Claude Lanzmann was hired to make a 120 minute documentary about the Holocaust and turn it in within about 18 months. He did not do this. Instead, acknowledging the truth of the matter, that one could not begin to grasp the inhuman enormity of the Nazi's decimation of the Jewish people of Europe, Lanzmann spent the next decade interviewing survivors of the camps, non-Jewish Poles who lived and worked around the camps, Nazis who ran things, and other witnesses - over 350 hours of footage - and editing it down to the nine and a half hour documentary Shoah (1985) and a number of other shorter documentaries in the decades since. 

Because of the emotional (and temporal) magnitude of the film we'll be spending the next three weeks covering this to better give it the time it deserves. Week one is on Shoah Era 1, the first four and a half hours of Shoah, week two will cover the rest of Shoah, and week three will cover the additional materials on the Criterion release including three additional shorter documentaries made by Lanzmann from his original footage.