Among the extensive material that did not make the final cut in Claude Lanzmann's landmark 1985 Holocaust documentary Shoah (VL-10/87) was a series of interviews Lanzmann conducted in 1975 with Benjamin Murmelstein, the third Jewish elder of the “model ghetto”—or more accurately concentration camp—that the Nazis established at Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, and the only one to survive. In The Last of the Unjust, Lanzmann has edited substantial portions of their conversations into a fascinating and compelling film, which also features newly shot footage of the former Theresienstadt—as well as scenes of Lanzmann reading from contemporary sources and later accounts, artwork painted by inmates, and clips from a Nazi propaganda film—to present a history of the camp and its horrors. Central to the narrative, of course, is the testimony of Murmelstein, a man reviled by many as a power-hungry collaborator who instead portrays himself as a wily strategist who used his skills at manipulation while he was a rabbi in Vienna to arrange for the emigration of as many Jews as possible, and then after being sent to the camp tried to secure the best possible conditions for the inmates there. Murmelstein offers a scathing indictment of Nazi kingpin Adolf Eichmann (who Murmelstein was forced to deal with), but while Lanzmann presses his subject about the self-serving nature of his apologia, in the end what emerges is a portrait of a shrewd, calculating man who may be shading the truth but was not the accommodating puppet claimed by his most severe critics. Highly recommended. Editor's Choice. (F. Swietek)
The Last of the Unjust
Cohen, 2 discs, 220 min., in French & German w/English subtitles, PG-13, DVD: $39.98, Blu-ray: $49.98 Volume 30, Issue 1
The Last of the Unjust
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