The 30 Best Films About the Shoah

Cinema that confronts the Shoah has a unique responsibility: to confront the unrepresentable. The collective imagination is marked by monumental works, masterpieces that have sought to give a face to the horror and a voice to survival, becoming pillars of world memory. But beyond these powerful narratives, a more arduous cinematic territory exists, one that explores the fragmentation of memory and the abyssal ethical complexity inherited from the Holocaust.

Our compass in this exploration will not be only notoriety, but formal innovation and psychological depth. We will discover how the language used to tell the Shoah story is inextricably linked to the geopolitical context of its production. Films born in the Eastern Bloc, for example, were not simple artistic expressions, but complex negotiations with censorship and national memory, while Western cinema focused more on individual psychological trauma.

This guide is a path that unites the most celebrated masterpieces with the most necessary independent and auteur works. These are films that do not offer easy answers but ask necessary questions, challenging the viewer to reject simplification and approach a deeper, more uncomfortable truth about the memory of the Shoah and human nature.

Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog)

This 32-minute documentary by Alain Resnais, made just ten years after the liberation of the camps, is not a simple historical account. It is a cinematic essay on memory, oblivion, and responsibility. Resnais juxtaposes color images of the Auschwitz and Majdanek camps, empty and overgrown with nature in 1955, with terrifying black-and-white archival footage, creating a visual and emotional short circuit that directly questions the viewer.

Resnais’s analysis is ruthless. His dialectical method does not seek to explain the horror, but to show the chasm that separates our present perception from the past reality. The title, a reference to Hitler’s “Nacht und Nebel” decree for the disappearance of political prisoners, becomes a metaphor for our own tendency to let the past vanish into the fog of ignorance. The film is one of the first, and most powerful, cinematic reflections on the Holocaust, a work that changed modern consciousness and laid the groundwork for all future cinema on the subject.

Shoah

Claude Lanzmann’s monumental work, nearly ten hours long and the result of eleven years of labor, is a point of no return in the representation of the Holocaust. His thesis is radical and uncompromising: the Shoah is an unprecedented event that cannot be “represented” or historicized through archival images of corpses, an act Lanzmann considered obscene. The film, in fact, contains not a single frame of period footage.

Its power lies entirely in the present: in the testimonies of survivors, perpetrators, and eyewitnesses interviewed decades after the events, and in the long, meditative shots of the extermination sites as they appear today. Lanzmann does not create a documentary, but a work that, through the living word and the obsessive emptiness of the landscapes, performs an act of resurrecting memory. It is a cinematic experience that does not inform, but transmits the inconceivable, making the invisible visible and leaving an indelible mark.

Kapo

Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, this 1960 film was one of the first works of fiction to explicitly confront the horror of the concentration camps. It tells the story of a young French Jewish girl who, to survive, denies her identity and becomes a “kapo,” a prisoner with supervisory duties. The film is as important for its content as for the critical debate it sparked.

A famous essay by the critic Jacques Rivette, “De l’abjection,” condemned a specific shot in the film: a tracking shot forward to aestheticize the suicide of a prisoner on the barbed wire. For Rivette, this formal choice represented a moral failure, an attempt to make horror “beautiful.” This critique marked a crucial point in film theory, posing a fundamental question: is there a moral limit to the aesthetic representation of atrocity? Kapo thus became an essential benchmark, an “anti-model” against which later works like Shoah and Son of Saul would define themselves.

Le Chagrin et la Pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity)

This four-hour-plus documentary by Marcel Ophüls is a devastating work of historical revisionism. Focusing on the French city of Clermont-Ferrand during the Nazi occupation, Ophüls dismantles, piece by piece, the post-war myth of a unanimously resistant France. Through interviews with collaborators, Resistance members, German officers, and ordinary citizens, the film reveals a much more uncomfortable truth.

A picture emerges of opportunism, indifference, latent anti-Semitism, and fear—that “gray zone” of human behavior that was far more widespread than the heroism celebrated by official historiography. The film was so controversial that French state television banned its broadcast for over a decade. Its importance is paramount: it expands the concept of responsibility beyond the Nazi perpetrators, forcing a nation to reckon with its own past and the active role of collaborationism.

Pasażerka (Passenger)

An unfinished masterpiece by Polish director Andrzej Munk, who died in a car accident during filming. The film was assembled by his collaborators using the footage shot, still photographs, and the screenplay read by a voice-over. A former Auschwitz guard, on a cruise on a transatlantic liner, believes she recognizes one of her former prisoners, Marta, among the passengers. This encounter triggers a flood of conflicting memories.

The fragmented and unfinished nature of the film becomes a powerful metaphor for traumatic memory itself: elusive, incomplete, impossible to reconstruct into a linear and coherent narrative. Munk explores the complex psychological duel between victim and perpetrator, refusing any easy moral categorization. The work is a fundamental example of how the Polish Film School confronted the heavy legacy of the war, turning a production limitation into an extraordinary aesthetic insight.

Démanty noci (Diamonds of the Night)

Jan Němec’s debut film and a key work of the Czechoslovak New Wave, Diamonds of the Night is a radical and immersive cinematic experience. The plot is stripped down: two Jewish boys escape from a train deporting them to a concentration camp. The film, almost devoid of dialogue, does not focus on narrating events, but on the physical and psychological experience of the escape.

Through fragmented editing, a visceral use of the handheld camera, and dreamlike, surreal inserts, Němec plunges us into the protagonists’ feverish delirium. We do not see the Holocaust, but we perceive it through the hunger, fear, and fatigue of the two boys, in a stream of consciousness where reality, memories, and hallucinations merge. It is a work that strips the horror of any historical context to give us its pure existential essence, an example of phenomenological cinema of rare power.

Obchod na korze (The Shop on Main Street)

Winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, this Czechoslovak masterpiece explores the banality of evil through the figure of an “everyman.” During World War II, in a small Slovak town under the pro-Nazi regime, the carpenter Tóno Brtko is assigned the role of “Aryan controller” of the small notions shop of an elderly Jewish woman, Mrs. Lautmann. An unlikely and tender friendship develops between them.

The film masterfully blends tragedy and grotesque comedy to show how ordinary people can become accomplices in an inhuman system out of cowardice, greed, or simple conformism. Tóno is not a monster, but a weak man overwhelmed by events larger than himself. His story is a ruthless investigation into the “gray zone” of responsibility, demonstrating that the architecture of extermination was built not only by fanatics, but also by the silent consent of countless individuals.

Jakob der Lügner (Jacob the Liar)

Produced in East Germany by DEFA, this is the only East German film ever to receive an Oscar nomination. In a Polish ghetto, Jakob Heym accidentally overhears on a police station radio that the Red Army is advancing. To instill hope in his fellow sufferers, he pretends to own a clandestine radio and begins to invent increasingly optimistic war bulletins, becoming an unlikely hero.

Frank Beyer’s film is a touching tragicomedy about the necessity of hope as a form of spiritual resistance. It explores the moral ambiguity of the lie: is it an act of courage or a cruel illusion? Far from any heroic rhetoric, Jacob the Liar tells a profoundly human story, balanced between humor and despair, showing a surprising nuance and complexity for a film produced under a communist regime.

Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked Among Wolves)

Another crucial film by Frank Beyer for DEFA, based on a novel by Bruno Apitz and shot in the real Buchenwald concentration camp. In the final weeks before liberation, the camp’s prisoners, organized in a communist resistance cell, risk everything to hide a three-year-old Jewish boy who arrived on a transport. The child’s presence endangers their plans for an uprising.

The film is a paradigmatic example of the official anti-fascist narrative of East Germany, which emphasizes communist solidarity and resistance. However, beyond the ideological imprint, Beyer constructs a tense and powerful drama about collective responsibility and moral choices under extreme conditions. The use of the real Buchenwald location and the presence of some former prisoners in the cast give the film a chilling authenticity.

Austeria (The Inn)

A masterpiece by Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Austeria is set in 1914, on the first day of World War I. Tag, an elderly and wise Jewish innkeeper, offers refuge in his inn to a diverse group of fugitives, including a community of Hasidim fleeing the advancing Russian army. The inn becomes a microcosm, an ark trying to withstand the storm of history.

The film is a poignant elegy for a lost world: the vibrant and complex Jewish civilization of Eastern Europe that would be wiped out a generation later by the Shoah. Kawalerowicz uses the outbreak of the Great War as a premonition of future destruction. The work is a passionate and dynamic fresco, a lament for traditions and a world that were about to be annihilated, capturing the clash between mysticism, modernity, and the impending catastrophe.

Daleká cesta (Distant Journey)

Made in Czechoslovakia in 1949, this film by Alfréd Radok is a pioneering and formally audacious work. It tells the love story of a Jewish doctor and her “Aryan” husband in Prague, intertwining their personal story with chilling Nazi newsreel footage and scenes shot in the Terezín ghetto. Its visual experimentation, which combines fiction, documentary, and expressionism, was decades ahead of its time.

The film was made in a brief window of artistic freedom before Stalinist censorship descended on the country, and it was promptly banned for forty years. Its rediscovery after the Velvet Revolution revealed a courageous and innovative masterpiece, an early and desperate attempt to find a cinematic language to express the inexpressible, and a historical document of suppressed memory.

Komissar (The Commissar)

Banned in the Soviet Union for twenty years, Aleksandr Askoldov’s film was accused of “philo-Semitism” for its humane and compassionate portrayal of a Jewish family. During the Russian Civil War, a pregnant and inflexible female Red Army commissar is billeted with a poor Jewish family to give birth. The encounter between her rigid Bolshevik idealism and the warmth of Yiddish family life will profoundly transform her.

Although it does not deal directly with the Shoah, the film is essential for understanding the context of Russian anti-Semitism that was its antecedent. Its crime was humanism, finding common ground between two seemingly irreconcilable worlds. A shocking flash-forward sequence, explicitly foreshadowing the Holocaust, connects the violence of past pogroms to the future genocide, making the film a powerful and prophetic testimony.

Ostatni etap (The Last Stage)

Directed by Wanda Jakubowska, an Auschwitz survivor, and filmed in the camp itself less than two years after liberation, The Last Stage is one of the very first and most important films about the Holocaust. With an almost neorealist style, it recounts the life and resistance of a group of female prisoners in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

The director’s direct experience and the use of the original locations give the film an unparalleled authenticity and immediacy. It is a fundamental historical document, a kind of primary source of the cinematic memory of the Shoah. Jakubowska establishes many of the visual and narrative tropes that would define the genre for decades, creating a raw, powerful, and necessary work, an act of testimony made when the ashes were still warm.

Ulica Graniczna (Border Street)

Polish director Aleksander Ford, a central figure in post-war cinema, directs this courageous film that explores the complex relationships between Polish and Jewish families living on the same street in Warsaw, before and during the creation of the ghetto. The narrative is seen mainly through the eyes of the children, whose friendships are tested by growing anti-Semitism.

Ford does not hesitate to show the dark side of Polish society, the indifference and prejudice that existed alongside acts of solidarity. The film is a “report from the border between two worlds,” the “Aryan” one and that of the ghetto, and offers a crucial look at the social fabric in which the Holocaust could take place. It is a ruthless and moving analysis of the human dynamics that precede and accompany the catastrophe.

Szegénylegények (The Round-Up)

A masterpiece by the Hungarian master Miklós Jancsó, The Round-Up is an allegorical work of staggering formal power. Set in the aftermath of an 1848 uprising, the film depicts the psychological torture inflicted on a group of prisoners in a makeshift camp in the desolate Hungarian puszta. The jailers use deception and manipulation to turn the prisoners against each other.

While not set during the Shoah, the film is a universal study of the mechanisms of totalitarian power, dehumanization, and surveillance. Jancsó’s unmistakable style, with its extremely long and choreographed sequence shots and its abstract representation of violence, creates a terrifying and formalist vision of a concentration camp system. It is an essential work for understanding the logic of oppression, deeply relevant to the study of the Holocaust.

The Pawnbroker

An American independent film that broke a taboo, directed by Sidney Lumet. The Pawnbroker was one of the first U.S. films to tell the story of the Holocaust from the perspective of a survivor. Rod Steiger gives a monumental performance as Sol Nazerman, a former Jewish university professor who, after losing his entire family in the camps, runs a pawnshop in a Harlem ghetto.

The film is a devastating study of post-traumatic stress disorder and emotional death. Nazerman is a spiritually annihilated man, incapable of feeling. Lumet visualizes his trauma through innovative and lightning-fast, almost subliminal, flashbacks that tear through the gray reality of the present. The Harlem setting creates a powerful parallel between the historical suffering of the Jewish people and the contemporary oppression of the African American community, a bold statement on the universality of pain.

Phoenix

A tense and brilliant psychological thriller by German director Christian Petzold. Nelly, a Jewish singer who survived Auschwitz but was disfigured, returns to Berlin after the war. After facial reconstruction surgery, she searches for her husband, Johnny, the man who may have betrayed her. He doesn’t recognize her, but notices a resemblance to his wife, whom he believes to be dead, and proposes that she impersonate herself to collect the family inheritance.

The film is a powerful metaphor for the broken identity of post-war Germany and its willful amnesia regarding the Nazi past. Johnny’s inability (or refusal) to recognize his wife mirrors the nation’s inability to recognize its own guilt. Through the codes of melodrama and noir, Petzold constructs a chilling allegory about identity, betrayal, and the impossibility of returning to a normality that no longer exists. The final scene is unforgettable.

Ida

Shot in austere and magnificent black and white, Paweł Pawlikowski’s film is a work of rare visual poetry. In early 1960s Poland, Anna, a young novice about to take her vows, discovers she is Jewish and that her real name is Ida Lebenstein. Together with her aunt Wanda, a disillusioned and cynical former communist prosecutor, she embarks on a journey to uncover the truth about her family’s tragic end during the Nazi occupation.

The Shoah is not shown, but it is the unspeakable trauma that haunts every frame. Ida is a film about the ghosts of the past and the complex legacy of the war in Poland, unflinchingly addressing the theme of the complicity of some Poles in the murder of their Jewish neighbors. The rigorous visual style, with its off-center shots that crush the characters at the bottom of the screen, creates a profound sense of emotional and spiritual dislocation.

Sorstalanság (Fateless)

Based on the novel by Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, this Hungarian film by Lajos Koltai is a radical departure from conventional Holocaust narratives. We follow the experience of a 14-year-old boy from Budapest deported to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. What is shocking is his perspective: the boy experiences the horror of the camps not as a constant hell, but as a succession of moments, some of which are even “normal” or strangely happy.

This controversial perspective, faithful to the spirit of the novel, rejects all sentimentality and challenges our expectations. The film does not seek to evoke easy emotions, but offers a profound philosophical meditation on the nature of freedom, destiny, and human adaptation in an inhuman system. It is a difficult and intellectually provocative work that offers a completely new way of looking at the Holocaust.

Sunshine

This epic family saga by Hungarian director István Szabó, with an extraordinary Ralph Fiennes in a triple role, spans three generations of the Hungarian Jewish Sonnenschein family (which means “sunshine” in German). Their story unfolds throughout the 20th century, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to communism and beyond, showing the continuous compromises each generation must make to survive.

The film explores the complex issue of Jewish identity and assimilation in Central Europe. The Sonnenscheins change their surname, convert, embrace different political ideologies, but each time they are relentlessly confronted with the specter of anti-Semitism. Sunshine demonstrates how the Shoah was not an isolated event, but the brutal culmination of centuries of European history, a long wave of prejudice and violence.

Saul fia (Son of Saul)

Winner of the Oscar and the Grand Prix at Cannes, the film by Hungarian László Nemes is a shocking and unprecedented cinematic experience. Through a radical stylistic choice, the camera remains glued to the face and shoulders of Saul Ausländer, a member of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, forced to collaborate with the Nazis in managing the extermination. The horror of the camp is almost always out of focus, a sonic and visual hell that churns in the periphery of our vision.

Saul believes he has recognized the body of his son and embarks on a mad and desperate mission: to find a rabbi to give him a proper burial. The film throws us into the “gray zone” described by Primo Levi, immersing us in the mechanical and dehumanizing work of the Sonderkommando without moral judgment. It is a visceral work that does not narrate the Holocaust, but makes us experience it firsthand, a total immersion into the abyss.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

A masterpiece by Vittorio De Sica, based on the novel by Giorgio Bassani. The film portrays the life of an aristocratic Jewish family in Ferrara who, with the enactment of the fascist racial laws in 1938, retreats into the isolated and idyllic world of their magnificent villa and garden. The garden becomes a symbol of a refined and cultured civilization that deludes itself into thinking it can remain immune to the barbarism mounting outside.

With a compassionate but critical eye, De Sica stages the denial and psychological inability to face the impending catastrophe. It was one of the first Italian films to point a finger at the responsibility of Italian fascism in the persecution of the Jews, breaking a long silence. It is a lyrical and poignant work about the fragility of beauty and the illusion of being able to shut the world out.

Au revoir les enfants (Goodbye, Children)

A deeply autobiographical film by the French master Louis Malle, based on a childhood memory. In a Catholic boarding school in occupied France, young Julien Quentin befriends a newcomer, Jean Bonnet. Julien will discover that Jean is Jewish, hidden in the school by the courageous headmaster, Father Jean, to save him from deportation.

The work is a subtle and heartbreaking analysis of lost innocence, unintentional betrayal, and the tragic awakening to the reality of the adult world. The film’s strength lies in its observational and measured style, culminating in a single, fatal glance from Julien that, unintentionally, betrays his friend. Malle shows how the vast machinery of extermination could be triggered by the smallest of human frailties, making the story both intimate and universal.

Divided We Fall (Musíme si pomáhat)

This Oscar-nominated Czech black comedy by Jan Hřebejk intelligently and humanely explores the moral compromises of survival. During the Nazi occupation, a childless Czech couple decides to hide a Jewish friend in their home. The situation becomes complicated when a local collaborator, who desires the wife, begins to visit their home frequently, forcing the couple into a series of dangerous and absurd improvisations.

The film refuses to create heroes or villains, showing ordinary people forced to make extraordinary choices in extreme circumstances. With a perfect balance of humor and drama, it celebrates small acts of everyday courage while acknowledging the fear and selfishness that guide human behavior in wartime. It is a profoundly humanist work that finds hope in mutual help.

Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters)

Based on the true story of “Operation Bernhard,” this Austrian-German film tells of a group of Jewish prisoners, experts in printing and forgery, who are isolated in a special section of the Sachsenhausen camp. Their task is to produce counterfeit pounds and dollars to destabilize the Allied economies. In exchange for their work, they receive preferential treatment: food, clean beds, relative safety.

This “golden cage” creates a deep moral dilemma. Is collaborating with the enemy to survive an act of resistance or a betrayal? The film is a gripping thriller that explores the “gray zone” in all its complexity, staging the clash between the pragmatism of those who want to live at all costs and the idealism of those who refuse to help the Nazi war machine. A compelling investigation into the price of survival.

Das weiße Band (The White Ribbon)

Shot in a cold and impeccable black and white, Michael Haneke’s film is a disturbing X-ray of the roots of evil. In a small Protestant village in northern Germany on the eve of World War I, a series of strange and cruel incidents disrupts the apparent order of the community. Suspicion falls on the village children, educated according to rigid principles of purity and punishment.

Haneke does not narrate the Shoah, but the society that made it possible. The film is a terrifying prequel to Nazism, a clinical analysis of how a culture based on repression, patriarchal authoritarianism, humiliation, and internalized violence can generate monsters. It is a chilling work that suggests that horror was not born from nothing, but was cultivated in the very heart of European civilization.

Train de vie (Train of Life)

In a shtetl in Eastern Europe in 1941, the inhabitants learn of the imminent arrival of the Nazis. Led by the village fool, Schlomo, they decide to organize their own deportation: they buy a train, disguise themselves as German soldiers and prisoners, and set off on a surreal journey towards Palestine, crossing territories occupied by the Nazis and Soviet partisans.

This tragicomic fable by Radu Mihăileanu celebrates, with Yiddish humor and fantasy, the resilience and ingenuity of a community facing annihilation. The absurdity of the premise allows for an exploration of the madness of history while honoring the culture the Nazis wanted to destroy. The devastating final twist, however, reinterprets the entire film as a desperate act of imagination, a story of hope told in the heart of a camp.

Europa Europa

Directed by Agnieszka Holland, the film tells the incredible true story of Solomon Perel, a German Jewish boy who survived the Holocaust by pretending first to be a Stalinist orphan in the Soviet Union and then a heroic member of the Hitler Youth in a prestigious Nazi academy. His life is a constant and dangerous performance, a precarious balance to hide his identity.

The film is a surreal and dark tragicomedy about the absurdity of racial and national identity. “Solly’s” story exposes the arbitrary and performative nature of totalitarian ideologies, where a Jewish boy can become an Aryan model. Holland mixes adventure, drama, and black humor to create a one-of-a-kind survival story, a picaresque testimony to the absurd madness of history.

Korczak

The Polish master Andrzej Wajda directs this powerful portrait of Janusz Korczak, a Polish-Jewish doctor, educator, and writer who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. Despite numerous offers of personal salvation, Korczak refused to abandon his two hundred children and accompanied them to the end, on the journey to the Treblinka extermination camp.

Shot in magnificent black and white, the film is a tribute to the moral integrity and radical humanism of a man who embodied the principle of responsibility towards the weakest. It is a moving and rigorous work that celebrates an act of supreme dignity in the face of absolute evil. The controversial and dreamlike final scene, in which the children seem to escape from the train, is an act of cinematic grace, an affirmation of spiritual victory over barbarism.

Samson

A lesser-known but important work from Andrzej Wajda’s early period. The film, with an art-house aesthetic, tells the story of a young Jew, Jakub, in the Warsaw Ghetto, alluding to the biblical figure of Samson. Unlike the biblical hero, whose strength was physical, Jakub’s is an inner strength, a moral and emotional resistance to annihilation.

Wajda himself recounted the profound difficulty in finding a Polish-Jewish actor for the role, a tragic testament to the success of the genocide. The film is stylistically suspended between a raw realism and a more mythical and allegorical register, representing one of the great director’s first attempts to confront the Shoah. It is a fascinating and artistically ambitious work, a fundamental piece in the canon of the Polish Film School.

The Responsibility of the Gaze

The films in this guide are not easy works. They challenge, provoke, deny catharsis. They represent a collective cinematic effort to create a memory of the Shoah that resists trivialization and simplification. Together, they trace the evolution of a language: from Resnais’s documentary urgency to Lanzmann’s testimonial purity; from the subjective delirium of the Czechoslovak New Wave to the allegorical critiques of Hungarian and Polish cinema; up to the radical and sensory immersion of Son of Saul.

These works fulfill a vital cultural function. They force us to confront the “gray zones,” to question the nature of memory, and to accept that some wounds can be neither fully represented nor completely healed. They do not offer answers, but load us with questions. Ultimately, the most important and necessary legacy of this cinema is to place the responsibility of bearing witness directly on the viewer. They entrust us with the responsibility of the gaze.