ABSTRACT
In April 1991 a major symposium honored one of the University of Vermont's retiring faculty members. It paid tribute to an extraordinary professor of political science. His research—including especially a monumental book called The Destruction of the European Jews—arguably has made Raul Hilberg the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust. Among the many distinguished persons who honored Hilberg was the brilliant and unrelenting filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, whose epic Shoah is a cinematic counterpart to Hilberg's monumental writing. Hilberg plays an important part in Lanzmann's film. Put into perspective by work like Hilberg's, the big questions become what Elie Wiesel's teacher, Moshe, called the "right questions," and thus they command the respect they deserve. That respect enjoins suspicion about "answers" that are small—inadequate for the facts they must encompass.
