The Last of the Unjust

Returning to the Holocaust for the fourth time since his monumental 1985 documentary Shoah, 87-year-old Claude Lanzmann draws on unused footage of a 1975 interview in Rome with Viennese rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein to assess his role as the sole surviving member of the Jewish Council installed by the Nazis to help run the Theresienstadt ghetto camp. Having been acquitted of collaboration by a Prague court, Murmelstein knows he is a divisive figure and Lanzmann presses him hard about his relationship with Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution. Denying political theorist Hannah Arendt's suggestion that he epitomised "the banality of evil", Murmelstein remembers Eichmann as greedy, corrupt and wicked. Yet he persuasively argues that he had to play the "calculating realist" with him and his cohorts to protect his fellow Jews. Lanzmann makes telling use of a propaganda film that depicts Theresienstadt as a model camp and covert drawings made by Jewish artists. But he also revisits the site and its environs to convey the chilling ease with which things have returned to normal in a place where systemised murder was once plotted and carried out.