Filmed in Rome in 1975, this conversation between Claude Lanzmann and Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Elder of the Judenrat at the Theresienstadt ghetto and the only head of the Jewish Council of Elders who survived the war, did not make it into Lanzmann's groundbreaking, nearly 10-hour-long “Shoah.” Years later, however, the director decided to make use of this fascinating footage. Lanzmann visited the places that they talked about at the time and made yet another film that is fundamental to our understanding of the Holocaust. Murmelstein turned out to be a remarkable interlocutor: incredibly intelligent, sardonic, and in a position to offer that which the court in Jerusalem did not want to take from him in the case against Eichmann: the invaluable testimony of a man whose fate was to survive for years near the very heart of darkness.  

Maciej Nowicki