It was the late, much-missed, Colin Rosenstiel who alerted me to the fact that Shoah (calamity or destruction in Hebrew) had become the term preferred in the Jewish community to Holocaust for the Nazis' "final solution". Shoah was therefore the name given by Claude Lanzmann, who died last Thursday, to his forensic and exhaustive examination on film of the Jewish genocide. As well as testimony from Jewish survivors, Lanzmann also obtained, largely by subterfuge, the recollections of former Nazis. That this could still touch a raw nerve, a generation after the war, was demonstrated when Lanzmann was beaten up by a group of young Germans on an occasion when his fictitious persona as a mere researcher had been seen through.
Claude Lanzmann's work is a perpetual rebuttal of the claims of holocaust deniers.
[Update] For an obituary highlighting Lanzmann's childhood in the Resistance and his place in French intellectual society, see this article on France 24's English language service.
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