Bike riding in Brooklyn, New York

Walking down Bedford Avenue with eyes trained to a digital map and a steeply declining phone battery charge, I breezed right passed the Apple Store. My gently respiring, blue-dotted avatar had become misaligned with a red pin drop. As I retraced my steps and crossed the street, I noticed a small, black stencil of the company pomme hanging with stated understatement from a pristine and non-descript brick building that encouraged misrecognition as an old neighborhood warehouse. In gentrified Williamsburg, a trillion dollar company dons vintage-washed jeans.

I entered the cavernous emporium. Wading through the chummy waters of salesman-as-fellow-customer, I headed to a table of clinically arranged iPhones where I unplugged a display model and attached my own. Electricity trickled in like drips of rain plunking against tree leaves after a July storm. Across from me, a marooned child searched for video games on a device tethered with thin metal wire. Rather than convalesce, my phone would have to manage with a few gulps from a listless drinking fountain. I acceded to thirty minutes of patience before continuing to explore the neighborhood en route to a rendezvous with friends followed by a bike ride around Brooklyn with my father the next day.

My trek in Brooklyn fell at the tail end of a three-week trip to the Northeast to visit family and conduct a bit of research for the Shoah project.

I had spent the previous week in the Adirondacks camping on a lake island with my mother and father. For my parents, it’s an annual summer tradition that I attend as often as I can. Growing up on the Jersey Shore, the family retreat to a lake in New Hampshire or upstate New York was a ritual as hallowed as Christmas. The sun-illumined, stony depths of clear water and the scent of hemlock spoke of immanence. I recall the pleasure of a much younger self bounding down a grassy hill towards a lakeside beach, gaze fixed on the granite slabs that punctuated the path every few feet like a staircase of missing piano keys. Each “note” had its own individual color, texture, and sun-baked warmth to be savored with the eyes and the soles of the feet. Striking them in succession was like ascending a musical scale with each step heightening the anticipation of resolution in the lake’s languid chords. Remembering each note as I heard it anew was a timeless and treasured rite of childhood summers.

New Hampshire in the late 1980s

In more recent years, the sound of arrival at communion with nature has become the insistent whir of an outboard motor propelling a seventeen-foot sailboat with a canoe and a kayak in tow. Lakeside cottages and the rousing calls of children have given way to secluded island campsites and NPR news reports delivered on a portable radio. The journey in requires a thirty-minute boat ride upriver that traverses ponds and lily-padded coves before broadening into an open lake spotted with islands, like shards of wood scattered around a jigsaw. As each river bend unfolds, stoic Eastern white pines tower above the water’s edge, their innumerable branches perpetually curved back by the ceaseless northern winds. These elder statesmen of the forest bristle and sway with barefaced abandon while their fallen needles soften the earth. Skimming beneath their arbor marks passage into a realm of rugged splendor chiseled by exposure and fortitude, a sojourn not unlike the peregrinations of middle age.

Adirondacks, New York in 2019

The languorous, camp-time hours and constantly shifting Adirondack weather makes dipping into a book a more frequent refrain than absorbing oneself in the lake. This year, as my mother quietly plowed through her Kindle, I chipped away at lectures in yogic philosophy and waded into Holocaust literature geared towards adolescents.

Teaching college students about the Holocaust through the lens of Lanzmann’s Shoah has heightened my curiosity and awareness of what they are bringing to the table when they enter my class. What information, ideas, and materials have they already received on the Holocaust (if any)? How has the event been situated in their consciousness? What perceptions do I need to challenge and what ideas do I need to reinforce to prepare them for receiving Lanzmann’s work?

These questions point toward many core issues of the Shoah project at large. I believe this film is an essential catalyst for a deeper, more sustained engagement with the Holocaust at both individual and public levels that ought to be a household name in the United States like Anne Frank and Schindler’s List. I see at least two major challenges for Shoah to make a wider impact, both of which are structural in nature.

First, the development of an individual’s capacity to face the event, sit with it, return to it, and act with awareness from it is a difficult process requiring significant time and commitment. At best, many people only have episodic encounters with the Holocaust and often recall their emotional reactions more clearly than the historical details of the event itself. Consequently, Lanzmann’s film must contend with layers of individual resistance and a culture of limited engagement to attain a broader audience.

The transcript of Shoah

Second, Shoah is a very demanding film to watch and truly absorb: it’s nine-and-a-half hours of oral testimony and panning shots of forsaken landscapes that completely dispenses with the customary hallmarks of documentary filmmaking such as voiceover narration, chronological progression, archival imagery, mood music, and signposted organization. Developing the capacity to face it, sit with it, return to it, and act with awareness from it not only applies to the Holocaust but also to Lanzmann’s magnum opus itself. While it stands on its own as a monumental work of art, its interpretation has often been limited to specialized academic discourses. Lanzmann’s well-known ties to Sartre, De Beauvoir, and Les temps modernes might further abet the impression of a French director making an “art film” for intellectuals. My aim is to carve new inroads to Shoah that are deeply informed but lightly worn in order to generate a wider audience for the film while cultivating sustained interest in the Holocaust among present and future generations.

My project is thus a bridge-building enterprise that seeks to elevate viewers to the challenge of Shoah while grounding the film in a companion guide that unpacks its many subtle layers of meaning and connects them with the larger history of the Holocaust.

The question of audience—both for Lanzmann’s film and my own work—has led me to explore the place of the Holocaust in education and popular culture. Surveying my university students about Holocaust-related materials they have already encountered has yielded a list of books and films that combine canonical works and popular culture. Figures like Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, and Wladyslaw Szpilman often appear alongside works of historical fiction such as The Book Thief and Number the Stars and fantasy films like Inglorious Basterds and Life is Beautiful. I feel compelled to know these works and the relationships people have developed with them in order to better understand the contours of what I’m terming “episodic engagement” with the Holocaust. As a result, bookmarked copies of Maus and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas found their way next to the campfire this year.

Camp reading

This year, our camping trip did not immediately conclude with a long drive back to New Jersey but instead led to a Shoah-related side trip across Lake Champlain to Burlington, where the papers of Raul Hilberg (1926-2007) are housed at the University of Vermont. Hilberg was a professor of political science at the University for thirty-five years and is best known as the author of The Destruction of the European Jews (1961; 1985; 2003), a foundational, three-volume work in Holocaust history. He is also the only academic “talking head” featured in Shoah.

Hilberg’s classic work

Hilberg makes three appearances in Lanzmann’s film. First, he contrasts the unoriginal and historically derivative character of Nazi antisemitism with their bureaucratic inventiveness in carrying out the Final Solution. Second, he elucidates the details of a German train schedule routing deportees to the Treblinka death camp and connects it to the larger role played by the Reichsbahn (German National Railway) in the Holocaust. And third, he reanimates the perspective of Adam Czerniakow, who served as the head of the Judenrat (Jewish Council) in the Warsaw ghetto from October 1939 until his suicide in July 1942, when the mass deportations to Treblinka began.

Hilberg’s 1996 memoir

Hilberg is an engrossing figure whose life, work, and appearances in Shoah have made their way into my teaching over the past two years. In a class on historical writing, I assigned chapters from his memoir, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian, to provide students with a lucid, plainspoken historian reflecting on the stages of his career to help them cognitively map their own goals. I have also used the account of his family’s flight from Nazi-occupied Vienna to Brooklyn by way of Havana in my modern world history classes as a harbinger of World War II and as a point of comparison with Stefan Zweig’s portrayal of fin-de-siècle Vienna. When I taught the history of the Holocaust at Cal State Fullerton last spring, I included the abbreviated student edition of The Destruction of the European Jews as one of the course books—I am currently trekking through the entire three-volume edition.

While teaching my class on the Holocaust, it occurred to me to check Special Collections at the University of Vermont for materials on Hilberg and Lanzmann. A few mouse clicks led me to the Hilberg papers, which listed a folder of their correspondence and materials from a conference honoring Hilberg’s retirement in 1991 that Lanzmann attended as a speaker. While these documents were unlikely to contain any major revelations, I was curious to know more about their relationship outside the film as the very possibility of Shoah was tied in part to Lanzmann’s rapport with his interviewees. It was also an opportunity to continue retracing Lanzmann’s steps in the making of the film; rather than a flight to Poland, however, this segment only required a detour from a family camping trip.

An easily overlooked aspect of vacations is that they end before they are over. The penultimate day swings like a pendulum between a final rallying cry and a sigh of resignation, a prelude to the unraveling return journey. A side trip to an unfamiliar place, however, provokes a flutter of anticipation with the inheritance of extra innings. After literally decamping from the island and winding our way through the Adirondack Mountains in pursuit of sweets, we crossed Lake Champlain at Crown Point and entered Vermont.

Self-sustaining farm in Charlotte, Vermont

Our convoy of trailered and roof-racked boats glided across wide vistas of undulating pastures and paused in colonial-style villages before arriving at our Airbnb in Charlotte: a self-sustaining farm about twenty-five minutes south of Burlington. Our hosts were a Dutch couple and several post-college-aged farmhands, all with ties to the University of Vermont. When the original eighteenth-century farmhouse caught fire many years ago, they constructed an environmentally-sustainable home on its foundations. Hay bales filled the walls. The mini-fridge in our room had jars of fresh yogurt and unpasteurized cream. That evening, we watched the sunset over Lake Champlain against the distant backdrop of the Adirondacks, the prospect of two full days laying ahead of us.

The next morning, my parents dropped me off at school.

University of Vermont, Burlington

At first glance, the University of Vermont seemed a reflection of Berkeley by way of New England: a stately, hillside campus perched above a bohemian downtown with views of an expansive lake on the horizon. At lunchtime, I descended the tree-lined streets from the University to a local, vegetarian-friendly restaurant and imagined the autumnal charm.

The University of Vermont’s Special Collections are located in the basement of Billings Library, a grand piece of late nineteenth-century architecture inlaid with ruddy stone. Hilberg’s papers are part of the University Archives and consist of twenty cartons. The focal point for me was his correspondence with Lanzmann. The two first met at a Holocaust conference in New York in 1975 and the letters in the collection span three decades from that year to 2005.

Billings Library, University of Vermont, Burlington

In a handwritten letter sent from Munich in 1975, Lanzmann refers to Hilberg’s magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, as “the Bible.” Indeed, Hilberg’s influence led him to interview ex-Nazi bureaucrats who perpetrated the Holocaust from behind the safety of their desks. Such work, however, proved frustrating for Lanzmann, who came to regard these interviewees as “liars and cowards.” His solution? “You will be in this film,” he declares to Hilberg, adding that he will visit him in Burlington for that purpose. “I am convinced it will be very strong.” In two of Hilberg’s appearances in Shoah, Lanzmann presents him as a straight-shooting counterpoint to the dissembling bureaucratic perpetrators. Already in 1975, Lanzmann envisioned Hilberg as “the voice of the prosecution,” stating that, “When there will be no Jewish witnesses – survivors – you will be the one who will say who is who.”

Later that afternoon at the Howe Library Multimedia Department, I watched Lanzmann’s moving speech for Hilberg’s retirement. In his remarks, he reiterated the foundational importance of The Destruction of the European Jews for Shoah while playfully taking credit for making Hilberg a movie star.

Hilberg, for his part, also threw his weight behind Shoah. In a 1985 letter he asked Elie Wiesel if he had heard about Shoah, which had recently premiered in Paris. “Although I have seen only excerpts in the making,” wrote Hilberg, “I am convinced that this is the most powerful testimony about the Holocaust we will ever have on the screen.” For both Lanzmann and Hilberg, Shoah was born of conviction. Ten years later, Hilberg heartily endorsed the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s acquisition of the film’s two-hundred plus hours of outtakes. Ironically, decisive financial support for the purchase came from Steven Spielberg—a somewhat awkward transaction (or perhaps just desserts) given Lanzmann’s and Hilberg’s open criticism of Schindler’s List just a few years earlier.

At the end of the day, my parents and I drove past Hilberg’s former home about a mile and a half from campus in a residential neighborhood. I came to recognize the address from the many letters I had sifted through at the library. Hilberg is filmed at home in Shoah, often with Lanzmann in the frame. Tracking shots of the neighborhood and the exterior of the house are also included. The power of these scenes are sustained by the precision of Hilberg’s words and the unaffected decisiveness of his voice. Lanzmann, for his part, plays the informed, thoughtful student sharing his teacher with the world from the intimacy of his home.

The house and the neighborhood looked remarkably unchanged nearly forty years later.

Hilberg’s former home in Burlington, Vermont featured in Shoah