Between 1955 and 1983, three film documentaries, Nuit et brouillard, Le chagrin et la pitié, and Shoah, focusing on discrete aspects of World War II, were hailed as unsurpassed masterpieces each in their own right, In Nuit et brouillard, Alain Resnais weaves contemporary sights of Auschwitz with newsreel footage of the deportees. In Le chagrin et la pitié, Marcel Ophuls’s interviews thirty years after the events those who witnessed the occupation. Finally, fifty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Claude Lanzmann in Shoah questions the victims, victimizers, and by-standers of the deportations. Each of these films marks a specific moment in France’s difficult path to assessing the events of the “dark years”. Acting as markers of changes in the political, social, and cultural attitude of France’s views of the war years, these films offer probing historical evidence of France’s struggles with its past, as well as compelling archival materials on the occupation and the Holocaust, But in addition, these films also present us with exceptional illustrations of the vicissitudes of recollections, the unpredictable workings of memory, and the vicarious effects of visual and oral testimonies.