In 1975, Claude Lanzmann (then embarking upon his epochal Holocaust documentary Shoah) travelled to Rome to interview Benjamin Murmelstein, the only surviving president of the Jewish Council in Theresienstadt – Adolf Eichmann’s so-called “model ghetto” in which thousands died in appalling squalor, while many more were transported on to death camps in “the East”. Shunned after the war as a collaborator, Murmelstein was imprisoned and then acquitted by the Czech authorities. Yet the stench of guilt remained, and hangs in the air of Lanzmann’s surprisingly intimate interviews, conducted over the course of a week during which the two develop what looks like a friendship.
Murmelstein is slippery; his voice strident and self-justifying, his conversation digressional and erudite, his manner argumentatively unrepentant. In the version of events that he recalls here (which Lanzmann notes is tonally “very different” from that presented in his 1961 book Terezin: Il ghetto-modello di Eichmann), Murmelstein worked pragmatically to preserve the ghetto and its population in the face of inconceivable evil, wielding whatever power he had to soften the anvil blows of the Nazi regime. His memories are anecdotal yet precise, his testimony feistily first-hand (he dismisses Hannah Arendt’s infamous depiction of Eichmann as “banal”, asserting forcefully that “he was a demon”). He repeatedly compares himself to Scheherazade, using stories to save his life, and arguably those of others.
Intertwined with these archived interviews is recent footage of the 87-year-old Lanzmann revisiting less well-known sites of Nazi horror, from Nisko in Poland to Terezin itself, where the foul lie of humane relocation was propagated to hide the unthinkable reality of the “final solution”.
“It took me a long time to accept that I had no right to keep it to myself,” says Lanzmann of his resurrection of Murmelstein’s 40-year-old testimony, which is by turns engaging, sardonically horrifying and bewildering. Each viewer will judge its truth for themselves, but the director’s compassionately unsentimental acceptance is clear and profound
