“If Shoah was a powerful reminder of the evil men can be capable of, then All I Had Was Nothingness is an explanation for the tender gloves that are often worn politically when it comes to the Jewish people.”
In the early 1970s, French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann set out to make a documentary about the Holocaust, commissioned by Israeli officials to show the viewpoint of the Jews. It proved a feat for Lanzmann, who himself hailed from a Jewish family and battled the demons of traveling into the hell of places like the Chelmno extermination camp, as well as Poland’s Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the Warsaw Ghetto. After nearly 12 years and through dozens of interviews with survivors, witnesses and perpetrators, Lanzmann delivered the film Shoah, a 9 hours and 45 minutes-long masterpiece which in 2023 was added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.
In honor of 2025 being the year we celebrate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, as well as what would have been the late Lanzmann’s 100th birthday, the Berlinale is revisiting both the original film and a new documentary drawn from the archival footage of Lanzmann’s journey into the atrocities, as told by those who survived, or helped perpetrate them. This new doc is titled All I Had Was Nothingness and is written and directed by French filmmaker Guillaume Ribot.
This is not the first time that Ribot tackles the tragedy of the Shoah – the Holocaust. In 2014 there was Le Cahier de Susi (Susi’s Notebook), a medium-length doc about an 11-year-old Jewish girl who was murdered in Auschwitz. In 2016, Ribot made Treblinka, I Am the Last Jew about Chil Rajchman, a young Jew who took part in the uprising at the camp, thus surviving the Holocaust. There is also the 2019 doc The Black Book about the infamous catalogue of names that Russian writers kept, detailing Nazi atrocities against the Jewish people. The book, a terrifying narrative, was only discovered after the dissolution of the USSR in the 1990s. In fact, one could say that Ribot has consciously dedicated his career – his CV also includes photojournalism – to the theme of memory, as the Berlinale site describes in his bio.
All I Had Was Nothingness uses the diaries Lanzmann wrote during the lengthy filming of Shoah as well as the filmmaker’s memoirs as a thread, to tie the narration of those who survived the atrocities with the words of the perpetrators. Or rather, the majority of the people present, who simply stood by and watched – unable or unwilling to do anything about the horror. It is a haunting reminder of what went on in Europe in the 20th century, not even a hundred years ago, something Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai often points out when asked about the current turmoil in the Middle East. “Less than a hundred years ago, Europe experienced its darkest hours,” Gitai said in an interview about his latest film in Venice, in 2024.
All I Had Was Nothingness also helps explain, though not justify, why a German festival like Berlinale is so reticent in allowing the Palestinian narrative to seep through, after everything the country had been responsible for, and not so long ago. If Shoah was a powerful reminder of the evil men can be capable of, then All I Had Was Nothingness is an explanation for the tender gloves that are often worn politically when it comes to the Jewish people.
Ribot’s own voiceover, as he narrates Lanzmann’s writing, is soothing, though the words are often jarring. The interviews help put together a picture of the filmmaker behind Shoah, a man tormented by ghosts which must have accompanied him all through his 90-plus years on earth – the result of having lived through WWII and fought in the French Resistance alongside his father and brother. He talks about Shoah as a film featuring survivors, but which is ultimately about death, and yet where death isn’t talked about by anyone who has faced it. Those who went into the gas chambers never lived to tell their story. “I realized I’m making a film about death, not survival,” Lanzmann writes at one point, and often uses phrases like “questions tormented me,” while lamenting the inability to get a specific type of Nazi perpetrator on camera and thus in the film. His biggest regret in making Shoah is that none of the Nazi executioners were ever interviewed in the film, though Lanzmann comes face to face with one, in an unsettling turn where his camera is discovered and, in the rush to escape, he leaves the equipment behind.
All I Had Was Nothingness also reminds us that Shoah was a film which unprecedentedly documented the Holocaust without using any stock images or archival footage. It did so simply by allowing those who witnessed it to talk, to Lanzmann, to each other and to us, the audience. It opened a dialogue for the world to never forget what happened, not so long ago, in areas not so far from where audiences will watch the film, or both films: Berlin.
By putting human faces to the terror, Lanzmann singlehandedly changed the opinion of the world and, whether we like it or not, influenced the narrative that is still preferred today. It is no surprise that the Jewish people will always be called victims and everyone who perpetrates any acts against them terrorists, if only we are privy to the testimony of people like Abraham Bomba, the Jewish barber of Treblinka who cut women’s hair in the gas chamber. Or Simon Srebnik, whose survival depended on singing military songs to the Nazis and who moved to Israel after the war. Or even Henryk Gawkowski, the Polish locomotive operator with a passion for vodka whose likeness is featured on the poster of Shoah, and who drove the trains that transported the Jews to their death.
Along with the former Nazi officials featured in the hidden interviews by Lanzmann in All I Had Was Nothingness, these images, these words, these feelings have created a reminder of why we should never forget. And perhaps, if we really did remember, wholeheartedly and powerfully, we would never be allowed to do it again – against any other people.
Image copyright: USHMM et YAD VASHEM – Collection SHOAH de Claude Lanzmann