On the eve of the 27^th of January, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum invited to spend all day in the museum’s Tolerance Centre, where the international prize winning documentary cycle Shoah, created by the French director Claude Lanzmann (b.1925) was screened for 9 and a half hours. From 10.00 a.m. to 8 p.m. the cycle of the documentary movies was shown without intervals in the movie hall of the Tolerance Centre. Visitors were able to come and go at their convenience all day long.

Shoah premiered in Paris in 1985. After watching the documentaries, the famous French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir expressed her opinion to the French newspaper La Monde: “I have never imagined such a combination of beauty and horror... A real masterpiece.” The premiere of the film had a great impact on the world from the cinematographic and historical aspect – the dialectics of the film became the subject of articles, books, seminars.

While recording the memories of the Jewish survivors, German perpetrators and Polish peasants bystanders, Lanzmann brakes from the pure historical documentary genre. His movies come close to meditation, emphatically modernist in form, on the genocide of the European Jews. In these movies, we meet the Polish barber, who used to shave off the hair from the heads of the Jewish women destined to be gassed in several minutes. As well as the Jewish survivor, who was forced to sing merry songs for his Nazi guards, while they were casting the ashes of the cremated Jews into the Narew River. In one of the first shots of Shoah we meet Simon Srebnik, a modern incarnation of Orpheus. He repeats the songs, which he was singing to the Nazis, when he was a teenager. His small boat, gliding in the river, takes us to the world of the dead – existing not in the past, but now and always. This is the abyss of Shoah, which opened during the years of war.

VGSJM Director J.Markas Zingeris presents C.Lanzmann‘s „Shoah“

Markas Zingeris, Director of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, greeted the distinguished guests, who came to pay the tribute on the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Among them the Ambassador of United States of America Anne Derse, the Ambassador of France Francois Laumonier, the Ambassador of Germany Hans Peter Annen, the Ambassador of the Kingdom of Spain Jose Luis Solano Gadea, the Ambassador of the Czech Republic Radek Pech, the Ambassador of Bulgaria Ivan Dantchev, the Ambassador of Hungary Peter Noszko-Horvath, the Counsellor of the Division of the Vice-Minister of the Foreign Affairs Egidijus Meilūnas, Saulius Jaskelevičius, and many other honourable guests were present.

The schoolchildren of the Gerosios Vilties Secondary School in Vilnius have chosen Shoah screening as their way to commemorate the International Holocaust Remembrance day as well. After watching one part of the documentary, schoolchildren also had a guided tour and saw the permanent exhibition “Rescued Lithuanian Child Tells About Shoah”, located in the Tolerance Center of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum.