I – 6 – the shift from myth to reality

The Shift from Myth to Reality – 

the decision to explore your own family history is, therefore, a difficult one. It can change your life. You reach a point of no return, and that is the moment when you grasp reality; From now on, you want to know. You want to get out of the fog.

Claude Lanzmann, the artist and filmmaker behind the documentary “Shoah,” called this moment “the shift from myth to reality.” Lanzmann wrote: “Treblinka existed. A village named Treblinka existed. (…) I didn’t really want to go to Poland. I had arrived there full of arrogance, convinced that I was undertaking this journey only to confirm that I could easily do without it and quickly return to my old ways of thinking. In fact, I had arrived heavily burdened, crammed full of the knowledge I had acquired over the previous four years through reading, research, and even while filming (as in the case of Suchomel); I was a bomb, albeit a harmless one: the fuse was missing. Treblinka set the bomb ablaze, and I exploded that afternoon with unimagined, devastating force. How else can I describe it? Treblinka became real, and the transformation of the myth into reality struck me like a bolt of lightning…” (Claude Landzmann; The Patagonian Hare, 2012)