Customer Ratings & Reviews

I am old enough to remember the original theater release of Shoah. I purchased this given that the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz has recently passed. This documentary is several and I do mean several hours long with captions for English language viewers. This documentary is definitely worth the effort needed to get through it all. Shoah is effective at humanizing the witnesses’ experiences through their own words. This work grows in importance as fewer and fewer survivors live to bare witness to the events in the extermination camps. Lastly, the media quality is on par with other Criterion Collection restorations. It includes a 60 page booklet that is helpful for navigating through the many witness interviews which are organized into chapters.

This is a documentary that should have been given a Special Nobel Peace Prize from a committee that does not lend itself to film. None of the familiar Holocaust footage is used but, rather, it is a 9-hour film of interviews from every dimension of witnesses who were there; including the neighbors who resided outside of the camps. The only way to describe this film would entail a review of the greatest of length; which, in the end, would bore the reader away from a film that must be seen at least once in everyone's life. It is mandatory history unlike anything put to film.

This is a great achievement, but it is one of the hardest things to watch that I’ve ever seen.