Claude Lanzmann’s monumental 1985 oral history of the Holocaust, Shoah (VL-10/87), is justifiably considered a classic of both documentary filmmaking and communal testimony regarding the greatest horror of the 20th century. Shortly before his death at the age of 92 in 2018, Lanzmann released this tetralogy of interviews with female Holocaust survivors (which were not used extensively in Shoah) that serves as a fitting coda to his masterwork. The stories differ in details, but each reflects common grief and guilt. Hannah Marton defensively recounts her escape on a train of mostly well-to-do Hungarian and Romanian Jews that was arranged, controversially, by Rezső Kasztner with Adolf Eichmann. Paula Biren ruefully recollects life in Poland’s Lodz ghetto, where she was a member of a women’s police force that was inevitably collaborationist. Ada Lichtman recounts how she was one of the Polish prisoners in the Sobibór camp chosen to clean and dress dolls taken from Jewish children so that they could be given to the daughters of their former owners’ killers. And in the most agonizing segment, Ruth Elias describes how Josef Mengele singled her out for experimentation when he discovered that she was pregnant. There are haunting moments in each interview—Elias singing Czech folk songs while accompanying herself on the accordion; Lichtman fussing with the dolls she has collected, while her husband, also a Sobibór survivor, sits tearfully beside her; Marton obsessively consulting her husband’s diary to be precise about how he worked to secure their inclusion on Kasztner’s list—but all four, simply edited with minimal archival additions, are powerful acts of memory bound together by shared suffering. Bonus features include a conversation with scholar Bernard-Henri Lévy about Lanzmann’s work filmed at the Streicker Center of New York City’s Temple Emanu-El. Highly recommended. Editor’s Choice. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)
Shoah: Four Sisters
(2017) 273 min. In French, German, English & Hebrew w/English subtitles. DVD: $25.99, Blu-ray: $30.99. Cohen Media Group (avail. from most distributors). Volume 34, Issue 5
Shoah: Four Sisters
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