Passing On Suffering

Well, this is about the most heart-breaking thing you'll read today, via:Sully re:  a memoir by Claude Lanzmann, best known for Shoah, the 9-hour documentary on the Holocaust:

One of the most famous scenes in the film is his interview with Abraham Bomba, the so-called "Barber of Treblinka," a Jewish prisoner who was forced to cut women's hair before they were sent to the gas chamber. ...  [Bomba] finds one memory too hard to share—the day when a fellow barber saw his wife and child enter the undressing room. At this moment in the film, for the first time, Bomba breaks down and can't go on, until Lanzmann insists: "You have to do it. We have to do it."

There is something cruel about this insistence—most of us could not force a Holocaust survivor to return to the worst moment of his life. But for Lanzmann, Shoah was not just a film, it was a historical mission and a life work, and he was willing to do just about anything to get it made. "Abraham's tears were as precious to me as blood, the seal of truth, its very incarnation," he writes. "Some people have suggested some sort of sadism on my part in this perilous scene, while on the contrary I consider it to be the epitome of reverence and supportiveness, which is not to tiptoe away in the face of suffering, but to obey the categorical imperative of the search for and the transmission of truth."

As I've said before, be it war vets or Apollo atronauts or Mel fucking Brooks, we hafta get these people to empty the tank before they die. As cruel as it may be, and like anybody there's no way in hell I woulda been able to press him to continue with his story, ANY story we have to share serves to benefit how we understand both our humanity as a group of people and ourselves as humans.

Basically, what I'm saying is I couldn't do it but I'm glad someone else did. Like tapping a keg, I guess.

This also reminds me of the crushing Jerry Lewis flick that was never released.