Outside it was burningly hot, the skies clear blue. But inside there was only darkness. For the next nine and a half hours, in the Jerusalem Cinematheque, they would sit, rapt and in silence, through Shoah, the film made by the French director Claude Lanzmann, which was already being garlanded by critics around the world as the greatest single film about the Holocaust and one of the very greatest documentaries in the history of cinema.

It was June 1986, 14 months after the film’s world premiere in France. Hushed audiences had sat spellbound at screenings in Paris and New York, but this June day was different. It was the first official showing of Lanzmann’s masterpiece in Israel, its premiere marked as all but a state occasion. Taking their seats at the Cinematheque, then a newly opened arthouse cinema facing the walls of the Old City, were Israel’s prime minister, Shimon Peres, along with the country’s president, chief rabbi and even the chief of staff of the military. A surging pack of press and cameras had greeted their arrival.

Less noticed as they made their way through the heaving crowd were the rest of the invited audience. Among them were several of those who appeared in the film: the survivors of the Nazi death camps, the resistance fighters, those who had witnessed the slaughter up close. They were in the room. Many had their children at their side.

Lanzmann himself – a fighter in the French resistance, a former lover of Simone de Beauvoir and confrère of Jean-Paul Sartre – was agitated. Earlier that morning, Alan Reich, then working as an intern at the Cinematheque and now a documentary maker in his own right, had brought the director breakfast in his hotel room. “He was completely stressed out: he was sitting there, writing notes, getting up and pacing the room, popping pills to calm himself down. He was really quite anxious.”

The film had been lauded everywhere, but the judgment of Israel mattered to Lanzmann especially. He was presenting his account of one of the defining events of Jewish history to the world’s only Jewish country – a country whose leading officials had chosen him for the task, entrusting him with this work of memory. He was adamant that the Jerusalem audience not miss even a moment of the story he had to tell. Just before the screening, he had clashed with the Cinematheque’s founder, Lia van Leer. “He said, ‘There’s one thing you have to know: when the film starts, you lock the door, nobody leaves,’” Van Leer recalled when I spoke to her in Jerusalem earlier this year. “I said, ‘Are you crazy? If somebody has to go the lavatory, what do they do? Should they pee in their pants?’” Only when Van Leer declared that she would not forbid Israel’s prime minister from visiting the bathroom, did Lanzmann relent.

At last, everyone was seated. A hush descended. The director rose to introduce Shoah – the Hebrew word for destruction, and the preferred Israeli term for the Holocaust. He said how glad he was that so many had come to see his film, a film he had made with all his heart. He headed for his own seat, but he could not stay in it. Instead, and for the duration of the screening, he was in and out of his chair, patrolling the auditorium, unable to sit still. He wanted to see the 380 faces that made up his audience.

For some, seeing the story of the Shoah played out on screen for 566 slow minutes proved too much. At one point, a member of the audience, a survivor, collapsed and suffered a heart attack. He had to be stretchered away. Another fainted.

At one point, a member of the audience, a survivor, collapsed and suffered a heart attack. Another fainted

It was as if, for one extraordinary June day, Israel itself grappled with the event that preceded its birth by three years, and has haunted it ever since. It did so in an unprecedentedly concentrated way: the leaders of the Israeli state were all present, together, in one room and in the dark. What the audience experienced during those hours was a reminder that Israel’s relationship with the Holocaust has been impossibly tangled, stirring emotions that linger still: grief and pain, of course, but also guilt, fear and even shame. The story of the day Shoah was screened in Jerusalem is also the story of how the Shoah has reverberated, and continues to reverberate, through Israeli life.

In the politics of the country, in the way it relates to the rest of the world, the shadow of the Holocaust is never far away. It is there in the crudest, most basic argument offered for Israel’s right to exist: that after the murder of six million, Jews need a safe haven that they can call their own. It is there too when Israeli leaders insist that they have not only the right but the duty to crush any and every threat to the security of their citizens, because “never again” will Jews be left defenceless. When, in 1981, Prime Minister Menachem Begin sent Israeli air force jets to destroy Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor, a site assumed to be dedicated to the production of atomic weapons, Begin reached for this same formulation. “There won’t be another Holocaust in the history of the Jewish people,” he said after the raid. “Never again. We shall defend our people with all the means at our disposal.”

The Holocaust is similarly present in almost every speech that Begin’s successor Binyamin Netanyahu has made to warn of the prospect of a nuclear Iran, invoking the right of the Jewish people to protect themselves against the possibility of annihilation. It colours the way Netanyahu sees his closer enemy too: earlier this year, in a claim that was later withdrawn after much criticism, not to say scorn, from historians, Netanyahu suggested that the notion of exterminating the entire Jewish people, what the Nazis called the “final solution to the Jewish problem”, was planted in the mind of Adolf Hitler by the Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem.

Netanyahu’s remarks were egregious and almost universally denounced, in Israel as much as anywhere else. He had next to no defenders. And yet, the prime minister was voicing a strain of thinking – feeling, more accurately – that lurks somewhere deep in the Israeli psyche. It was articulated best by the Israeli novelist Amos Oz, who in his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, describes the curious symmetry of Israeli and Palestinian views of the other. Despite their common history of suffering at the hands of Christian Europe, one through persecution, the other through imperialism, each struggles to see the other as a victim, Oz writes. The Palestinians fail to see Jews as the past target of European oppression and genocidal hatred. They don’t see Jews, as Oz puts it, as “a bunch of half-hysterical survivors”. By the same token, he writes: “When we look at them, we do not see fellow victims either; we see not brothers in adversity but pogrom-making Cossacks, bloodthirsty anti-Semites, Nazis in disguise, as though our European persecutors have reappeared here in the Land of Israel, put keffiyehs on their heads, and grown moustaches, but they are still our old murderers.” With his bizarre flight of fantasy about the mufti, Netanyahu had revealed again the extent to which the Holocaust still colours the Israeli mindset, fearfully seeing neighbours near and far as “Nazis in disguise”.

All of this hung heavy in the air at the main auditorium of the Cinematheque that day nearly 30 years ago, as Lanzmann paced among the rows, watching the faces in the dark. Staring out most keenly of all were the survivors, those who had been present at the conflagration and who had built new lives and new families in a new home – a home that had never quite known how to embrace them.

The youngest face to appear in Shoah belongs to Hanna Zaidel. She is a grandmother now, in her 60s, but on screen she is in her 20s, beautiful, taking long moody drags on a cigarette. Speaking first in Hebrew, then through a French interpreter – one of the reasons why the film is so long is that Lanzmann eschewed subtitles, insisting on consecutive translation – Zaidel tells how she learned the remarkable story of her father, Motke, in scraps, extracting one fact at a time. “I had to tear the details out of him,” she says. “He was a silent man, he didn’t talk to me.” Addressing the camera, she adds that only “when Mr Lanzmann came” did she hear the whole story, told in one go.

Hanna Zaidel in Shoah. Photograph: Claude Lanzmann

When the Nazis liquidated the Vilna ghetto, in today’s Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, they did it by leading an estimated 90,000 Jews eight miles to the Ponari forests and shooting them dead, en masse, letting their bodies fall into vast pits originally dug by the region’s previous Russian occupiers for use as petrol reservoirs. When the killing was over, as many as 25,000 corpses were left in each pit. Next, the Nazis sent in chain gangs made up of some 84 Jews – 80 men and four women – shackled above their calves day and night, to dig the bodies out and burn them. One group was charged with removing gold teeth from the dead. Motke Zaidel was one of those 84, forced on pain of death to burn the corpses of his own friends, neighbours and even relatives. In Shoah, Motke Zaidel tells this story with the Israeli forest of Ben Shemen as a backdrop. In the distance, there is a bonfire, sending wreaths of smoke into the air.

When I met Hanna Zaidel earlier this year in her home in the Tel Aviv suburb of Hod Hasharon, her hair shorter and grey now, and with a picture of her late father looking on from the sideboard, she offered an unexpected memory of him. “The main thing is that he was washing hands all the time. He was washing his hands, he was washing our hands. All the time. He was cleaning up all the time. And he kept on doing it, to my sons, to his grandchildren. So whenever they saw him, they used to hide their hands like this.” She pulled her hands into her sleeves. “Until I told him, ‘Daddy, their hands are clean. They don’t need to clean Ponari from their hands. Please stop it.’ And he did.”

The Holocaust survivors – and their children – who gathered in the audience at the Jerusalem Cinematheque that day would have recognised that account and especially Motke Zaidel’s reluctance to speak of his experience. It fitted well with what was then an established narrative of Israel’s complex relationship with the Holocaust. The accepted view held that those who had survived the Nazi whirlwind were, initially at least, all but silent about the hell they had endured. Perhaps it was because they were simply too traumatised, rendered mute with pain. Perhaps they were simply determined to start afresh, to put the torments of Europe behind them and begin anew, never looking back.

But that view – the myth of a self-imposed silence – has begun to crumble in recent years. The evidence shows that, in fact, there was plenty of discussion in Israel, beginning even before the state was established in 1948. Yehuda Bauer, a pre-eminent Holocaust scholar who served as the historical adviser to Lanzmann on Shoah, told me: “If you look at the [Hebrew] newspapers between 1945 and 1954, practically every week, sometimes every day, there were stories published – articles, memoirs.”

Hanna Zaidel, now in her 60s, holds a picture of her late father Motke Zaidel. Photograph: Gali Tibbon/The Guardian

The survivors were talking a lot, even if the most intense conversations were with each other. The trouble was, the rest of the new Israeli society – those who had been in Palestine throughout the war years or who had not been touched directly by the Nazi death machine – did not always know how to listen.

Hanna Zaidel’s own experience was a case in point. As a child, she saw her father gather with fellow survivors from Vilna: inevitably, she had no uncles or aunts, so these friends of Motke’s were the closest she had to an extended family. “They used to meet every three of four weeks for a big meal: lots of food, lots of alcohol, singing songs from the ghetto and talking in Yiddish or Russian or Polish.”

But with outsiders, things became complicated. One day, around 1950, an interviewer from Tel Aviv University came to the Zaidel house, keen to explore the events of the Ponari forest. During the conversation with Motke, the researcher suggested that the Jews of Europe had gone to their deaths “like sheep to the slaughter”. The phrase had first been deployed as a call to arms in the Vilna ghetto, issued on the last day of 1941 by the resistance leader and poet Abba Kovner: “Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter!” But in Israel it acquired a toxic currency. It conveyed the disdain of the new Israelis – so proud of their muscularity and their newly acquired power of self-determination – for the powerless, defenceless Jews of the diaspora. “To say something like this to my father, he just stood up and banged his fist on the table,” Hanna Zaidel recalled. “To those professors who were asking him, he said ‘I wish you were there.’ And then he walked out.”

As it was in the Zaidel family, so it was in Israel itself. Those who had been there, those who understood, could talk to each other. But among those who had not, there was incomprehension or, worse, a harsh brand of judgment. If it was not outright condemnation for failing to fight back – “sheep to the slaughter” – it was a more invidious form of suspicion.

The final speaker in Shoah is Simcha Rotem, one of the last surviving heroes of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. He describes how, after the liquidation, he emerged from the sewers to find himself utterly alone in the place, now reduced to a ruin. He walked for hours in the ghetto but nothing and nobody was left: “I didn’t meet a living soul. At one point I recall feeling a kind of peace, of serenity. I said to myself: ‘I’m the last Jew. I’ll wait for morning, and for the Germans.’” Those are the last words of the film.

Rotem was in the audience, watching himself on the screen that day in Jerusalem. Now aged 90, his eyes still sparkling with almost boyish energy, he described the significance of Lanzmann’s film and why it meant so much to Israel. “Testimony was important,” he said. “Telling my story, the experience in and around the ghetto first hand, was hugely important. I think it helped people first to see at first hand that it was true, that these things really did happen, but also to think more deeply what had happened.” He left the cinema full of admiration. “Lanzmann made an extraordinary film, a film that’s incomparable with anything that’s been made since.”

Even now, Rotem is best known by his nom de guerre from the Jewish underground: Kazik. Despite his impeccable resistance credentials, in the early days of Israeli statehood, even the legendary Kazik was wary of talking too much about his past. “People had a problem understanding and digesting the story. Really hearing the story. And I felt there was sometimes a question about what we did and how we got through it. People would ask, ‘How did you survive?’ And what they really meant was, ‘What did you do to survive?’” Tired of being viewed as a suspected collaborator, he developed a coping strategy. “When people asked where I was from, I said I was from Petach Tikva” – a town close to Tel Aviv.

Simcha Rotem, one of the last survivors of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, tells his story in Shoah Photograph: Claude Lanzmann

A shift came in 1961, with the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, one of the prime architects of the Nazis’ “final solution”. “The Eichmann trial was a real turning point, because it engaged the young generation, the Israeli-born generation,” said Yehuda Bauer. “Everyone was walking in the street, with transistor radios, listening to the testimonies in the trial. And that made a tremendous impact.”

For hour after hour, survivors were on the witness stand, describing in painstaking and painful detail what they had endured and what they were up against: the relentlessness of the Nazi machine, herding Jews into ghettos, murdering them in forests, starving them and using them as slave labour in concentration camps, murdering them on an industrial scale in the death camps of Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno and Majdanek. For the first time in such concentrated form, Israelis were exposed to the full picture of the Holocaust, learning of the factories Nazi Germany had built across Poland – factories whose only product was death. According to Bauer, “The original attitude to the Holocaust changed. Before, the question had been, ‘Why didn’t the Jews resist?’ After the Eichmann trial, a slower process begins: ‘How come there were so many who resisted?’”

But by the early 1970s, Israeli officials, particularly those around Yad Vashem, Israel’s state Holocaust memorial and museum – a fixture on the itinerary of every visiting foreign dignitary – worried that the impact of the Eichmann trial was beginning to fade. They wanted to find a new way to communicate this formative event in Jewish history to the next generation, this time harnessing the power of cinema. The call went out to Lanzmann, a luminary of the French intellectual left and a documentary film-maker who had just made Pourquoi Israel, a sympathetic portrait of Israeli life produced to mark the country’s 25th anniversary in 1973.

The director was summoned to Jerusalem, where he delivered a presentation for the top brass at Yad Vashem, confining himself to “generalities”, according to Bauer: “He didn’t want these people to have a say in what he was doing.” Nevertheless, he had done enough to impress. As Bauer put it, “People in those days, when they saw a genius, they realised he was a genius. And you don’t try to stop a genius.” The director left with a promise of funding.

The timing of Lanzmann’s commission would prove crucial. Ten months later, Israel would face a near-death experience, believing itself to have come close to defeat and invasion in the Yom Kippur war. The muscular “new Jews” of 1948, the conquerors of 1967, suddenly saw themselves as vulnerable.

For the Israeli journalist and historian Tom Segev, who charted the complex relationship of Israelis with the Holocaust for his book The Seventh Million, the 1973 war shifted the country’s understanding of the Nazi period once again: “What it basically says is if we [the Israelis] could hardly survive the Egyptian and Syrian armies, what do I expect of some elderly woman in Warsaw facing the Nazis?” Segev told me. “And it is at this point that the concept of heroism in Israel begins to change. It is no longer [just] someone who throws a grenade at the Nazis. It is also someone who manages to get some bread for her children, who manages to retain their human dignity. Because that’s what the Nazis wanted to take away.”

This was the context in which Lanzmann set to work on a project that would dominate the next 12 years of his life – and help reshape Israel’s, and the world’s, understanding of the Holocaust. By 1974, he was meeting survivors and ghetto fighters, perpetrators and bystanders, in Poland, in Germany, in the US, in Israel. One door he knocked on, all those years ago, was that of the Zaidel family home in Petach Tikva. Lanzmann put his tape recorder on the dining table and asked Motke to talk about the horrors he had lived through in the darkness of Ponari. And there in the room, absorbing each word as she dragged on a cigarette, was Hanna, the face of the new Israeli generation, born far away from the killing fields of eastern Europe – the daughter whose young hands Motke nevertheless needed to scrub, to wash away the dust of the forest.

The length of Shoah, the demands it imposes on the audience, make it less like seeing a movie than taking part in a ritual, a sacred rite of remembrance. I went to see it with a friend, at the Curzon cinema in London, in September 1986, just a few months after the premiere in Jerusalem. My friend made the mistake of bringing popcorn – but he did not get very far with it. He had barely begun chomping when a woman from a nearby row leaned over and slapped him, hard, on the thigh. In an accent thick with the sound and memories of prewar Europe, she said: “Have you no respect?”

The film’s pace is unsettling. There are slow, lingering shots of the (usually Polish) countryside, unbroken by either commentary or music. There is none of the familiar, expected footage: Shoah includes no archive material at all, none of those now-stock images of skeletal inmates or corpses piled into small mountains. There are no interviews with politicians or government ministers. Instead, it focuses on the ordinary people who were caught up in a period of collective human wickedness, in which cruelty became a system and day became night. The film listens as they describe it, detail by murderous detail.

Claude Lanzmann in 1985, the year the Shoah was released. Photograph: Jean-Regis Rouston/Roger Viollet/Getty Images

The effect is mesmerising. Zaidel recalled the extraordinary hush inside the Jerusalem Cinematheque: “It was very strong, people sitting for so many hours. It was, shhhhh. Even the flies didn’t want to fly there. You didn’t hear anything.”

There was little of the usual shifting in seats, despite the marathon length of the film. People stayed still, riveted. Nevertheless, and despite Lanzmann’s edict, some did have to take a break. One woman went to the bathroom just to wash the tears off her face. Another went outside and found herself dazzled by the sunlight: it was a shock after the darkness and the crematoria and the death. But when they went back inside the auditorium, Shoah was still going on. Because that is how it was: for at least four years, the killing did not stop. Between 1941 and 1945, no matter what else was going on in the world, the wheels of death were still turning. Somehow the very form of Shoah conveyed something important about the reality of the event itself.

For many in that audience – and not just the ones who fainted or suffered cardiac arrest – it was overwhelming. Shimon Peres was the prime minister at the time and, thanks to the demands of high office, he had to leave before the film was over. But it was more than diary commitments that took him away. “I couldn’t stay,” he told me from his office, which overlooks the Jaffa coast. “I felt like a broken man.” Now in his 90s, the film took him to his childhood in prewar Poland. “These were the people with whom I lived. There was nothing imaginary about it. It was very hard. [Afterwards] we didn’t know what to say to each other. All of a sudden, words lose their meaning. They look so pale.”

For some critics, it was excessive. Tom Segev faulted the film for adding drama to an event that needed no added drama. He disliked the way Lanzmann staged certain scenes, demanding for example, that a man who, as a boy, had been forced by the Nazis to sing a particular folk song, sing the song again, for the cameras. Others resented the director’s probing, relentless style.

For one sequence, involving Abraham Bomba, a former inmate of Treblinka and a trained barber, Lanzmann recreated a barbershop, in Tel Aviv – and put questions to Bomba as he cut the hair of an unidentified customer. In English, and in a voice which is, at first, oddly matter-of-fact, Bomba combs and clips and combs as he explains that he and his fellow barbers were forced to cut the hair of women as they entered the gas chambers. The women did not know what was about to happen to them. They believed they were “getting a nice haircut”. (Their hair was, in fact, collected and sent to Germany for commercial use.)

Bomba then recalls how one day a transport arrived from his hometown of Częstochowa. “I knew a lot of them. I knew them; I lived with them in my town. I lived with them in my street, and some of them were my close friends. And when they saw me, they started asking me … ‘What’s going to happen to us?’ What could you tell them? What could you tell them?” He goes on to say that a fellow barber suddenly saw his own wife and sister enter the gas chamber.” At that moment, Bomba – previously so controlled, so fluent – halts.

“I can’t,” he says. “It’s too horrible. Please.” He pauses for about 90 seconds. Lanzmann’s camera remains on Bomba’s face. We watch as the armour a man has built to protect himself over the intervening four decades crumbles before our eyes. Bomba seems to be breaking. “I won’t be able to do it,” he pleads.

“You have to do it,” Lanzmann tells him.

“Don’t make me go on. Please.”

Abraham Bomba cuts the hair of an unidentified customer in Shoah. Photograph: US Holocaust Memorial Museum & Yad Vashem & State of Israel

It is one of the most painful sequences in the film. There can be few more affecting scenes in cinema. But for the audience watching on that scorching day in Israel, it would have carried an extra power. The room was packed with survivors who knew Bomba’s anguish, even if their experience had not been as extreme or as morally devastating as his. And what they saw on the screen was not black and white footage from faraway Europe. They saw a man in contemporary Tel Aviv, tanned and wearing a summer shirt. Yet slowly that exterior – the carapace of the confident, brash Israeli – was peeled away, to reveal a Jew trembling with grief and pain.

This gets close to the heart of what was singular about Lanzmann’s film. If it had a message, it was that the Holocaust was not in the past: it had a presence in the present. It was all around. It did not exist only in archival monochrome, but in colour, in the here and now. The places where it happened were not in some distant galaxy, on the mythical Planet Auschwitz. They happened in this world: in this forest, in this field, in this village. And its pain lives on in this world too, in the places where the victims are remembered and the places where the survivors fled. The Holocaust runs deep in the soil of Poland and Germany and Lithuania and Belarus and every place Jews were killed, of course. But the Bomba sequence, like the shots of Motke Zaidel in the Ben Shemen forest, told that Israeli audience watching in Jerusalem that the Shoah was alive in their country too. They could not escape it. Too many people, and too many of their children, had been shaped – or broken – by it.

In the 12 long years Claude Lanzmann spent making Shoah, he came to Jerusalem often. He would take the same room in the same hotel, at the artists’ colony of Mishkenot Sha’ananim, and promptly drive everyone crazy. Those who encountered him on these visits described a man who was impossibly demanding, spectacularly self-absorbed and brutally unbothered by the needs of others. When he had toothache, he thought nothing of telephoning the distinguished professor from the Hebrew University, Yehuda Bauer, in the middle of the night to insist he find him a dentist. Lia van Leer put it baldly. “You know, he’s a man that thinks he is the one and only. He has an ego that is quite enormous, and never changed until today.” According to Van Leer, when Steven Spielberg made Schindler’s List, “Lanzmann was furious: ‘How dare he [Spielberg] talk about it, when I have already said everything?’”

Lanzmann was furious about Schindler’s List: ‘How dare he [Spielberg] talk about it, when I have said everything?’ Lia van Leer

But what they all said – these same people who described him as a monstrous egomaniac – was that Lanzmann is a bona fide genius, a true artistic original. It was his determination, his obsession, that ensured Shoah became a landmark document of one of the darkest chapters in human history. Only a man with Lanzmann’s single-mindedness would have spent more than a decade crossing the globe, generating an estimated 225 hours of filmed footage, interviewing every subject for hours, even days, before the cameras started running, to get the story exactly right. Only Lanzmann would have devoted his life to this project, sacrificing every waking hour to it. “I remember his wife pouring out her bleeding heart to me,” Bauer recalled, chuckling at the memory. “She thought she had married a man. In fact she had married a film.”

Visit Lanzmann in Paris, as I did earlier this year, and you are confronted, as soon as the front door of his modestly sized apartment is open, with an enormous cinema poster for Shoah. Staring at you is the face of the train driver who took Jews to their deaths at Treblinka, the man who in one unforgettable scene recalls the Poles who would gather by the railway tracks to watch the death trains. He describes how they would signal to the Jews the fate that awaited them: he re-enacts the gesture, running his finger across his throat.

Inside the apartment, fighting for space among the personal snaps that show Lanzmann on vacation with De Beauvoir and Sartre – they seemed to have functioned as a trio, Lanzmann the bright young man walking alongside those two giants of French thought – or receiving an honour from François Mitterrand, are boxes of DVDs, new versions of the film, spin-offs from the film, books about the film. Shoah is all around.

There was no show of false modesty. In answering my first question, Lanzmann – who last month turned 90, his movements now slow and laboured – declared that once his film was screened in Israel, it changed everything. “The film was a triumph everywhere. In all the newspapers. Amos Oz wrote five articles about the film. It was unanimous. I don’t know how many interviews they made. They made pictures, they made profiles of me. They understood perfectly that there was ‘before Shoah’ and ‘after Shoah’”.

Our conversation turned to one especially haunting sentence from the film. It comes in Lanzmann’s interview with Yitzhak “Antek” Zuckerman, a leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and one of those revered as a hero by Israel in its earliest days. Interviewed on his kibbutz, Antek says: “I began drinking after the war. It was very difficult. Claude, you asked for my impression. If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.”

I heard that sentence nearly 30 years ago and I have never forgotten it. But it nearly eluded Lanzmann. “Antek liked to drink. He was a drinker. And he says, ‘Claude, I started to drink after the war, when I climbed on this huge mass grave.’ The translator, who was Jewish, did not translate this, but this is what he says. And the people of the kibbutz did everything they could so that I would not talk with Antek, because they were ashamed of him. The authorities of the kibbutz did not want to show a hero who drinks – like me.” And with that, Lanzmann reached for a glass.

Yitzhak ‘Antek’ Zuckerman, a leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, appearing in Shoah. Photograph: Claude Lanzmann

This was part of what Lanzmann was forcing Israel and Israelis to confront that day in Jerusalem. There were men and women living among them – even those, like Antek, who had been lionised as legends of resistance; even those, like Bomba, who appeared to be getting on with their lives – who were, in fact, broken.

The film had a lasting impact on Israel in other ways, too. By letting his camera linger so long on Poland and Poles – to an extent still resented by many in that country – Lanzmann succeeded in shifting the focus from Germany alone. Shoah made clear that the elimination of the Jews was not only a German project, but involved most of the nations of Europe. More deeply, the film signalled to Israelis that there was a place they could go to reflect on and mourn the past. Until then, the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem had been the focal point of national commemoration. After Shoah, and especially after the fall of communism in 1989, Israelis realised they could get on a plane and travel to the heart of darkness, that they could see the sites of mass murder for themselves. Today such trips are a staple of the Israeli school calendar. It has made the Holocaust tangible and real, rather than distant and mysterious.

As that hot June day in Jerusalem turned to evening, all that lay in the future. Lanzmann’s film was finally reaching its conclusion. Not everyone had made it to the end, the cinema was not as packed as it had been nearly 10 hours earlier. But most had stayed. And when it was over, they remained fixed in their seats, stunned by what they had seen. There was no applause. Instead, one by one, many stood up and walked over to Lanzmann. Several hugged him. One survivor sobbed as she thanked the director; she kissed him and told him that he had “done such a heroic thing”. And she was not the only one.

For her part, Hanna Zaidel remembered that her father, Motke, left the cinema as if he were two centimetres taller. “He said, ‘Thank God. Now people will understand. Now people will know.” He had carried the burden for so long: “He burned his family – his own family – in that pit in Ponari. How can you live with this?” But Lanzmann’s film had granted him “some respect and understanding”.

When we met, Hanna Zaidel told me something that surprised me. I had long known that many Holocaust survivors, those who had lived so close to starvation, could become agitated, even decades afterwards, if there was not a plentiful supply of food around. They might be comfortably settled and living in affluent countries, but they would still keep the cupboards stocked, just in case. What I had not realised was that this habit sometimes passed on to the next generation.

“For many years, I had six loaves of bread in my freezer,” Hanna told me. “Or butter or flour in the freezer, just to be safe. My boys helped and said, ‘Mummy, what do you think? They won’t have it in the grocery tomorrow?’ They did it slowly. And I don’t have bread in the freezer now.”

Remember, Hanna Zaidel herself was never in those forests. She was never in the camps. But the Shoah was all around her.

Jonathan Freedland’s documentary, Shoah in Jerusalem, is available on BBC iPlayer

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• This article was amended on 29 January 2016. An earlier version said June 1986 was “eight months after the film’s release”, and referred to “more than 350 hours of filmed footage”.