Instructor: Gordon Thomas
Most recently taught: I have used these handouts to look at excerpts of Shoah in my classes at all levels. Many of these handouts contain excerpts from the published transcripts of this book: Shoah: The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995). Many libraries contain an earlier edition, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust (New York: Pantheon, 1985), which is now out of print and has different pagination (and slightly different and less accurate text). The first two handouts use the current edition of the book; page numbers in the other handouts are to the earlier edition.
We are planning to use the first two of these handouts in the workshop.
Click on the following links to either download the files or view them in rich-text format (rtf):
 | "The Germans made us refer to the bodies as Figuren." Discovering One’s Family Among the Victims. Interviews with Mordechaï Podchlebnik, Motke Zaïdel, and Itzhak Dugin. |
| "It was God's will, that's all!" Group interview of the villagers at Chelmo. |
| Arrival at a Death Camp. Rudolf Vrba, Abraham Bomba, and Richard Glazar speak of their experiences. |
| " . . . your feelings disappeared, you were dead. You had no feeling at all." Abraham Bomba describes cutting hair at Treblinka. Includes excerpt of interview of Lanzmann published in Yale French Studies. See also this Web page of some of my students' comments on this interview; these students were enrolled in English 309 in fall 1993. |
| "I realized that my life had become meaningless." Interview with Filip Müller, survivor of the Sonderkommando. Müller describes hearing victims sing the Czech national anthem and the Hativah in the gas chamber. |
| Interviews with Filip Müller and Raul Hilberg concerning what was the Nazis "invented" and what they used from previous times. |
| Interview with Franz Suchomel, SS Unterscharführer. |
| Interview with Walter Stier (traffic controller for the railway). Handouts contextualizes Stier's testimony with information from Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews. |
| Interview with German railway workers and survivor Richard Glazar. |
| ". . . the following technical changes are needed:" Change Order for the Manufacture of Gas Vans. Lanzmann reads the memo while his camera makes a point about German industry during the war and today. |
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Last edited on Wednesday, June 20, 2001 at 05:02 AM.