2004 Fishmaster Jon Boat

The law of conservation of violence

I've been avoiding since I arrived in Berlin but in the end it happened without my noticing. There were two factors: one, I am seeking information about T4 disposal program of the "mentally ill" during the rule of the Nazis, two, that a close friend he kept telling me about this documentary that had to do without fail. And it happened: I saw "Shoah." started with the first 2 hours are posted on google video , I became obsessed and I could not quit. If you do not tell it here, my blog would be a little less than mine, a little further from the truth.

"Shoah" is a documentary 9-hour course on the Holocaust, directed by Claude Lanzmann . It rolled for about 11 years and was released in 1985. It contains no footage or soundtrack. The images are composed exclusively of interviews with survivors, witnesses and ex-Nazi officials and as contemporary footage of what remains of the extermination camps of Treblinka, Chelmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Warsaw ghetto. There are no historical accounts or policies, or melodrama or sentimentality, only dry and detailed descriptions of how death was organized on an industrial scale. Trains arriving here, we put in a row here, devestían here, we cut their hair here, entered the gas chambers here, and took out the bodies, put them in ovens Asa, and this with several thousands of people day. It is as slow as it takes for data and data no longer take their proper dimension and that the interpretation (and somehow the final assembly) is formed slowly in your head.

Lanzmann insists that "Shoah" is about the specificity of the "Jewish question", not comparable to any other. However, it is almost impossible to see without your mind go in other directions and do not get to thinking, for example, how the indifference, a feeling very common and very treacherous, developed with frightening ease. Or forgetfulness, that makes us forget that while the holocaust was invented by the Nazis, antisemitism did not (and I step examples that cover centuries of European history) or, as saying on twitter , to condemn Israel no we remember that the weapons with which to attack Palestinian we also sell them. Or the thread about this, remember that soon comes the summer and once there will be hundreds of dead on the shores of southern Europe and many others, the more fortunate, end up in a detention center for immigrants in terms painful life, humiliated, herded and invisible. Indifference, again, and forgetfulness.

While watching "Shoah" I accidentally went through two readings: "Everything Flows" by Vasily Grossman on the crimes of Stalinism, and "Footnotes in Gaza," a comic documentary about Joe Sacco two brutal massacres of Palestinian refugees perpetrated by the Israeli army in 1956. Sometimes, the three works appear to me as a fatal triangle, they ask, are answered, they understand, they misunderstand each other. But most of the time are like a compact block in which I am no longer able to distinguish scenes and evidence: the unimaginable cruelty, people who pisses on it that is stooping to pick up a wounded family and hit a shot in the neck, the smell of corpses in the heat and how well they are preserved in the cold, the survival instinct bordering on madness and guilt of those who did not die, the inability to tell it, the need to forget and again forgetfulness and indifference to make their way. Sacco's drawings may illustrate Lanzmann interviews and these confused with the experiences of those deported to Siberia and these in turn with those of Palestinians killed in the door of his house. The stories of suffering are interchangeable and are repeated in a spiral demonic. And he says Vasily Grossman, the voice of a political prisoner released after Stalin's death:

"There is a simple law: the law of conservation of violence. Simple as the law of conservation of energy. Violence is eternal by much to be done to destroy it does not disappear, not diminished, only transformed. Now take the form of slavery, now Mongol invasion. Jump from one continent to another, it becomes class struggle and class struggle in the struggle of races, now in the material sphere he moved to medieval religiosity, now rails against people of color, now with the writers and artists, but in general on the ground there is always the same amount of violence. "

In the image above: "Topography of Terror. Gestapo, SS and Reich Security Main Office" , catalog of the permanent exhibition on the Holocaust in Berlin, "Footnotes in Gaza" by Joe Sacco (Reservoir Books, Mondadori), "Everything Flows" by Vasily Grossman (Random House Mondadori); "Fuck America" \u200b\u200bEdgar Hilsenrath (the photo is the French edition of Attila, the English edition is Naturae Errata) .