We took the opportunity of the Easter break to watch a few DVDs, one of them the marathon 9.5 hour Shoah documentary by Claude Lanzmann from 1986. It deals with the extermination camps for Jews built in Poland by the Nazis during WW2 at Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno and Auschwitz.
Apart from a handful of documents, it doesn't use any archive footage, instead it comprises interviews - mostly with survivors, but also gentile villagers, one with a quite candid SS man involved in Treblinka, an American historian and a few Nazi appointed functionaries in Poland - plus (then) contemporary views of the places featured. But it isn't at all dull because of that and the footage of the villages and locations as they were 30 years ago is quite interesting. Most of the trains that are shown travelling to the different destinations are steam-hauled which is a bonus for those interested in historic transport. The other thing you notice is the relative absence of cars, and the appearance of horses and carts. The contemporary scenes at Auschwitz are almost devoid of people - when we visited there 20 years later in 2005 it was full of coachloads of tourists.
It seems that the scenes of trains arriving at Treblinka are now historic as the railway has been removed. Chelmno was a different category as there gas vans were used to take victims from holding buildings - including a church and a manor house - to pits in the forest: by the time they reached there 15 minutes later they had been asphyxiated.
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