Chapter 4, “The Warsaw Ghetto: A People Set Apart,” considers how Polish elites grappled with Jewish victimhood in their midst and differentiates between Nazi targeting of Polish elites and the better known targeting and murder of Polish Jews. It traces initial Nazi persecution of Warsaw’s Jewish community, ghettoization in 1940, persecution within the ghetto, and its liquidation to the death camp at Treblinka in 1942, and the outbreak of violent resistance in 1943. This is contextualized against Polish antisemitism before and during the war and particular Polish elite reactions to the developing Holocaust. A handful of intelligentsia figures who reacted strongly to antisemitic persecution in various ways demonstrate the complexity of Polish response to the Nazi Holocaust and how prewar and wartime antisemitism widened gulfs between ethnic Poles and the Polish-Jewish community. It argues that, because of a combination of targeted Nazi violence and native antisemitism, Polish elite response to Jewish persecution arose very late, typically only in 1943 with the outbreak of the ghetto uprisings, which captured the attention of resistance-minded Poles.

Claude Lanzmann began work on Shoah in 1973 and didn’t complete it until twelve years later. The film was shaped in part by events that happened as it was being shot: a spate of trials that placed in the dock perpetrators of the Final Solution in France, the emergence of a movement of Holocaust-deniers or negationists, and the airing on French TV in 1979 of the American “docudrama” Holocaust. Lanzmann shaped a movie that in form and substance defined itself in reaction to these developments, crystallizing in the process a particular, French understanding of the Final Solution as a unique and unprecedented event, not about survival and reconstruction, but about death in the gas chambers of the Aktion Reinhard Vernicthungslagers. Lanzmann wanted to create a film that denied viewers catharsis or consolation, and in the process, he gave the genocide a new name, Shoah, which has since gained currency in France and elsewhere.