From Trauma to Testimony: The Psychology of Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah”
(Trigger warning: Holocaust, genocide, death)
In the years following the Holocaust and World War II, first-person accounts of the genocide shocked the world. The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel’s Night are two of the most notable literary accounts of the Holocaust and are still being discussed 80 years after the end of the war. Night describes Wiesel’s survival as a Jew in Auschwitz and the sights and sounds he would never forget. In his book he recalls the final separation of him and his mother and sisters, the physical decay and eventual death of his father, the burning pit of children, and the constant starvation (Wiesel, 2006). These events were not entirely unique to Wiesel, either. We have all read different accounts of the Holocaust from survivors, and many of them have similar stories and experiences. It is important to remember that large-scale events like the Holocaust result in a traumatized collective (Rousseau, 2025). People who once led vastly different lives are suddenly forever bonded by tragedy.
In 1985, filmmaker Claude Lanzmann released his epic, 9-hour documentary Shoah. Lanzmann conducted interviews with both survivors and perpetrators to get a fully-rounded perspective of the events of the Holocaust. For many of the survivor interviews, Lanzmann places them in an environment similar to that of which they experienced during the years of the genocide. Was this a stylistic choice by the filmmaker, or was there a psychological reasoning for this? Let’s briefly explore the science behind traumatic memory and how it connects to Shoah.
How do our brains store traumatic memory? While we are experiencing trauma, the part of our brain responsible for reasoning virtually shuts off. Our amygdala, located in the limbic system of our brain, is activated, sending us into fight-or-flight. This mechanism is designed to help us survive, but makes it so we cannot transfer short-term memories to long-term storage. The part of our brain that is active during trauma, the limbic system, holds the memories as sensory stimuli (Rousseau, 2025). This explains why Elie Wiesel, in Night, remembers sights, smells, and sounds. Of course, Wiesel was able to give a narrative recounting of the events, but these sensory details are prominent in trauma survivors.
How does this connect to Shoah? One of the many testimonies delivered in the documentary was that of Abraham Bomba. Bomba was a Jewish barber who was deported to Treblinka, another death camp similar to Auschwitz. He was tasked with cutting people’s hair before they entered the gas chamber, and through this occupation he was able to survive.
In the film, Lanzmann interviews Bomba in a barbershop. While Bomba cuts someone’s hair, Lanzmann asks him about his time at Treblinka. What seems like a disturbing conversation in a mundane situation effectively draws out Bomba’s memories. He described how it felt knowing he was many people’s last stop before their death, watching them enter the gas chamber. He also recounted the experience of seeing his friend’s family in the line to the gas chamber (Lanzmann, 1985). In his testimony, Bomba clearly became emotional as he recalled these horrible memories.
We can connect this back to the psychological explanation for traumatic memory. Lanzmann placed Bomba in an environment similar to that of his time at Treblinka. The sight and sounds of cutting hair likely brought his sensory memories to the surface, and thus, his memory of the events. Lanzmann does this for at least two other survivors in the film: Simon Srebnik and Henryk Gawkowski. Srebnik, who survived by singing to the Nazis as entertainment at Chelmno, rowed a boat along the river similar to what he did during his time at the camp. Gawkowski drove the trains to the concentration camps, and Lanzmann interviewed him in the presence of one of these “death trains” (Lanzmann, 1985).
Lanzmann, in the production of Shoah, utilized the psychology of traumatic memory to ensure the most compelling interviews and testimonies from his subjects. By placing the survivors in environments with sensory stimuli that reminded them of their traumatic experiences in the Holocaust, the memories were able to flow. Shoah is one of the most important documentaries of the 20th century, recording the lives of Holocaust survivors less than 40 years after the end of the war. As the number of living survivors dwindles, we can look to this documentary to give us crucial first-person accounts about the horrors of genocide.
References
Lanzmann, C. (1985). Shoah [Film].
Rousseau, D. (2025). Introduction [Lecture Notes]. Retrieved from https://learn.bu.edu/ultra/courses/_194375_1/outline/edit/document/_15526518_1?courseId=_194375_1&view=content&state=view
Rousseau, D. (2025). Limbic System [Lecture Notes]. Retrieved from https://learn.bu.edu/ultra/courses/_194375_1/outline/edit/document/_15526385_1?courseId=_194375_1&view=content&state=view
Wiesel, E. (2006). Night. Hill & Wang.