Shoah turns 40

40 years ago, on April 30, 1985, 40 years after Hitler's suicide on April 30, 1945, the first privileged few had the unprecedented experience of discovering the now eternal film: Shoah. This UFO (unidentified cinematic object) was initially screened in three Parisian cinemas, as only three 35 mm prints were available: Le Monte Carlo at 52 avenue des Champs-Élysées, and two of Frédéric Mitterrand's cinemas: the Olympic Maryline at 10 rue Boyer-Barret in the 14th arrondissement and the Olympic Luxembourg at 67 rue Monsieur-le-Prince in the 6th arrondissement.

 If you were there, please don't hesitate to share your memories with us by writing to contact@claude-lanzmann.com.

 The theatrical release was preceded by a preview in the presence of François Mitterrand on Sunday April 21 at the Théâtre de l'Empire.

In January, he replied:

Dear Claude Lanzmann,

Thank you for your letter. Your testimony is precious to me.

I'm delighted to hear that you're completing your film, and I can only imagine how you must feel at the end of a work that has occupied you for so many years. It is, I am convinced, a monument worthy of our piety and the collective memory of our time. After this film, certain hated distortions of history will no longer be possible...

 Indeed, in January 1985, the film had not yet been released. Much has been written about the choice of this name. In fact, Tamar Lewinsky, the curator of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, recently had me listen to excerpts from preparatory interviews for Shoah, which make up a corpus of 250 hours of interviews, recorded on audiocassettes, donated by the ACFL to the Jewish Museum in Berlin in 2021, in preparation for the joint Franco-German UNESCO Memory of the World candidacy.

 As Tamar Lewinsky, who is doing such remarkable work on these recordings, pointed out to me, this is Claude Lanzmann's English-language interview with one of the few female survivors of the Sobibor extermination camp, Ilana Safran, an Israeli whom Claude begged to be filmed, but who refused and therefore does not appear in Shoah. Claude explained to her in English: "I'm preparing a film about the Shoah", in 1975, 10 years before the film's release. I thus had proof of what Corinna Coulmas, Claude's principal assistant in the making of Shoah over the course of 12 years, had already explained to me:during the entire preparation of Shoah, the team that consisted of Claude and his two Hebrew-speaking assistants, Corinna Coulmas and Irena Steinfeldt-Levy, commonly used the word "Shoah", since it had been used in Israel since 1948 to designate the extermination of European Jews during the Second World War, a word meaning "great catastrophe" and found a limited number of times in the Bible.

So, at the last minute, Claude couldn't find a title, so he decided on Shoah, which he recounts very well in Le lièvre de Patagonie.

Following the preview at the Théâtre de l'Empire, Le Monde published Simone de Beauvoir's review in its April 29 edition, whichLe Monde subscribers can reread today:"Shoah, de Claude Lanzmann : la mémoire de l'horreur".

The film began its universal journey.

Since then, the international dimension of the ACFL's inclusion in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register has put the monument back in the spotlight worldwide.

 On the weekend of April 13-14, 2025, it was shown in Warsaw at the Muranów cinema in the heart of the ghetto site, to a packed house, and then last weekend at the Beijing Film Festival in the company of Guillaume Ribot's magnificent film from the Shoah rushes : Je n'avais que le néant, about which we spoke earlier.

INA and Lumni Enseignement are also celebrating the film's 40th anniversary. The teaching pack was designed by Jean-François Forges, in consultation with Claude Lanzmann. INA and Lumni are making extracts from "Shoah" available to mark the fortieth anniversary of the film's release.

"Shoah" - Extract 1 - The disappearance of traces

"Shoah" - Extract 2 - The gas chambers of Treblinka and Auschwitz

"Shoah" - Extract 3 - Poles from Grabow

"Shoah" - Extract 4 - Poles of Chelmno

"Shoah" - Extract 5 - The killing process at Treblinka

"Shoah" - Extract 6 - Life and death at Birkenau for Jews from the Theresienstadt family camp

As Polish student Franek Csaja said at the Warsaw screening, this work, which"everyone must see once in their life", must be shown again and again. It's up to everyone to seize the educational virtues of this film, without an image of violence, whether in the school or the home, in order to raise awareness at all ages and combat current societal excesses.

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