The first frames are unpeopled, long roving views of a tranquil Polish countryside through which runs a small river overhung with drooping trees. It is the Narew river. The scene is Chelmno, a rural Polish region in which, 40 years ago, more than 400,000 Jews were exterminated.

Two men row down the river, speaking softly. The first, Simon Srebnik, was a boy of 13 when he saw his father killed at Lodz and was himself sent to Chelmno. He was known, he remembers, by the villagers there as well as by the SS guards as the little boy with the beautiful voice, who sang Polish folk songs. The other man is French film-maker Claude Lanzmann, who more than 40 years later has persuaded Srebnik to return to Chelmno and sing the songs of his childhood.

As they row down the Narew, Srebnik sings softly, answered occasionally by wild birds. When they disembark, he points out the field before them. Yes, he answers, this is where they burned bodies. How high were the flames? It seemed, he says softly, they reached to the sky. How strange to see it now.

Of all the 400,000 who were sent to Chelmno, to be gassed to death in vans, only two survived. Srebnik is one of them, Lanzmann has found them both. Their stories and those of dozens of others of survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators of the Holocaust unfold, blend, and resolve to create an absolutely riveting nine-and-a-half hour film, Shoah.

Neither a dramatization nor a documentary, Lanzmann's project achieves what neither of those genres could: it records actual memories, unmediated by any dramatist's conception, in the richest possible detail, recreating the fabric of ordinary life which was alternately shattered or untouched by the horrors of the Second World War.

Using no actual death-camp film, no documentary footage, Shoah (the Hebrew word for "annihilation") is a work of journalistic brilliance. It is difficult if not impossible to convey a sense of the film's achievement, its power and immediacy, in print.

The subjects talk about death, murder, suicide in the thousands; they describe the stench of rotting and burning flesh; they recall the feeling of human hair in their hands as theywere compelled to shave those condemned to murder; they describe the feeling of carrying stiff corpses rigid from the gas chambers. At most one could attempt to convey the feeling of watching it, of listening to people speak about unspeakable horrors which they have themselves experienced. In nearly 10 hours, (the film is shown in two halves, on separate nights) there is not a slow moment, not a gratuitous detail.

And Lanzmann is obsessed with detail. "Excuse me," he will ask. "But what time in the morning was it? Six or seven a.m.? What color were the vans that took the Jews away?" Other critics who find fault with such meticulousness are missing the point of Lanzmann's goal: to render real experience in all its richness--not to interpret or to impose anything else. And these memories, which speak eloquently for themselves, in turn create new memories--from the painful to the exhilarating--for those who hear them.

No MEASURE OF knowledge about the Holocaust can prepare you for Shoah. It is not about politics, mortality rates, or economics. It is a cinematic experience of an immediacy and intimacy unparallelled either on film or in print.

It is about real people--guilty and innocent, aware and ignorant, helpless or in control of the events of the War. And these people constantly surprise us with their candor.

There is the former Nazi official whom Lanzmann interviews clandestinely at his home, reminding him of his responsibility as deputy director of the Warsaw ghetto, and filling in details as he interviews. "It was July 7, 1941? That's the first time I've relearned a date," says the small, white-haired Dr. Franz Grassler. "May I take notes? After all, it interests me too. So in July I was already there!"

Lanzmann's genius--and the source of the film's power--is his ability to gauge exactly what he wants and can get from each interview. He is by turns gentle, coaxing, disbelieving, and confrontational with those he interviews. It is as though he can. feel exactly to what degree each subject is willing to recount experiences, and just what his limits are. And he knows precisely how far he can push each interview, each subject, to get what he wants. While he will take 20 minutes to coax a group of villagers to describe what life was like with the Jews, he does not hesitiate to challenge the widow of a Nazi who has clearly got her facts wrong.

How far was your house from the church?

It was just opposite--150 feet.

Did you see the gas vans?