From the inside of the goods wagon parked at Treblinka, through the window that had once been fitted with barbed wire, I zoomed in slowly on the station sign, on the name that so terrified me, but which had meant nothing to the wretches who, for hours or days, had been cramped together inside it – filming it as I imagined they first saw it, terrified and suspicious. Inside the wagon, standing stationary on the tracks, they would wait, sometimes for a very long time. Gawkowski was a man of all trades: from Warsaw, from Białystok, from Kielce he drove the trains to Treblinka station where they were uncoupled into sections of ten wagons, then shunted each section forward to the ramp of the camp, and that was the end of the journey. We filmed in Treblinka in all seasons, the four seasons of death (according to Richard Glazar, there was even a ‘dead season’ – ‘die Flaute’ – during which for a time no trains arrived), and I filmed and re-filmed that slow zoom of the sign twenty times so determined was I to see through the eyes of those who were about to die. Inside the camp itself, I filmed the slabs and the stones for days, from every conceivable angle, unable to stop, running from one to another, looking for some new angle, with my cinematographer, Dominique Chapuis, climbing onto the slippery stone roof of the tall blockhouse symbolizing the gas-chambers, trying to get a 360° panorama to give a sense of the whole site at sunset, without realizing that our shadows and that of the camera were in the shot. They are still there, I didn’t cut anything. Chapuis, or before him Lubtchansky or Glasberg, would say to me, ‘Why are you still filming stones? You’ve already got ten times too much footage.’ I never had too much, in fact I hadn’t shot enough footage, and had to return to Treblinka to film more. I filmed them because there was nothing else to film, because I could not invent, because I would need this footage for when Bomba, when Glazar, when the farmers, or indeed when Suchomel, were speaking. These steles and these stones became human for me, the only trace of the hundreds of thousands who died here. The hard-heartedness I had felt in those first hours on that first day had melted in the face of the work of truth.
The railway station at Sobibór is unlike that at Treblinka, it is almost a part of the camp itself, and every time I see the sequences I shot there again, I tell myself it is the same haunted urgency that forces me to adopt the strange gait of a surveyor – so I can understand and make others understand – crossing and recrossing the tracks with Piwonski, the assistant pointsman in 1942. I can see myself, can hear myself saying to him, ‘OK, so here is life still. I take a single step and already I’m on the side of death.’ As I say it, I take the step, make the leap, and he nods in agreement. Twenty metres further on, I clamber onto a grassy embankment and he tells me, in the slightly sententious voice of a Communist colonel, ‘Here, you are standing on the ramp where the victims destined for extermination were unloaded.’ Running alongside the ramp, two blue steel tracks, impervious to the passage of time. ‘And these are the same tracks?’ I ask. ‘Da, da!’ he answers. The weather is beautiful, a beauty that unsettles me, plunges me into disarray and helplessness. I ask him, ‘And I suppose there were days when the weather was as beautiful as it is today?’ He murmurs, ‘There were days when the weather was much more beautiful than today.’ I truly think that it is possible that I was in the grip of a sort of madness, and not some gentle madness, either: in each of the places of death, I wanted to make the last journey, descending with Chapuis, camera in hand, the steps to the vast underground rooms of Crematoria II and III in Birkenau, unable to walk straight among the ruined, snow-covered blocks, both of us falling flat on our faces, trying as best we could to protect the camera, but it was good to fall, it was right to feel pain, to have to reheat the camera motor when it was -20°C so that we could continue, absurdly, to pan slowly from left to right, right to left, filming the connection between what remained of the undressing room, which Filip Müller calls the ‘international information centre’, to the immense gas chamber and vice versa. Still in Birkenau, though with Lubtchansky this time, Lubtchansky assisted by Caroline Champetier, we spent almost a whole night in the bitter cold, filming a panning shot that required an absolutely steady hand, one that could not tremble in the slightest, could not have the least change in pace, a panning shot of the scale model depicting 3,000 plaster figures going down into the death chambers, undressing, then, after the long, inevitable hiatus that, in the shot, separates the undressing room and the gas chamber, coming upon them, a tangled mass of lifeless bodies. What was there to film but the stones in Treblinka, the models in Birkenau? In Chełmno, with Chapuis, retracing the seven kilometres from the church to the forest at the constant, measured pace of the gas vans that asphyxiated victims during the journey, ending this hallucinatory tracking shot on a muddy path stippled with puddles of rain that I refused to skirt around, at the place of the graves, of the pyres, the place where Srebnik says the flames rose as high as the sky. Yes, as the sky.
It was the last day of our last shoot in Poland, December 1981, four days before General Jaruzelski decreed a ‘state of war’. There were three of us, me, Chapuis and Pavel, the sound-engineer, though there was no human voice to record since I was not interviewing anyone, there was nothing but the song of the forest, the wind and the rivers, but this too I would need. Before Chełmno, we had spent four days in Treblinka, filming the stones of the camp again and again, filming the steam engines crossing the bridge over the River Bug, headlights punching a hole in the darkness. Chapuis was lying, camera in place, almost on the tracks, I was hugging his chest tightly so that he could not move or fall. On his Nagra, Pavel recorded the thunderous roar of the train. All of Poland had ground to a halt, with hundreds of cars queuing outside every petrol station; our hotel, the only hotel in Małkinia, was lit by oil lamps and church candles because of the constant power cuts. Chapuis and I were sharing a long, narrow room where we couldn’t move since all our equipment was stored there too. In December, in eastern Poland, the days are very short and the daylight hours numbered. At four o’clock, we were lying on our beds waiting for dinner, a word as hollow as our stomachs since there was almost nothing to eat, the peasants deliberately refusing to supply Intourist, on which our hotel was dependent for food. Chapuis, lying on his bed, was able to listen to music on his Walkman; I did not even have a book, and I was brooding. It would have been worse still had I known that Dominique – our work together meant we became very close – was to be carried off by cancer twenty years later. He was a great cinematographer, a filmmaker to his very soul. Most of the protagonists in Shoah are dead now. Death never ceases. Aside from Chapuis, I should mention the grief I felt when the marvellous Sabine Mamou, who did the sound editing for Shoah and was the overall editor on Tsahal and did much of the work on Sobibór, 14 octobre 1943, 16h, was brutally taken by the same disease.
It had been announced that there would be a delivery of beer to our hotel in Małkinia and about a hundred farmers had invaded the ground floor feverishly waiting for the cans to arrive. It proved not to be a tall tale, the beer did arrive and, by the dim light of the candles, I witnessed an incredible session of collective drunkenness, everyone downing bottle after bottle, at least a dozen each, until they staggered off or collapsed where they sat. For dinner, we had nothing but some disgusting borscht until it occurred to me to flash a ten-dollar bill at the waitress. Things moved quickly then: she led me to the window and pointed to a house on the far side of the street, exchanging a few words to Pavel. Suddenly, organized famine was transformed into a fabulous feast: the people opposite, who were retired, had apparently just killed a pig and, for a staggering sum in dollars, we were treated to black pudding, sausages, ham, bacon and lard, which we wolfed down with the same heedless greed as the beer drinkers. And we were invited to return the next morning for breakfast before we set off for work at Treblinka, taking with us a copious pork-based lunch. The God of the Jews, I know, has forgiven us. In the face of great adversity, strict observance must compromise.
In Chełmno, in the Rzuszow forest, we were shooting the
last scene in the biting cold. It was getting dark, and I had a feverish urge to be finished when a boy, a messenger, came running up and said something to Pavel, who translated: the mayor had killed a pig and, in celebration of our departure, had invited us to dinner. I thanked the boy and accepted, although I found this generosity surprising since I had already had dealings with the mayor. Anyone who has seen Shoah will remember him in the scene in the church in Chełmno, after the procession. Speaking to a group of farmers gathered on the square in front of the church, I ask, ‘In your opinion, why did this thing happen to the Jews?’ At that moment, a face with a pointed chin comes forward and answers, ‘Because they were the richest,’ and the others nod their heads in agreement. That was the mayor. He did indeed provide a wonderful dinner, washed down with vodka. I got to my feet to thank him and take my leave quickly, since we were setting off on icy roads for Łódz´ where we were to spend the night before heading towards Auschwitz and Czechoslovakia. But the invitation to dinner turned out not to be an invitation. I was handed a bill, not in zlotys but in dollars, and it was not cheap: $150. I paid, cursing silently, but once in the van I was overcome by a surge of rage. I was sitting in the back with Pavel, the Masurian bear-hunter. He had been sound-engineer on Wajda’s The Promised Land, a film about the town of Łódz´ and about the Poznańskis, a rich Jewish family in the textile business, which contains long, profoundly anti-Semitic passages. Pavel agreed that both the film and the mayor were anti-Semitic, there could be no other motive for his sham invitation: I was part of the ‘rich’, and so it was completely normal that money should be extorted from me. And at that instant, as the car drove on through the night, Pavel said something magnificent: ‘Thankfully, there are no Jews left in Poland, otherwise there would be appalling anti-Semitism.’
I had filmed in Auschwitz several times already and, during my first, exploratory trip, I had walked alone along the railway tracks, through the blocks, the crematoria, the lake of ashes, the ramps, the museum; I had seen the watchtowers, the piles of suitcases, of spoons, of glasses and pince-nez, the chamber-pots, the lone, charred, twisted tree framed against the white sky next to the Little Farm House, which had been turned into an experimental gas chamber; I had allowed it to seep into me, to imprint itself on me. This time it was Auschwitz the town that I wanted to see again, I wanted to film the old Jewish cemetery with its tall tombstones carved with Hebrew letters, the cemetery where, before the war, before Hitler, the Jewish citizens of Oświęcim, who were lucky enough to die at home of natural causes, had been buried. In fact, the town of Auschwitz – I had not known this but learned it on my first visit to Poland – had been 80 per cent Jewish. I did not realize how precious the few graves that had survived the passage of time and the vandalism eradicating all traces of the Jews in Poland would be to me during the editing phase. As I had decided there would be not one word of commentary, the editing of the film is the key to its intelligibility, it is what makes it possible for the story to move forward and the viewer to understand. There is no voiceover to say what is about to happen, to tell the audience what to think, to connect one scene to the next. Such facile expedients, commonplace in what are classically called documentary films, are not permitted in Shoah. This is one of the reasons why the film defies and eludes the categories of documentary or fiction. The editing work was a long, serious, delicate, subtle process. On many occasions I found myself completely blocked, unable, as when climbing a mountain, to find the path that would allow me to carry on, to climb higher. Usually, there is only one, not two – just one right path. I refused to carry on until I had found it, which could take hours or days, on one occasion I am not likely to forget it took three weeks: it was about thirty-five minutes into the film, I was looking for a way to have Birkenau appear on screen for the first time, the great gateway of Birkenau, that sinister bird of death beneath which clattered the death trains heading for the gas chambers. I had begun by showing Oświęcim, this town that had once been 80 per cent Jewish, and I could not see how to engender Birkenau out of the scenes I had shot in the town, to have it rear up at once as a scandal and a fatality, as a startling and surprising proof, to make it appear naturally and of itself, so to speak. All the attempts I had made were unsatisfying, then the radiant solution suddenly came to me: to bring to the screen this cemetery with no tombs, no skeletons, that is Birkenau. To allow Birkenau to appear for the first time in the film, I had to use the ancient tombstones, those of the Jews who had once lived in Auschwitz, who had died and been buried there before the calamity. So I speak to Madame Pietyra, a Polish woman born in Auschwitz, who lived there all her life, and ask her, ‘Was there a Jewish cemetery in Auschwitz?’ She nods vehemently, happy to be able to teach me something I did not know. I press her, ‘Does it still exist?’ She nods immediately and over footage of the splendid tombstones, lopsided but proud still, we hear Madame Pietyra’s voice as she continues, ‘It’s closed now.’ ‘Closed? What does that mean?’ ‘They don’t bury there now.’ A few moments later I ask again, ‘What happened to the Jews of Auschwitz?’ ‘They were resettled,’ she gives me an almost pitying smile at this preposterous question. ‘In what year?’ ‘lt began in 1940, which was when I moved in here. This apartment also belonged to Jews.’ ‘Where were they deported to?’ At first she says she does not know and I say to her, ‘According to our information, they were “resettled”, since that’s the word, not far from here, in Bęndzin and Sosnowiec in Upper Silesia.’ ‘Yes, yes, that’s right, because these were Jewish towns too.’ ‘Do you know what happened to the Jews of Auschwitz later?’ Another pitying smile at my naïveté: ‘I think they all ended in the camp.’ ‘You mean they returned to Auschwitz?’ On the ‘yes’ that ends this conversation, naturally, harmoniously, so to speak, the first tracking shot appears, bringing us towards the entrance of the camp. I remember I pushed the mobile platform, on which Lubtchansky was standing behind the camera, along that single railroad track that ended the journey. And as we reach the accursed gatehouse, we hear Madame Pietyra’s voice, off-screen this time, lamenting, ‘There used to be all sorts of people here, from all over the world, they came here, they were sent here… All the Jews came here. To die.’
During the five years that it took to edit the film, I only obeyed my own rules, not yielding to the constraints of time or money, or to those people who, not understanding why it was taking me so long and giving up hope I would ever complete it, pressed me to finish. But that was how I was. I filmed with Jan Karski in the United States in 1979, the great Karski. He was professor of political science at Georgetown University in Washington and I had thought that he, too, was dead. Finding him alive, after a sequence of events it would be pointless to relate, excited me deeply and I accepted what Karski requested of me: as is customary in America, he wanted to be paid. We signed a contract in which he agreed not to appear in any other film (or television programme) until mine had been released. He had, of course, the right to give as many spoken interviews and to write as many articles or books as he wished.
Then I forgot about Karski, having other pressing matters to deal with. What was important to me was that I had filmed him even if I did not yet know how he would appear, how I would use the footage in the film. It was he who got in touch with me about two years later in a long, courteous, tentative letter. He was surprised that the film was not yet finished since, according to him, he had given me all the time I needed. My slowness surprised him all the more because other people, now aware of his existence, were impatient to hear him speak and could not understand why he had signed such a one-sided contract with no specified term. The photocopies of letters he sent to me were from prestigious institutions such as the BBC and Channel 4 or from major American television stations. I replied in great detail, in the most civilized manner I could, I explained to him for the first time, I think, the unique dimension that I wanted to give my work, trying to convey a sense of what was extraordinary and even revolutionary about such a project, which attempted
to encompass everything, to show everything that had happened from the point of view of the Jews themselves. I said again that his part in the film was irreplaceable and asked him, with all the conviction I could muster, to trust me. I liked Karski, I knew what courage he had shown under torture and I guaranteed him that, however long it took me to finish the film, and however protracted he found it, he would not regret it. In the end, the film would be a success, I had more faith in myself than in all the radio and television professionals in the world, first and foremost for one compelling reason: I had the strength to take my time.
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