as is suggested by the title given to these remarks: ‘Images, malgré tout’ [‘Pictures, despite everything’].
There are many who, like this commentator, demand images. After the release of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, and in order to testify, by a reductio ad absurdum, to the uncompromising stance of Shoah, I observed that if I had discovered a hypothetical silent film shot by an SS officer showing the deaths of 3,000 people in a gas chamber, not only would I not have included it in my film, I would have destroyed it. Outrage! Attacks from all sides! ‘He wants to destroy the evidence!’ Were those who denounced me insinuating that, perhaps unbeknownst to themselves, such evidence was necessa
ry? I did not make Shoah in response to revisionists and Holocaust deniers: one does not debate with such people. I have never contemplated doing so. A vast choir of voices in my film – Jewish, Polish, German – testifies, in a true construction of memory, to what was perpetrated.
Chapter 20
After four years of work, I finally arrived in Warsaw, yielding to a necessity more pressing than all my misgivings. Marina Ochab was waiting for me at the airport. She was not the blonde athletic Polish woman my simplistic imagination had been expecting. She was short, with incredibly dark, piercing, intelligent eyes and, like my mother, her nose unmistakably marked her out as a Jew. Clearly, not all Polish Jews had perished. Marina’s mother indeed proved to be Jewish, her father, Edward Ochab, had been President of the Council of State – the highest authority in the People’s Republic during the Gomułka period – until the anti-Semitic clashes of 1968, a few months after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War and just before the Soviet tanks put an end to the Prague Spring in August of the same year. After that, some Polish intellectuals became dissidents, left their country, as did the last remaining Polish Jews, those who had been brought back to their birthplace in Red Army trucks, those who, in October 1939, had been lucky enough to escape the Nazis, fleeing to that area of Poland already under Soviet occupation. The majority of the Polish Communist nomenklatura, including Ochab, had spent all or most of the war in Soviet-occupied Poland, but he had clashed with Gomułka when the Jews were once again made scapegoats, and he resigned. Marina, who was very charming and spoke perfect French, was unable to be of any real help to me since she knew nothing about the fate of the three million Polish Jews who, unlike her mother, had been unable to survive in Moscow or Uzbekistan. When I told her, within minutes of our first conversation, that I was planning to go to Treblinka as soon as possible, I realized she had never been there, had never thought of going there, had never really known what had happened there. The same was true of Sobibór, Belzec, Chełmno, the principal sites of Jewish death in Poland. She knew something about Auschwitz (Oświęcim, she called it) because at school, in the history books she had studied, Auschwitz subsumed everything else, all lumped into a category much favoured by Communist regimes: ‘the victims of Fascism’.
The following day, I rented an old Russian jalopy and we set off for Treblinka, by which I mean the site where the camp had stood. It was cold, there was still snow on the ground, though it was grey rather than white, and there was not a soul to be seen among the fields of standing stones and the granite memorials bearing the names of the shtetls and the Jewish communities that had been annihilated, or, on the great imposing boulders that looked prehistoric, the names of the countries ravaged by the whirlwind of extermination. As we walked, Marina and I, among these symbolic tombs, I felt nothing and yet I waited, my mind and my soul alert, for some reaction to this place, to these vestiges of the catastrophe that, I wanted to believe, could not fail to move me. But what I saw seemed completely unrelated to what I had learned, not only from books but most of all from the accounts of Suchomel that I had filmed, and that of Abraham Bomba in the forty-eight hours we had spent together in the mountains of upstate New York. Distraught, attributing my lack of emotion to my stony heart, I went back to the car after two hours and began to drive slowly, aimlessly, trying to stay as close as possible to the boundaries of the camp, which was marked out by triangular stones placed at 300- or 400-metre intervals. But the road did not follow the boundary line and instead led me to neighbouring villages whose names, since that first day, have been forever inscribed in my memory: Prostyń, Poniatowo, Wólka-Okrąglik. Children and teenagers, men and women of all ages lived here and, stopping the car to think, to look – more watched than watching in truth because every passer-by stared back at me – I could not help but think: ‘Between July 1942 and August 1943, while the camp at Treblinka was in operation, while 600,000 Jews were being exterminated, these villages existed!’ That these were long-established villages was clear from the muddy dirt-tracks, the architecture of the farms, the dark, massive presence of one or more churches towering over each settlement. And I thought: a man who was sixty in 1978 would have been twenty-four in 1942, someone who was seventy now would then have been in the prime of life. A fifteen-year-old boy in 1942 would now be about to turn fifty. This was a shattering revelation to me, a shock born of logic. I have said many times, the terror and the horror the Shoah inspired in me had forced me to banish the event from human history, to a time other than my own; now, suddenly, I realized that many of these Polish farmers had lived through it. In Prosty, in Poniatowo, in Wólka-Okrąglik, I didn’t speak to anyone, attempting to postpone that moment of understanding. I set off again, driving slowly. Then I saw a sign: black lettering on a yellow background that indicated, as though nothing had happened, the name of the village we were approaching: ‘TRE BLINKA’. Although I had remained impassive before the snowy wasteland of the camp, the standing stones, the memorials, the central blockhouse that purportedly marked out the place of the gas chambers, the sight of this simple road sign utterly devastated me. Treblinka existed! A village named Treblinka existed, dared to exist. It seemed impossible to me; such a thing simply could not be. Though I had wanted to know everything, learn everything, about what had happened here, though I had never doubted that Treblinka had in fact existed, the curse that, to me, hung over the name also entailed an almost ontological taboo; it was then that I understood that I had consigned it to the world of myth, of legend. The conflict between the ‘perseverance in being’ of this accursed village, stubborn as the millennia, between the dreary contemporary reality and the terrifying human memory of it could only be explosive. The explosion occurred some minutes later when, still behind the wheel of the car, I unexpectedly came upon a long convoy of goods-train wagons coupled together, standing at a platform that was nothing more than a dirt ramp. I drove on to the ramp and stopped dead. I was at the station. At Treblinka station. I got out of my car and began to walk, crossing the tracks to the main platform where the station building stood bearing a sign, in proud, high letters, ‘TRE BLINKA’. Beneath it, a scroll on which, in Polish, were the words ‘Never Again’, the only reminder of what this place had once been. At the end of the platform, at right-angles to the tracks, nailed to two posts set into the concrete, was a signpost bearing the name Treblinka on either side so travellers could see it from either direction. Treblinka was nothing but a ghost station: as I stood petrified on the platform, attempting to come to terms with the enormity of what I was witnessing, trains passed, some hurtling straight through, others stopping to load and unload passengers. As for the goods wagons, they had not been placed there as some sort of memorial, but had simply been shunted on to a siding waiting to be put back into service.
I had not wanted to come to Poland. I arrived full of arrogance, and convinced I was coming only to confirm that I had not needed to come, so I could swiftly return to what I had been doing. In fact, I had arrived there fully primed, crammed with all the information amassed in four years spent reading, interviewing, even filming (Suchomel); I was a bomb, though a harmless bomb – the detonator was missing. Treblinka had been the detonator; that afternoon I exploded with sudden, devastating violence. How else can I put it? Treblinka became real, the shift from myth to reality took place in a blinding flash, the encounter between a name and a place wiped out everything I had learned, forced me to start again from scratch, to view everything that I had been working on in a radically different way, to overturn what had seemed most certain and, above all, to allocate to Poland, the geographical heart of the extermination, the crucial place it deserved. Treblinka became so real that it could not wait; I was gripped by a powerful sense of urgency that day, one I would continually live with from that moment on: I had to film, to film as soon as possible, that was the order I received that day.
It was already late in the afternoon. On foot, Marina and I covered every inch of this village whose centre truly was the train s
tation and the tracks. I stopped at a farm whose farmyard afforded spectacular views of the passing trains. It belonged to the farmer in the reddish shirt with the cheerful potbelly, an unforgettable figure to those who have seen Shoah. It was cold, he invited us in and I understood from the way he looked at Marina that he had identified her as a Jew, something she had felt herself and later confirmed to me. The gloomy room in which he lived smelled of sour milk, cabbage, slurry and an unidentifiable odour of mildew that immediately turned our stomachs. But what was most frightening was the monster, his son, paralysed, mentally handicapped, wracked by uncontrollable spasms in his chair, head always turned to one side, tongue hanging out. Czeslaw Borowi and his wife had conceived him in the August stench of 1942, as the trains bringing Jews from Warsaw waited at the station for their turn to arrive at the extermination camp. From that very first conversation, Borowi, who, given the smell of his house, must have been immune, nonetheless insisted on talking to me lyrically about the futile efforts and the methods employed by the inhabitants of Treblinka to get rid of that stench, which, for months, day and night, enveloped every house in the village – as Suchomel had said to me, ‘It depended on the wind’ – holding their noses, closing doors and windows, stopping up every opening, every crack and crevice. The peasants who lived near the camp struggled heroically not to smell. They ate and they made love in the unbearable stench of charred flesh, of bodies being burned in pits to eliminate any trace of the extermination and in the even more intolerable stink of putrefaction from mass graves. Dusk and daybreak, Borowi told me, when dew settles at morning and evening, were the worst, because the smell did not rise, did not drift, but hung in the air at ground level, leaching into every corner of every house, into even the least delicate nose. Borowi seemed to be an expert on the subject of smell, his olfactory memory had a truly poetic refinement. As I listened to him more than attentively, I fulminated on the inside, harangued, cursed and reproached myself. How could I have thought even for an instant of making this film without the man sitting opposite me, without all those I had seen that same day, without the places that seemed to me exactly as they had been thirty-five years ago, without the permanence that could be read in the stones of every building, the steel of the railway tracks, without the fearsome plunge into the heart of the past I was discovering in these old farms?
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