Foreword by Simone de Beauvoir

It is not easy to talk about Shoah. There is magic in this film, and magic cannot be explained. After the war, we read countless testimonies about the ghettos and extermination camps; we were deeply moved. But, watching Claude Lanzmann's extraordinary film today, we realize that we knew nothing. Despite all our knowledge, the horrific experience remained distant from us. For the first time, we experience it in our minds, in our hearts, in our flesh. It becomes ours. Neither fiction nor documentary, Shoah succeeds in this re-creation of the past with astonishing economy of means: places, voices, faces. Claude Lanzmann's great art is to make places speak, to resurrect them through voices, and, beyond words, to express the inexpressible through faces.