Claude Lanzmann © FDC / TD
OUT OF COMPETITION – Lanzmann lifts the veil on “The Last of the Unjust”
For his latest film, Claude Lanzmann exhumes a series of interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, the last President of the Jewish Council of Elders in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, whence hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported. A testimonial that is almost forty years old, which sheds light on the Shoah.
Photo from the film © RR
Once again, Claude Lanzmann takes on an immense task of burrowing into the heart of history to make his latest film. The genesis of The Last of the Unjust, presented Out of Competition, stretches back nearly forty years. It is 1975, and the director of Shoah (1985) and of Sobibor, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures (Out of Competition, 2001), goes to Rome to spend a week interviewing the rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein. He was the man who, from 1938, was entrusted by Adolf Eichmann, in charge of the logistics of the Final Solution, with organising the forced emigration of Austrian Jews from Vienna.
The last President of the Jewish Council of Elders in Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, a former military fortress transformed into a ghetto during the Second World War, Murmelstein fought to save the ghetto occupants in spite of his orders from the Nazi criminal. For all these years, Claude Lanzmann was haunted by the filmed interviews with the rabbi, which in the end were not used in the film Shoah. “I knew I was the custodian of something unique, but I quailed before the difficulties involved in the construction of such a film. It took me a very long time to come to terms with the fact that I had no right to keep all that to myself“, the director explains.
For Lanzmann, the Theresienstadt ghetto constitutes a key element “in the genesis and the unfolding of the final solution“. The film lifts the veil on the character of Murmelstein, who called himself the last of the unjust for having accepted this responsibility, and the contradictions within the Jewish Councils. And it ultimately exposes Eichmann’s terrible project in a previously unseen way.
Benoit Pavan
SCREENINGS
Sunday 19 May / Salle Debussy / 7 pm.
