Shoah: Abraham Bomba

Etgar Keret's stories and films embody the funny and the Tragic;

'Both my parents were Holocaust survivors. My mother was in the Warsaw ghetto—they were kids during the war--and my father on the Russian-Polish border. They didn’t have any books, so my grandparents made up stories for them. So, for my parents the parental duty was to make up stories for us. For them, to read from books would have been like McDonald’s.'

'Most of my stories are not realistic because i am very much interested in the subjective experience of reality. I don't want to write stories that are factually true, but that are fundamentally true. I am more interested in portraying an emotional situation then in a correct ontology of the world'.

A fragment of an interview with Etgar Keret

By Daniela Hurezanu

SHOAH is a nine-hour film completed by Claude lanzmann in 1985 about the Holocaust. Shoah consists of many hours of interviews with witnesses of the Holocaust. Lanzmann's style of interviewing, and his selection of interview footage divides his witnesses into three distinct archetypes: survivor, bystander and perpetrator. Lanzmann makes an effort to represent each archetype quite differently. The account by hairdresser Abraham Bomba can be seen below.