The Film Shoah

One of the people who was interviewed that interested me the most was a man by the name of Abraham Bomba. He was a man who was kept at Treblinka during the Holocaust and performed the services of a barber for those who were sent to the gas chambers. His testimony is important to this film and to history because as a barber he was allowed to be extremely close to the victims when they were directly outside the gas chambers.

As Bomba described it, the females who were about to be sent into the gas chambers were to be given haircuts to mask the fact that they were about to be exterminated. The women would enter the gas chambers completely naked. There were benches inside the gas chamber and about fifty to sixty people were sat down in the gas chamber while sixteen barbers cut their hair. They had a very short time to do this and had to rush from person to person chopping off their hair before the doors were closed and the gas was released.

The interesting part of Bomba's testimony for me is the fact that he took a part in the preparation of the bodies for gassing. Though his position in this process is justified because he was forced into it by the Nazis, it still interests me because he was forced to be so close to the process. The results are evident when he starts to talk about cutting the hair of a woman he knows. He starts to talk about how she asks questions about what is going to happen to her and he breaks down emotionally. He asks Lanzmann repeatedly to stop the questions and says he can't continue. He does continue after much urging from Lanzmann, but it is very hard for him to talk about this experience. Being this close to the extermination process has indelibly been imprinted on Bomba's conscience. It seems that Bomba has kept this period in his life suppressed because it is too hard emotionally to remember.

Michael Podchlebnik was another person interviewed in Shoah. He was there when it all started. He is a Jew who was present at Chelmno when the exterminations commenced. Podchlebnik was one of only two survivors to come out of Chelmno, yet he smiles constantly while Lanzmann interviews him.

Podchlebnik's story is an extremely moving one. His family was deported from the town they lived in and arrived in Chelmno early in 1942. Gas vans were used in Chelmno for the first time. These vans were normal vehicles, but Nazis turned them into death machines by shoving a small group of Jews in the back and using a hose to fill it with the exhaust fumes from the engine. Michael Podchlebnik was recruited as a grave-digger at Chelmno. It was his job to bury the dead from these gassings in the forest nearby.

Only a few days passed before surely one of the most traumatic experiences in Podchlebnik's life occurred. He realized that among the dead in that day's batch was his wife, his seven-year-old son, and his five-year-old daughter. He had to bury his own family.

Upon this realization, Podchlebnik pleaded with the SS and asked them to be buried with them. The SS guard told him that he was strong enough to work and refused to let him die with his family. He eventually escaped this horrid job and survived the war, but his memories of that time of atrocities have always stayed with him.

The aspect of Podchlebnik that really drew me to him was the fact that he smiled the whole time Lanzmann interviewed him. Lanzmann even asks him why he does this to which he responds in fluent Yiddish that it is simply better to be happy than to be sad. For a man who had to bury his own family to smile gives me tremendous hope that human beings can withstand any atrocity. Seeing him smile makes me want to smile for him. He survived and that's what matters.