35 Years Later: New Discoveries from the Film “Shoah”

In 1979, Claude Lanzmann (right) interviews Tadeusz Pankiewicz (left), a Pole who ran a pharmacy within the confines of the Krakow ghetto and aided Jews. —US Holocaust Memorial Museum, RG-60.5014

In his landmark 9½-hour film Shoah, Claude Lanzmann used just a small fraction of the 230 hours of known footage, leaving out some of the most poignant insights from Holocaust survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators. For more than two decades the Museum pursued an ambitious project to preserve the outtakes, digitize them, and put them online. With that project complete, historians have already begun to make new discoveries, not least insights into survivors’ optimism and extraordinary will to survive.

In this digital program, Museum historian Edna Friedberg and Museum film archivist Lindsay Zarwell discuss the film, Lanzmann’s motivations, and new insights on this history.