Salvaged for Scholarship

More than 200 Hours of Footage from Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” Now Online

The Museum digitized hundreds of reels of interview outtakes, rescuing crucial Holocaust testimonies and making them easily accessible for researchers and the public. —US Holocaust Memorial Museum

As a college student in the early 2000s, Jennifer Cazenave saw the 9½-hour film Shoah for the first time. The 1985 masterpiece by Claude Lanzmann left her with questions, such as, did the women have more to say? Six women Holocaust survivors and witnesses appear for just 10 minutes in the film.

She later discovered, while she was the Museum’s Charles H. Revson Foundation fellow, how much more there is to learn from Lanzmann’s work. Over the last 24 years, the Museum acquired, reconstructed, and digitized 220 hours of unused Shoah interview and location footage. That long-term investment means that even now—when the Museum is closed because of COVID-19—researchers and the public can access online one of the richest audiovisual sources of Holocaust history.

Thanks to the Museum’s massive and costly undertaking, scholars, filmmakers, and exhibition designers are mining what was left on the cutting-room floor to deepen understanding of Holocaust history. Increasingly, they are drawing on this trove of testimonies to produce documentaries and books, enhance their research, and preserve Holocaust memory.

Director Claude Lanzmann, right, used a false name and hidden camera to record this interview with Hans Gewecke, who had been a regional commissioner in the German occupation administration of Lithuania and was convicted in 1971 of participating in the execution of a Jewish baker for smuggling. —Created by Claude Lanzmann during the filming of “Shoah,” used by permission of USHMM and Yad Vashem

While the finished film focuses on the “Final Solution,” or mass murder of Jews by Nazi Germany, the outtakes, co-owned by the Museum and Yad Vashem, cover events that happened from 1933 through 1945 and beyond. They include stories of resistance and rescue, the extraordinary will to survive, and attempts to alert the world about the genocide. Many of the approximately 70 interview subjects were Holocaust survivors and witnesses, but others are historians, State Department officials, and Nazi perpetrators.

In Cazenave’s case, what started as her dissertation turned into a book ten years in the making: An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” (2019).

“These were just leftover reels, but the Museum created an archive, especially in digitizing them,” said Cazenave, now a Boston University assistant professor. “Preservation is also an incredible endeavor, but the way that they went about creating digital access to the transcript and to the interview, that’s really unique. Now it’s really a coherent archive. These are crucial testimonies of the Holocaust that would have been lost.”

Cazenave said the outtakes raise many questions that historians and researchers in other disciplines, not only film scholars, can continue to analyze and build on, especially given that the nature of questions people want to investigate changes over time. “It’s not simply considered a film archive, but it’s considered an important archive for the broader narrative of the Holocaust,” she said.

Ruth Elias, who survived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, appears only briefly in the film “Shoah,” but its director and his team captured 3½ hours of footage with her. She speaks of her solidarity with other women prisoners, and also describes how she and her newborn baby were subjects of experimentation that killed her child. —Created by Claude Lanzmann during the filming of “Shoah,” used by permission of USHMM and Yad Vashem

Another book, published in April 2020, is lending visibility to the archive. The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Its Outtakes is a collection of 13 essays — including one by a historian in the Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies — that reexamine his work and its influence on how we view Holocaust history. Both books ease navigation of the daunting collection, which weighed two tons before digitization.

The Museum staff who managed the outtakes preservation project, Lindsay Zarwell and Leslie Swift, also contributed a chapter describing the content’s significant themes and the many challenges to preservation: the deterioration of some of the film, audio tape, and paper materials that had been stored in damp conditions before the Museum’s acquisition; tackling the enormous puzzle of making sense of the archive without a log from Lanzmann; and the conservators’ laborious and time-consuming process.

Zarwell noted the “immeasurable value” of many interviews, such as Ruth Elias’ harrowing story of how her infant child was killed, Theresienstadt Jewish council chairman Benjamin Murmelstein’s defense of himself against criticism that he was complicit, New York activist Peter Bergson’s far-reaching warnings about the genocide, historian Raul Hilberg’s detailing of the killing process, and Auschwitz escapee Rudolf Vrba’s testimony.

“We are gratified and professionally proud to see people making such diverse and creative use of a film collection that we have worked so hard to preserve and make accessible,” Zarwell said.

Filmmakers also have used the Shoah outtakes footage in their projects. A sampling:

• Tim Dunn’s 2020 episode of Secrets of the Dead, “Bombing Auschwitz”
• Ashton Gleckman’s 2019 We Shall Not Die Now
• Lara Fitzgerald’s 2019 episode of Hitler’s Most Wanted, “Demon Doctor of Auschwitz”
• Olivia Carmel’s 2019 The Little Dentist
• Mark Fastoso’s 2018 Meeting Max: A Holocaust Survivor’s Story
• Mark Limburg’s 2018 Sobibor Excavated: The Four Stages of Deceit
• Johnathan Andrews’ 2018 The Secret Survivor
• Slawomir Grunberg’s 2015 Karski & the Lords of Humanity
• Yale Strom’s 2012 A Letter To Wedgwood: The Life Of Gabriella Hartstein Auspitz
• Anna Grusková’s 2012 The Woman Rabbi
• Pierre Sauvage’s 2011 Not Idly By
• Ed Gaffney’s 2011 Empty Boxcars
• Richard Trank’s 2008 Against the Tide
• Brad Lichtenstein’s 1999 Andre’s Lives
• Lanzmann himself used the outtakes after the Museum acquired them to later make his five related films: A Visitor from the Living (1999); Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001); The Karski Report (2010); The Last of the Unjust (2013); and Shoah: Four Sisters (2018)

Browse the Shoah outtakes online.