«The Four Sisters»
by Claude LanzmannAs part of the "Holocaust Remembrance Day"

In preview.

• The Hippocratic Oath (90min)
• Baluty (64min)
• La Puce joyeuse (52min)
• Noah’s Ark (68min)

(c) SYNECDOCHE – ARTE FRANCE

“Paula Biren, Ruth Elias, Ada Lichtman, Hanna Marton, four names and surnames of Jewish women, witnesses and survivors of the wildest and most ruthless barbarism, and who, for this reason alone, but many others still, deserve to be inscribed forever in the memory of men. What they have in common, besides the specific horror of which each has been 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 overwhelming 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, finishing once and for all with the embellishments and false testimonies:

When one is in misery, one acts like an animal, one follows instinct. When I hear people say that, in the camps, they behaved like this or like that, that they wanted to live so that 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 in helplessness, naked, we had to show our true face. One of the instincts in me was food. Surviving is only possible if you 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 inhuman moans from her child, Ruth could only resolve to administer the fatal injection herself. The nurse kapo who gave him the syringe and the lethal poison had taken, she said, the Hippocratic oath, which forbade him to kill! But the three other 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 to find their place in Shoah – and for the same reasons. Each deserved a film in itself and cutting to the hilt in only 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, a brilliant intelligence with extreme charm, appointed by Rumkowski as a member of the Jewish women’s police of the Lodz ghetto, by Ada Lichtman, a witness in Krakow of the atrocious and excruciating murder of her entire family in 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, by Hanna Marton, eaten away by the incurable remorse of having been part of the Noah’s Ark which, as the result of an agreement concluded with Eichmann, allowed 1,600 Hungarian Jews to embark for Bergen-Belsen and Switzerland while at the same moment several hundred thousand of their compatriots were savagely gassed en masse in Auschwitz.

Claude Lanzmann

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