Have we forgotten the lessons of Shoah?

Since Hamas’s assault on innocent Israelis, a wave of anti-Semitism has swept across the world. Jews in Europe feel distinctly unsafe. There’s been an arson attack on a German synagogue, the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Austria, and, last weekend, in Lyon, a Jewish woman was stabbed twice, a swastika sprayed on her door. Meanwhile, in Britain, as the Guardian newspaper proclaims that ‘Israel must stop weaponising the Holocaust,’ the Metropolitan Police report antisemitic attacks to have increased in early October by 1350 per cent. You wonder what the late director Claude Lanzmann would have made of it.

Lanzmann’s nine-hour Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985) – meant to be sampled in two parts or at one sitting – was intended to be a colossal blow against such hatreds ever returning to haunt Europe again. Eleven years in the making, it contained long, harrowing accounts of the mass-execution by the Nazis of six million Jews.