Disc Reviews

4 Films After Shoah Review

• 2nd Feb 2015

I first watched Claude Lanzmann’s seminal almost 10 hour documentary Shoah shortly after its initial release in 1985. I was immediately captivated by it and despite having heard and read similar stories could not believe the testimonials being verbalised by the survivors in a testimonial documentary on the Holocaust. Who can imagine that such a film would be so captivating without relying on any archive footage or crass re-enactments while dealing with so bleak a subject? Yet it is. The four films on this release by Eureka! represent a body of documentary filmmaking that followed Shoah and together are like few others you’ll ever see yet all following the similar style to Shoah. It is truly remarkable to have all these films plus a re-release of Shoah by Eureka! together. Lanzmann’s idea of a documentary is literally that, a document and a testimony to these witnesses to survival. Of course there have been a whole raft of powerful documentaries about the Second World War and the Holocaust made over the years. Yet few provide such a document as these films between Shoah and the latest film, The Last of the Unjust which was released in the UK at cinemas on January 9^th this year.

Each documentary is made, styled and presented in the same manner: opening with a lengthy narration with white captioned prologue on a black background giving context to the interviews about to be viewed. There is very little or no archive footage, instead letting the survivors and perpetrators tell their stories. There is in many cases footage shot by Lanzmann of the sights today: Thersienstadt, Nisko, or Sobibór. Each of the interviews are expanded from those used in Shoah and come from the project shot by the Jewish French filmmaker during the almost 10 years he spent filming and editing.

The earliest of these is Un vivant qui passé (A Visitor From the Living), edited together and released in 1999. This is a 65 minute filmed interview of Maurice Rossel, a Swiss International Red Cross (IRC) worker who talks about his visits to Auschwitz as well as the so-called model ghetto and concentration camp at Theresienstadt, a former fortress and cavalry outpost that controversially was either a way station to Auschwitz-Birkenau or was a camp for notable and elderly victims of the Nazis. For Auschwitz Lanzmann prises out of the Swiss man the impression the camp had on the Red Cross worker and what he observed. He described the camp as blandly calm despite the “musselmen”, that is the emaciated prisoners in striped clothing looking like the walking dead. He explained that of what he saw Rossel found the camp Kommandant, Rudolf Hőss to be convivial, calm and direct with him. Other than that Rossel did not find the camp “out of the ordinary” or any different to a POW camp. Towards the end, after Rossel describes his visit to Theresienstadt, Lanzmann lets the former Red Cross man have it and tries to get him to admit that the IRC visitors were duped and in so many words made to look stupid when he talks about games of football, children’s playgrounds, synagogue’s and theatres. There was no mention of a deliberate cloaking of the reality and the fake reality the Nazis were presenting in the IRC report. Rossel describes the Jewish inmates there as listless and apathetic until Lanzmann again reminds him of the situation of the Jewish inmates that after the Red Cross had left and the Nazi propaganda film had finished everything was torn down and most of these people were sent to be gassed at the death camps in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Another, Sobibór, 14 Octobre 1943, 16:00 (95 minutes) is an interview with Yehuda Lerner, a subject from the original Shoah. Lerner, a Polish Jew describes in amazing detail how he had escaped and been recaptured no fewer than eight times from the SS before finally being sent to the temporary death camp at Sobibór. One of the very few (one of 65 in his train) who were assigned to a work detail he soon saw an opportunity with others to murder some SS officers in a tailor’s hut before making a mass breakout with over 500 prisoners, 50 of who managed to evade recapture (the date of which is the title of the documentary. Shortly after the Nazis closed and bulldozed the camp, attempting to conceal any evidence of their having been an extermination camp there.

The third documentary, The Karski Report (made for TV in 2001) is perhaps the least dramatic, despite some of the personalities in the story and the eccentric and flamboyant interviewee, Jan Karski, a courier for the Polish Jewish underground who explains how he escaped the clutches of the Nazis and made his way to the United States and explain to Washington and President Roosevelt what is going on in Nazi occupied Poland.

The final and main film on this disc is The Last of the Unjust, the recently released 279 minute documentary and interview with the last Jewish Elder of the ghetto and concentration camp of Theresienstadt, located just 80km from Prague. His predecessors had both been murdered by the Nazis, one at Auschwitz and the other was executed at the shooting range in the Gestapo run Small Fortress at Theresienstadt. The man in question’s name was Benjamin Murmelstein, a very charismatic individual indeed. The interviews were shot in 1975 (he died in 1989) while Lanzmann was working on the early stages of Shoah but even back then he felt that his story warranted a film of its own. Murmelstein was living in exile in Rome after the war. Although exonerated he felt that it was too dangerous for him to travel to Israel, somewhere he never visited as he had been tried as a collaborator. Before the war Benjamin Murmelstein was a senior Jewish figure in Vienna but had worked for Adolf Eichmann’s ‘emigration’ bureau as Jews were forced to emigrate but not before they handed over the wealth to the Nazis. Murmelstein claims that he was able to work with duplicity and help the Jews to get out safely. Elsewhere he was accused of not being able to escape as business would mean he would have to travel to Paris and London. Justifiably he says that he did not go into exile because his wife and family were still living in Austria.

Murmelstein comes across as dynamic, in his words an ‘adventurer’ while his lack of displaying any external fear was what made him a survivor. Later as the Elder of Theresienstadt, towards the end of the camp’s existence (he was interned there in 1943) he claimed he saved many people’s lives by his Machiavellian character and boldness. He defended his actions in assisting with the propaganda film the Nazis made of the ghetto, showing it as a nice place to ‘re-settle’ the Jews (“the Führer gives a town to the Jews”) by claiming that they had to show their assistance in order for them to survive for as long as possible. This did not seem to make him popular either with some of the SS nor with others on the Jewish Council but he never the less pressed ahead until the camp was liberated in May 1945. He later felt that giving evidence at Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel in 1961 would not have helped and remained silent about his former boss.

Theresienstadt holds a unique place in the Holocaust and is still a controversial one, one that maybe Lanzmann muddies further here for while Murmelstein is challenged he is once again exonerated by an interlocutor. Maybe Murmelstein’s own lack of personal guilt feelings aid this, but conversely this was always the thing that aided his survival. At one point Lanzmann does question him whether his actions were for his own survival or to help others and in a roundabout way does claim that it was to help others. The Last of the Unjust is a much more intellectually presented film than Shoah but seems to struggle with itself but in doing so losing some of the power of Shoah that even at 10 hours or so felt it had much tighter editing. However it picks a pace towards the end and runs with it while all these films as a collective are a kind of Shoah II. There are no extras as none are required and the documentaries all speak for themselves.

Chris Hick