Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4pm

"The Sobibor uprising could not be a mere moment in Shoah: it deserved a film of its own, demanded to be treated individually. It is in fact a paradigmatic example of what I have referred to elsewhere as the 'reappropriation' of power and violence by the Jews."

In this remarkable new documentary, director Claude Lanzmann focuses on one, highly significant episode from the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. Originally intended to be included in his monumental film, Shoah (1985), much of the footage presented here comprises of an interview with a survivor of Sobibor concentration camp, and one of the very few to have survived through rebellion and escape.

Rather than being an epilogue or a shorter companion piece to Shoah, however, this film very much possesses its own identity, particularly in its direct challenge to the pervading "myth of no resistance" that holds that the Jews went to their slaughter in ignorance and timidity. In the lengthy introduction that sets out the rationale for the film in characteristically explicit terms, Lanzmann expresses the need to bear testimony to the countless acts of bravery and freedom on the part of Jews in the camps and ghettos of Nazi incarceration.

Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4pm recounts the story of Yehuda Lerner; his arrest, internment, escape and re-capture eight times, and his transportation to Sobibor in the autumn of 1943. He tells of his luck in not being killed on the spot on the numerous occasions of his arrest, and explains his relentless attempts to escape by declaring it better to risk being shot or hanged than to die of starvation and degradation, forced to live a "non-life". Lanzmann's astute and direct questions serve as gentle prodings of memory, while Lerner's story unfolds over slow pans across sleepy summer landscapes, forests and town-views of modern-day Poland and Belorussia. Although the interview was held in 1979, the use of more recent footage of Warsaw and Minsk not only serves to re-visit the scenes of earlier crimes but also evidences the continued existence of places whose names have been subsumed into the chronicles of history. When Lerner tells of his ultimate arrival at Sobibor, we see the deserted train station itself, serving as both a proof and a reminder that these places still exist and the story, in some sense, still goes on.

This is most marked with the short sequence at Majdanek concentration camp, one of the many stations on the way to Sobibor. We see, and hear, hundreds of black crows who rule this desolate place as death made manifest. Lublin, a centre of pre-war Jewry, lies in the background only nine kilometres away, testament to the conspicuous visibility of the death camp on the hill. We are shown the gas chambers and oven chimney, not destroyed by the departing Germans as at Auschwitz and elsewhere. These things in themselves need no narration; the documentation of their existence is sufficient, and yet Lanzmann achieves this with a real cinematic eye married to the principles of non-exploitation and unsentimentality.

In particular is the use of silence and the mixing of image and narration. The fluid yet non-intrusive illustration of the journey lessens, however, when Lerner tells of the actual events leading up to October 14, 1943. Fearful of the imminent destruction of the entire camp by the Germans anxious to retreat West, a scorched-earth policy that would have entailed the certain death of all the remaining Jews, a plan to overwhelm the camp guards was hatched by a select committee of prisoners. The story of the escape is fascinating in its own right, dramatic and absurdly comic in equal measure, necessitated as it was on stereotypical German punctuality. Most striking is the emotion of Lerner as he re-visits the terror of attacking with an axe 'his' designated guard and his telling of the honour he felt to be chosen to be one of the men to kill a German. The plan is successfully executed and we leave the story with Lerner having collapsed through exhaustion at he edge of the forest surrounding the camp…

Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4pm and Shoah are arguably the most important films ever made, not only due to the importance of their subject but the craft of the films themselves and their status as proof that the moving-image documentary remains a unique medium for the exposition of truth. Much has been said of Lanzmann and his adamant views regarding the ethics of representation of the Holocaust. Avowedly critical of all attempts to 're-enact' or 'fictionalise' this most indescribable and incomprehensible of events in human history, his films are remarkable achievements in fashioning essential viewing out of survivor testimonies and masterful evocations of place, history, and the enormous courage of a profoundly violated people.

Reviewed by Yoram Allon