HORRIBLE REALITY OF ‘SHOAH’

Television drama has never found the right language for the Holocaust, perhaps because that language doesn’t exist.

Dramatists have had their crack. Stories recalling Nazi atrocities during World War II come and go, some of them even high-minded, yet by sheer weight and numbers seeming almost to desensitize as they commemorate. Even the better ones, such as the recent “Escape From Sobibor” on CBS, fall short.

“Such reality is a challenge for every fiction,” says Claude Lanzmann, the French Jew who spent 11 years making his shining, searing 1985 masterpiece “Shoah,” a 9 1/2-hour documentary that PBS is airing tonight through Thursday (8 p.m. on Channels 28, 50 and 24; 9 p.m. on Channel 15).

“Shoah,” whose title is the Hebrew word for annihilation , stands alone as a living, anguished, screaming, unforgettable document on Nazi war crimes and is one of the most significant works ever shown on any size screen, let alone TV. It already has run in theaters and on European TV, including Germany.

Unlike other Holocaust documentaries, “Shoah” contains no archival footage or stills. Lanzmann instead relives this dark period through subtitled interviews with survivors of such death camps as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmno and Sobibor.

Recording the almost monotone, 9-to-5 routine of atrocity, he also listens to former SS men, Polish farmers and villagers and others who either oversaw or observed the extermination process. He probes, he coaxes, he persists.

Lanzmann has created a remarkable cinema of memories supported by film of the campsites as they appear today. Interviewing people in 14 countries, he recorded a “wave of words” that burn into your mind.

“They began hitting us over the head with all kinds of things, and it was very, very painful” . . . “one hour or minute, you were part of a family, a wife or a husband, and now over everything was death” . . . “thousands of people piled on top of each other, stacked like wood” . . . “they opened the gas chamber, and people fell out like potatoes” . . . “the graves were 20 feet deep, all crammed with bodies” . . . “it stank horribly for miles around” . . . “feeding the ovens.”

This is one of those rare times on TV when pictures support words instead of vice versa. Although the white subtitles are occasionally difficult to read against light backgrounds, it is those words that evoke the images in your mind, almost like radio, letting your imagination shape its own version of the macabre.

Although it’s usually true that the larger the screen, the larger the impact, there is no screen large enough to capture the panorama of this level of evil. There are advantages to viewing “Shoah” at home instead of in a theater, moreover. Although a darkened theater offers more focused viewing, a home offers the kind of familial surroundings that give even greater meaning to the human destruction chronicled on the screen. And the four-part split reduces the burden.

Yet watching “Shoah” is still every bit the emotional ordeal it should be. It’s an open wound.

Lanzmann has the eye of a journalist and the sensibilities of a film maker. There is something almost poetic in the way he uses his camera as a participant as well as an observer.

As he shoots from the front of an old locomotive that slowly approaches the notorious Auschwitz on weed-covered tracks, the voice of a camp survivor recalls:

“So what happens was the following: Say, a transport of Jews was announced to come at two o’clock. So when the transport arrived . . . at Auschwitz, an announcement came to the SS. Now, one SS man came and woke us up. We had to get up and move to the ramp. We immediately got an escort in the night, and we were escorted to the ramp. . . . We were about 200 men . . . and lights went on . . . and under those lights were the cordon of the SS. There was one every 10 yards with a gun in the hand. So, we were in the middle--the prisoners--and we were waiting, waiting for the train, waiting for the next order. And when all this was done, everybody was there, the transport was rolled in. This means, in a very slow fashion, the locomotive which was always in the front was coming to the end of the railway. That was the end of the line . . . for everybody who was on the train.”

What strikes you is the dark symbolism of trains in “Shoah”--black locomotives, black coal, black smoke. Trains, so traditionally romantic in signifying birth and hope when opening new vistas and territories, are here symbols of doom, transporting Jews and others to their death.

Lanzmann asks a German woman whose husband taught school for the children of SS men at Chelmno if she knows how many Jews died at the camp.

She hesitates. “400,000 or 40,000?”

“400,000,” he informs her.

“400,000,” she repeats. “I knew it had a four in it.”

The Nazis did not invent anti-Semitism, historian Raul Hilberg notes in “Shoah.” But their “final solution” was a big, grisly exclamation mark, a statement of closure on an entire people. Others throughout history had told the Jews, “You may not live among us,” Hilberg says. Nazis told them, “You may not live at all.”

We may never understand why the Holocaust happened, but at least “Shoah” explains how it happened. It should be mandatory viewing for students, because never in their lives, one hopes, will they confront evil such as this.

A generation nurtured on the camp gore of “Friday the 13th” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” should have the opportunity to see a real horror story.