Delayed Reaction: Shoah

Premise: An incredible exhaustive documentary about the Holocaust.

Back in 8th grade, I had a group project where each group picked a time period and had multiple assignments to turn in. One part was that we had to have a video project. Or maybe it was some piece of multimedia. The specifics don't matter. My friends and I in our group initially thought about funny, impractical skits we could do on our topic - The Great Depression. Eventually, we ran out of time and opted for the easiest idea we could think of: we found the oldest people we knew and asked them about their memories of the Great Depression. It turns out, that was the best move we could've made. We got an A and a special award at an "everyone gets a trophy" awards ceremony at the end of the year for it. The lesson I learned from that is that it's hard to mess up interviewing old people about a sad time in history.

This is exactly why Shoah is such a valuable document. It's 9-hours of interviewing people with first-hand accounts of the worst parts of the Jewish Holocaust. There's almost no way to mess something like this up. It reminded me a lot of the deeply unsettling doc The Act of Killing (and its sister doc, The Look of Silence). Much of all these docs are about the banality of evil. It's not Schindler's List recreating the liquidation of the Warsaw ghettos. Shoah is about matter-of-fact stories of people with jobs like burying the bodies.

Shoah is absolutely "homework viewing". There's no way to entice a person to watch it on entertainment levels. It's 9-hours of interviews. The interview subjects are older and not the most polished speakers. There are no revelations about the Holocaust that you didn't already know. I do think it's a movie anyone should watch though. It's one of our great cultural artifacts. If this was the one piece of media left about the Holocaust, it would be plenty. Never has the Holocaust felt more like a real event to me than while I was watching this. This is certainly one of the essential documentaries, even though you'll never see it mimicked in a Documentary Now.

Verdict: Strongly Recommend