France, documentary, Synecdoche, Arte, 2017. With the support of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah.
In preview.
(c) SYNECDOCHE – ARTE FRANCE
Paula Biren, Ruth Elias, Ada Lichtman, Hanna Marton, four names of Jewish women, witnesses and survivors of the wildest and most ruthless barbarism, and who for this reason alone, but many others, deserve to be forever engraved in the memory of men. What they have in common, besides the specific horror of which each was the object, is intelligence, a sharp, acute, carnal intelligence, which rejects all pretense, bad reasons, in a word idealism. There was no idealism in an extermination camp. Let’s listen to the wonderful Ruth Elias, very beautiful and moving when she plays the accordion a German song by Sarah Leander:
"Everything passes. Even at this moment so hard, there is still humor in our hearts."
But Ruth adds again, ending once and for all with the embellishments and false testimonies:
«When you are in misery, you act like an animal, you follow your instincts. When I hear people say that, in the camps, they behaved like this or like that, that they wanted to live so they could then tell what had happened, I am sorry but I do not believe it. I saw the animal instinct. All the masks were falling, we were helpless, naked, we had to show our true face. One of my instincts was food. Survival is only possible if we eat. It was all that mattered.”
But Mengele wanted to know how long a baby could live without food and had made Ruth’s breasts hard. After four days and nights of her child’s inhuman moans, Ruth could only bring herself to administer the fatal injection. The kapo nurse who handed him the syringe and lethal poison had, she said, taken the Hippocratic oath, which forbade him to kill! But the other three heroines in this film, which I shot more than thirty years ago at the same time as The Last of the Unjust, were then unable – and for the same reasons – to find their place in Shoah. Each deserved a film of its own, and to cut one of these four episodes, all equally moving, would have revolted me by the disfigurement that had been imposed on protagonists of an exceptional caliber. Whether it is Paula Biren, brilliant intelligence with extreme charm, appointed by Rumkowski as a member of the Jewish women’s police in the Lodz ghetto, by Ada Lichtman, who witnessed in Krakow the atrocious and unmarked murder of her entire family from the first week of the war before becoming a real slave at the Sobibor extermination camp and finally playing a decisive role in the revolt. Finally, D'Hanna Marton, consumed by the incurable remorse of having been part of Noah’s Ark, which, as a result of an agreement reached with Eichmann, allowed 1,600 Hungarian Jews to board for BergenBelsen and Switzerland while at the same time several hundred thousand of their compatriots were savagely gassed en masse in Auschwitz.”
Claude Lanzmann
In the presence of director
Please note, as this event is fully booked, the remaining seats are located in the broadcasting room.
