New film explores ethical dilemma
Source: AFP |
May 20, 2013, Monday
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WHEN your enemy is sworn to exterminate every one of you, can you - should you - try to cut a deal with him to at least save some lives knowing that others are doomed?
The question lies at the heart of a new documentary by Claude Lanzmann, author of "Shoah," the hugely-acclaimed tableau of the Holocaust.
"The Last of the Unjust," premiering at Cannes yesterday, explores a moral dilemma that Lanzmann briefly touches on his 1985 masterpiece.
For three and a half hours, the viewer is taken through an exploration of Benjamin Murmelstein, the last president of the Jewish Council in the "model ghetto" of Theresienstadt in Nazi-annexed Czechoslovakia.
Set up by SS colonel Adolf Eichmann as a bogus town run by Jews themselves - a Potemkin village designed to dupe the world - Theresienstadt was one of the grimmest chapters in the long record of Nazi atrocities.
It housed 50,000 Jews at its peak periods. Over four years, more than 150,000 inhabitants were killed, several sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
"It was the peak of Nazi cruelty and perversity... a unique combination of lies and naked violence," Lanzmann, 87, said in an interview with AFP in February.
Jewish Council
To run Theresienstadt, the Nazis formed a Jewish Council, comprising 12 members and a leader, "the Elder of the Jews," or Judenaeltester in German. Those who refused the appointment were killed.
The first Elder was sent to Auschwitz in 1943 and killed six months later; the second was executed in Theresienstadt in 1944.
The documentary describes the extraordinary and controversial tale of Benjamin Murmelstein, a former Grand Rabbi of Vienna who became the third and final Elder in Theresienstadt and the only one in all of eastern Europe to survive the war.
Survival meant that he became a target. In the early 1960s, Murmelstein was bitterly attacked by some Holocaust survivors, who accused him of collaboration. There were even calls for him to be hanged, like Eichmann, whom Murmelstein knew intimately from Vienna.
The documentary is based on interviews that Lanzmann had with Murmelstein in 1975, 14 years before his death.
In it, Murmelstein comes across as hugely compelling, a man fiercely intelligent, courageous and ironic, harsh with others but also with himself.
The question lies at the heart of a new documentary by Claude Lanzmann, author of "Shoah," the hugely-acclaimed tableau of the Holocaust.
"The Last of the Unjust," premiering at Cannes yesterday, explores a moral dilemma that Lanzmann briefly touches on his 1985 masterpiece.
For three and a half hours, the viewer is taken through an exploration of Benjamin Murmelstein, the last president of the Jewish Council in the "model ghetto" of Theresienstadt in Nazi-annexed Czechoslovakia.
Set up by SS colonel Adolf Eichmann as a bogus town run by Jews themselves - a Potemkin village designed to dupe the world - Theresienstadt was one of the grimmest chapters in the long record of Nazi atrocities.
It housed 50,000 Jews at its peak periods. Over four years, more than 150,000 inhabitants were killed, several sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
"It was the peak of Nazi cruelty and perversity... a unique combination of lies and naked violence," Lanzmann, 87, said in an interview with AFP in February.
Jewish Council
To run Theresienstadt, the Nazis formed a Jewish Council, comprising 12 members and a leader, "the Elder of the Jews," or Judenaeltester in German. Those who refused the appointment were killed.
The first Elder was sent to Auschwitz in 1943 and killed six months later; the second was executed in Theresienstadt in 1944.
The documentary describes the extraordinary and controversial tale of Benjamin Murmelstein, a former Grand Rabbi of Vienna who became the third and final Elder in Theresienstadt and the only one in all of eastern Europe to survive the war.
Survival meant that he became a target. In the early 1960s, Murmelstein was bitterly attacked by some Holocaust survivors, who accused him of collaboration. There were even calls for him to be hanged, like Eichmann, whom Murmelstein knew intimately from Vienna.
The documentary is based on interviews that Lanzmann had with Murmelstein in 1975, 14 years before his death.
In it, Murmelstein comes across as hugely compelling, a man fiercely intelligent, courageous and ironic, harsh with others but also with himself.
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