Between the Hammer and the Anvil: Claude Lanzmann Revisits the Holocaust
CLAUDE Lanzmann’s opus magnum, the nine-hour 1985 documentary Shoah, focused on the oral testimonies of the perpetrators of the Holocaust and its victims. It was a forensically detailed examination of the mechanics of mass murder.
Lanzmann cut from the final film an interview, conducted in Rome across a week in 1975, with Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Elder of the Theresienstadt Judenrat (Jewish council). That interview has now been made public for the first time with the release of a new documentary, The Last of the Unjust.
The role of the Judenrat during the Nazi period has long been a delicate ethical issue. Were the community leaders motivated by selflessness or selfishness, self-aggrandisement or civic duty, political naivety or poor judgment, self-preservation or integrity? It is a sine qua non that collectively and individually the council members collaborated; their appointment was to implement Nazi orders.
The Judenrat ensured the efficient administration of ghettoes. The leaders, believing work would save their communities, gave up the sick, elderly and children for deportation or were silently complicit. They repressed resistance, and when they knew the final destinations of the deportees determined not to inform their communities. These were choices made in the most difficult circumstances.
Seventy years on it remains problematic to pass judgment. Historians have tiptoed through this morally complex terrain. Survivors also have been equivocal, although uniformly sceptical about the exercise of power, the opportunities for profiteering, preferment and corruption. That said, survivors know survival required a denial of conventional moral codes. So condemnation does not come easily to those who lived through the period.
In The Last of the Unjust, Lanzmann resists opining on this moral quagmire. Instead the French filmmaker allows the only surviving Elder of the Theresienstadt ghetto, located in what is now the Czech Republic, to speak for himself. Murmelstein’s survival depended on his hard work and loyalty to his Nazi masters. Had he been disloyal, he certainly would not have been available for interview on a sunny Roman balcony.
The documentary weaves the original 1975 interview together with narrative monologues recorded more recently by Lanzmann that contextualise Murmelstein’s account of his activities between 1938 and 1945.
Murmelstein is a quintessential Viennese Jew: punctilious, pedantic, knowledgeable and determined. He is defiant, defensive and unrepentant. His purpose is to prove that he always acted in the community’s best interests. He shadowboxes his critics, referring repeatedly to Hannah Arendt’s damning critique of the Judenrat as “instruments of murder”.
Lanzmann shares his bewilderment at the brutality of individuals and the horrors of the Nazi regime. As he walks us through the procedure of hanging Murmelstein’s predecessor, the acute observational power of his camera lens and his plain speaking confronts the viewer with the mechanics of murder.
Theresienstadt was established in 1941 as a model ghetto to prevent the world knowing the fate of European Jewry. Highly educated and mostly secular Jews from Germany and Austria were sent there after first signing over all their assets. They were prominent individuals, decorated war veterans or the Jewish partners of mixed marriages.
Murmelstein had already proved himself useful in Vienna, assisting Adolf Eichmann’s mass Jewish emigration plans in the late 1930s. When emigration proved inefficient, Murmelstein was sent to Theresienstadt, where his operational talents were used. There was much to be done: supplying labour, distributing food and accommodation, managing sanitation and health, education and cultural programs and exercising judiciary functions. Murmelstein is categoric that he never compiled a list but he was certainly part of the Judenrat’s deliberations when exemptions were bartered and negotiated.
Critics have suggested that if Shoah was a hymn to death, then The Last of the Unjust is a homage to life. But it is more a meditation on survival.
Murmelstein describes himself as a “calculating realist”, a “marionette that had to pull its own strings”. He cites the fate of Orpheus and Eurydice to warn it is “sometimes its best not to look back”. He likens himself to Scheherazade, a teller of stories to both his masters and his community. Most remarkably he views himself as Sancho Panza, the practical everyman and servant.
When quizzed about not seizing the opportunity to escape he responds that he felt compelled to “do something” while admitting to “a thirst for adventure”.
He justifies his actions vociferously: “I participated in this theatre, this propaganda, because I thought if the world knew about us then the Nazis wouldn’t be able to get rid of us.” When Lanzmann describes Theresienstadt as hellish, Murmelstein’s post-factum response is: “A surgeon must not cry on the patient he operates on or the patient will die.” One cannot overcome the sense that Murmelstein’s over-weaning arrogance blinded him to the fate he sealed for his community.
His self-imposed task was to save the ghetto inmates. Our problem is that he was also saving himself. Prising these two motivations apart is difficult but necessary. He says: “The Elder of the Jews was always between the hammer and the anvil, the Germans and the Jews. He can deaden a lot of blows.”
His rationale, that work would save the Jews, was a view shared by many council elders. The king of the Lodz ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski, travelled through the ghetto in a horse-drawn carriage overseeing Jewish productivity. Convinced “his” Jews could stay alive by their labour, Rumkowski routinely sent those unable to work to the death camps. Usefulness was the dictat by which the Judenrat led their communities. In reality European Jewry was worked to death or gassed.
When Murmelstein was appointed as the last Elder of Theresienstadt, the camp commandant, Karl Rahm, asked him how he would live as the “king of the Jews”. He replied, “King of the Jews is what they wrote on the cross.” The German official didn’t laugh. Did Murmelstein really think of himself as a Christ-like figure, a martyr to his people?
The Last of the Unjust breaks Lanzmann’s taboo on using archival footage to include clips from the grotesque propaganda film The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews. The film was made after a visit by the International Red Cross in 1944. Embellishment of the ghetto was one of Murmelstein’s duties; beautification would dispel growing concern in the international community about the treatment of the Jews.
The program required mass deportations to disguise overcrowding and outbreaks of typhus. Flowerbeds were planted; stores stocked with high-quality goods (not for sale) were opened; cafes were established; park benches were erected on green turf; there were imitation graves in the cemetery; decent beds with white sheets and pillows; lamps and curtains were installed, with flowerpots on the window sills at ground-floor level in the knowledge the Red Cross visitors would be unlikely to trouble themselves to climb the stairs.
A former hospital was renamed The Boys School with a cheery poster on the front gate announcing school was closed for the holidays. Bakers in white overalls and white gloves loaded loaves of bread and vegetables were delivered to the grocer’s shops for the edification of the visiting delegation. In the children’s house, the commandant distributed sardines to the children, who said, “What, sardines again Uncle Rahm?” Once the film was completed, all the performers, most of the council and the children were deported to Auschwitz.
Murmelstein stayed. His duties were operational, ensuring inmates worked a 70-hour week. But Theresienstadt also gathered together many of Western Jewry’s finest composers, musicians, artists and writers, who created a remarkably rich cultural life as part of daily life until the next round of deportations.
So what choices were available to council elders? Might they refuse to organise the deportations and commit suicide? Might they inform the community of its fate, encourage resistance and face execution? Or might they expediently calibrate the sacrifice of the weak, the elderly and the children to ensure the survival of the strong?
In the final months of the war, Murmelstein was required to draw up a list of the 600 most important inmates, to whom he promised safety in Switzerland. In fact their destination was another camp to be used as a bargaining chip with the Allies. Once again Murmelstein complied with his orders and bought his own immunity. But it also ensured he would forever be remembered as a treacherous opportunist and a collaborator.
Murmelstein’s detailed explanations do not settle the question of responsibility. Perhaps judgment is beyond us. The Last of the Unjust includes a cantor reciting the Kaddish (the prayer for the dead) in the Old-New Synagogue in Prague. Perhaps if Murmelstein had himself recited Kaddish, expressed sorrow and pity for all those murdered innocents, his fate to be condemned to live forever as a pariah among his people might have been different.
One Theresienstadt survivor quotes a passage from the Book of Job: “Lo, mine eye hath seen all this, mine ear hath heard and understood it. What ye know, the same do I know also.”
Lanzmann’s life work has been to document this tragic period in human history. He is to be honoured for that work and the understanding he makes possible for each of us.
Louise Adler is chief executive of Melbourne University Publishing and president of the Australian Publishers Association.
The Last of the Unjust has its Australian premiere at the Jewish International Film Festival in Sydney and Melbourne. More information: www.jiff.com.au
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