Kirjahaku

A nine-and-a-half-hour documentary on the Nazi extermination camps, Shoah (the Hebrew word for "Holocaust") was internationally hailed as a masterpiece upon its release in 1985. Shunning any re-creation, archival footage, or visual documentation of the events, filmmaker Claude Lanzmann relied on the words of witnesses,Jewish, Polish, and German,to describe in ruthless detail the bureaucratic machinery of the Final Solution, so that the remote experiences of the Holocaust became fresh and immediate. This book presents in an accessible and vivid format the testimony of survivors, participants, witnesses, and scholars. This tenth anniversary edition, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the camps, is newly revised and corrected in order to more accurately present the actual testimony of those interviewed. Shoah is an unparalleled oral history of the Holocaust, an intensely readable journey through the twentieth century's greatest horror.

a cry of witness to the 20th century - the unforgettable memoir of 70 years of contemporary and personal history from the great French filmmaker, journalist and intellectual Claude Lanzmann. Born to a Jewish family in Paris, 1925, Lanzmann's first encounter with radicalism was as part of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation. He and his father were soldiers of the underground until the end of the war, smuggling arms and making raids on the German army. After the liberation of France, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, making money as a student in surprising ways (by dressing as a priest and collecting donations, and stealing philosophy books from bookshops). It was in Paris however, that he met Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. It was a life-changing meeting. The young man began an affair with the older de Beauvoir that would last for seven years. He became the editor of Sartre's political-literary journal, Les Temps Modernes - a position which he holds to this day - and came to know the most important literary and philosophical figures of postwar France. And all this before he was thirty years old...Written in precise, rich prose of rare beauty, organized - like human recollection itself - in interconnected fragments that eschew conventional chronology, and describing in detail the making of his seminal film Shoah, The Patagonian Hare becomes a work of art, more significant, more ambitious than mere memoir. In it, Lanzmann has created a love song to life balanced by the eye of a true auteur.