TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter I: The Description of Treblinka in Historiography 35
o. Claude Lanzmann
In 1985, the nine-and-a-half-hour film Shoah debuted, shot by the French-
Jewish director Claude Lanzmann. It sought to prove, on the basis of eyewitness
narratives of ‘Holocaust survivors,’ the annihilation of the Jews in ‘extermination
camps,’ among them also Treblinka. In the introductory note to
the book of the same name, which contains the entire spoken text of the film,
Simone de Beauvoir wrote: 69
“After the war we read masses of accounts of the ghettos and the extermination
camps, and we were devastated. But when, today, we see
Claude Lanzmann’s extraordinary film, we realize we have understood
nothing. In spite of everything we knew, the ghastly experience remained
remote from us. Now, for the first time, we live it in our minds, hearts and
flesh. It becomes our experience.”
In order to gain a notion of the standard of this film and of the book of the
same title, we now reproduce an excerpt from the conversation in it between
the director and his star eyewitness, the Treblinka barber Abraham Bomba.
We are quoting here from the English translation: 70
“[Lanzmann:] How did it look, the gas chamber?
[Bomba] It was not a big room, around twelve feet by twelve feet. […]
And then one of the kapos came in and said: ‘Barbers, you have to do a job
to make all those women coming in believe that they are just taking a haircut
and going in to take a shower, and from there they go out from this
place.’ We know already that there is no way of going out from this room
[…]’
And suddenly you saw the women coming?
Yes, they came in.
How were they?
They were undressed, naked, without clothes, without anything else […]
There were no mirrors?
No, there were no mirrors. There were just benches – not chairs, just
benches – where we worked, about sixteen or seventeen barbers […]
You said there were about sixteen barbers? You cut the hair of how
many women in one batch?
In one day there was about, I would say, going into that place between
sixty and seventy women in the same room at one time. After we were finished
with this party, another party came in […]”
Robert Faurisson comments about this: 71
69
Claude Lanzmann, Shoa, éditions Fayard, Paris 1985; English edition, Shoah, DaCapo Press,
New York 1995, Foreword, p. vii.
70
Shoah, English edition, pp. 112-116.
71
R. Faurisson, Ecrits révisionnistes, op. cit. (note 56), vol. II, pp. 558f.