The Last of the Unjust

In 1975 Claude Lanzmann filmed a long conversation in Rome with Benjamin Murmelstein and then left it out of Shoah. Almost forty years later he built a separate film from that footage. Murmelstein was the last president of the Jewish Council at Theresienstadt, the place Adolf Eichmann presented to the world as a model ghetto and which functioned as the last stop before the gas chambers. From 1938 until the end of the war he negotiated with Eichmann almost daily, and although he probably knew the man better than anyone who survived, he was never called to testify at Eichmann’s trial. Across three and a half hours Lanzmann puts both the interview and his own questions in front of the viewer, and leaves the judgement where he found it, open.