40 years since Lanzmann’s Shoah, his central question remains: When is it too late?

French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann was best known for his epic documentary Shoah – a viscerally-confronting nine-hour magnum opus in which he interviewed Holocaust survivors, witnesses and even perpetrators, the faces of his subjects filling the entire screen.

Why the need to make the film, asked a perceptive journalist. Wasn’t everything already known about the Holocaust that there was to know? Why the need to create yet another documentary, let alone one that ran for nine hours and took 11 years to produce?

Responded Lanzmann – there was a burning question which had not been asked: When was it too late? When had anti-Jewish racism reached such a crescendo as to be overwhelming? When was it too late for the Jews of Europe to avoid being caught up in the extraordinary killing machine which was Nazi Germany?

Was it too late when the Nuremberg Laws were enacted in 1935, isolating Jews politically and socially, curtailing their civil rights, forbidding marriage between Jews and “bearers of German blood”, banning them from holding government office?

Was it too late when those laws were tightened in 1938, rendering Jews as subjects, rather than citizens, with an incriminating “J” printed on their identity documents?