The complete text of Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah. This nine-and-a-half-hour film was the result of years of research and the result is an oral history of the Holocaust that brings together a full range of witnesses: the SS officers who served in the death camps; the Polish villagers who tilled their fields within yards of the crematoriums; the Germans who resettled occupied Poland, moving into the houses whose Jewish owners had been sent to their death; the state employees who sold Jews half-fare excursion tickets to the camps- one way; and others. Then there are the survivors themselves: a Polish barber who cut the hair of women he knew were to die in the next few minutes; a thirteen-year-old boy who was to work in the death camp's "special squad"; the Pole who was taken into the Warsaw ghetto so that he could report to the outside world what he had seen; a woman who lived in hiding in Berlin for most of the war, in anguish at the fate of her people and her own escape from it. The film shows no archival footage, it is through the words themselves that the imagination recreated the world described in these words- a way of getting at the truth that is far more shocking than the depiction of actual images. Shoah is unforgettable, and it is destined to become a landmark of film and history.