Over nine hours long and eleven years in the making, the film presents Lanzmann's interviews with survivors, witnesses and perpetrators during visits to German Holocaust sites across Poland, including extermination camps.

The sections on Treblinka include testimony from Abraham Bomba, who survived as a barber;[9] Richard Glazar, an inmate; and Franz Suchomel, an SS officer.

Testimonies on Auschwitz are provided by Rudolf Vrba, who escaped from the camp before the end of the war;[11] and Filip Müller, who worked in an incinerator burning the bodies from the gassings.

Accounts include some from local villagers, who witnessed trains heading daily to the camp and returning empty; they quickly guessed the fate of those on board.

Two survivors of Chełmno are interviewed: Simon Srebnik, who was forced to sing military songs to entertain the Nazis; and Mordechaï Podchlebnik.

A Christian, Karski sneaked into the Warsaw ghetto and travelled using false documents to England to try to convince the Allied governments to intervene more strongly on behalf of the Jews.

On his first day, he says he vomited and cried after encountering trenches full of corpses, 6–7 m deep, with the earth around them moving in waves because of the gases seeping from the decomposing bodies.

The smell of the bodies carried for kilometres depending on the wind, he said, but local people were scared to act in case they were sent to the work camp, Treblinka I.

"[15]: p.16 The publicity poster for the film features Henryk Gawkowski, a Polish railway worker from Malkinia, who, in 1942–1943 when he was 20–21 years old,[16] worked on the trains to Treblinka as an "assistant machinist with the right to drive the locomotive".

[17] Conducted in Poland in July 1978, the interview with Gawkowski is shown 48 minutes into the film, and is the first to present events from the victims' perspective.

[21] The Germans gave the train workers vodka as a bonus when they drove a Sonderzug; Gawkowski drank liberally to make the job bearable.

[23] The railcars would be driven into the camp by the locomotive in three stages; as he drove one convoy into Treblinka, he would signal to the ones that were waiting by making a slashing movement across his throat.

"[26] Lanzmann was commissioned by Israeli officials to make what they thought would be a two-hour film, delivered in 18 months, about the Holocaust from "the viewpoint of the Jews".

Some German interviewees were reluctant to talk and refused to be filmed, so Lanzmann used a hidden camera, producing a grainy, black-and-white appearance.

For example, Bomba was interviewed while cutting his friend's hair in a working barbershop; a steam locomotive was hired to recreate the journey the death train conductor had taken while transporting Jews; and the opening scene shows Srebnik singing in a rowboat, similarly to how he had "serenaded his captors".

The website's critical consensus states: "Expansive in its beauty as well as its mind-numbing horror, Shoah is a towering – and utterly singular – achievement in cinema.

[41] Mieczyslaw Biskupski wrote that Lanzmann's "purpose in making the film was revealed by his comments that he 'fears' Poland and that the death camps could not have been constructed in France because the 'French peasantry would not have tolerated them'".

[42] Government-run newspapers and state television criticized the film, as did numerous commentators; Jerzy Turowicz, editor of the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, called it partial and tendentious.

[43] The Socio-Cultural Association of Jews in Poland (Towarzystwo Społeczno-Kulturalne Żydów w Polsce) called it a provocation and delivered a protest letter to the French embassy in Warsaw.

[44] Foreign Minister Władysław Bartoszewski, an Auschwitz survivor and an honorary citizen of Israel, criticized Lanzmann for ignoring the thousands of Polish rescuers of Jews, focusing instead on impoverished rural Poles, allegedly selected to conform with his preconceived notions.

Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, a Jewish-Polish writer and dissident, was puzzled by Lanzmann's omission of anybody in Poland with advanced knowledge of the Holocaust.

[45] In his book Dziennik pisany nocą, Herling-Grudziński wrote that the thematic construction of Shoah allowed Lanzmann to exercise a reduction method so extreme that the plight of the non-Jewish Poles must remain a mystery to the viewer.

Grudziński asked a rhetorical question in his book: "Did the Poles live in peace, quietly plowing farmers' fields with their backs turned on the long fuming chimneys of death-camp crematoria?

According to Grudziński, Lanzmann leaves this question unanswered, but the historical evidence shows that Poles also suffered widespread massacres at the hands of the Nazis.

Also see "Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection: Henryk Gawkowski and Treblinka railway workers", Washington, D.C.: Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.