Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes: Holocaust Rescue and Resistance 9781350187078, 9781350187108, 9781350187085

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Reacting to genocide
1 Abba Kovner: ‘Like sheep to the slaughter’
2 Hansi Brand: ‘Selling one’s soul to the devil’
3 Indirect testimony: Rabbi Michael Weissmandl
4 Ghetto rescue and resistance: Tadeusz Pankiewicz, Hersh Smolar and Leib Garfunkel
5 Communal testimony and the War Refugee Board: Peter Bergson, Roswell McClelland, John Pehle and Robert Reams
6 Leadership, responsibility and resistance: Yehuda Bauer, Richard Rubenstein, Ya’akov Arnon
Conclusion: Henry Feingold in New York, Shmuel Zygielboim in London
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
Index

Citation preview

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

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Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes Holocaust Rescue and Resistance Sue Vice

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Paperback edition published 2023 Copyright © Sue Vice, 2023 Sue Vice has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Charlotte Daniels Cover image: Created by Claude Lanzmann during the filming of Shoah Used by permission of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Vice, Sue, 1961- author. Title: Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’ outtakes : Holocaust rescue and resistance / Sue Vice. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “As we approach the end of the ‘era of the witness’, given the passing on of the generation of Holocaust survivors, Claude Lanzmann’s archive of 220 hours of footage excluded from his groundbreaking documentary Shoah (1985) offers a remarkable opportunity to encounter previously unseen interviews with survivors and other witnesses, recorded in the late 1970s. Although the archive is all available freely to view online and includes extra footage of those who appear in Shoah, this book focuses on the interviews from which no extracts appear in the finished film or in any subsequent release. The material analysed not only features interviews with such significant figures as the former partisan Abba Kovner, wartime activist Hansi Brand, Kovno Ghetto leader Leib Garfunkel, rescuer Tadeusz Pankiewicz and members of Roosevelt’s War Refugee Board, but focuses throughout on the efforts at rescue and resistance by those within and outside occupied Europe. Sue Vice contends that watching and analysing this wholly excluded footage gives us a new insight into the making of Shoah through what was left out. Moreover, she reveals that the near-impossibility of rescue and often suicidal implications of resistance emerge through these interviews as inextricable from the process of genocide. She concludes by arguing that these outtakes show the potential for new filmic forms envisaged on Lanzmann’s part in order to represent this crucial subject”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020045615 (print) | LCCN 2020045616 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350187078 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350187085 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350187092 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Shoah (Motion picture) | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in motion pictures. Classification: LCC PN1997.S4755 V525 2021 (print) | LCC PN1997.S4755 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/72–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045615 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045616 ISBN:

HB: 978-1-3501-8707-8 PB: 978-1-3503-5746-4 ePDF: 978-1-3501-8708-5 eBook: 978-1-3501-8709-2 Typeset by Jones Ltd, London

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Contents Illustrations Acknowledgements

vi viii

Introduction: Reacting to genocide 1 1 Abba Kovner: ‘Like sheep to the slaughter’ 19 2 Hansi Brand: ‘Selling one’s soul to the devil’ 39 3 Indirect testimony: Rabbi Michael Weissmandl 59 4 Ghetto rescue and resistance: Tadeusz Pankiewicz, Hersh Smolar and Leib Garfunkel 83 5 Communal testimony and the War Refugee Board: Peter Bergson, Roswell McClelland, John Pehle and Robert Reams 121 6 Leadership, responsibility and resistance: Yehuda Bauer, Richard Rubenstein, Ya’akov Arnon 153 Conclusion: Henry Feingold in New York, Shmuel Zygielboim in London 185 Notes Bibliography Filmography Index

193 229 236 237

Illustrations 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6

Former Jewish policemen of the Riga Ghetto Jean Pictet, Geneva Claude Lanzmann and farmer, village of Treblinka Children and mother at farm gate, Treblinka Abba Kovner, Israel Abba Kovner listens to Lanzmann reading aloud the wrong appeal Abba Kovner, night-time, holding the ‘appeal to resist’ Hansi Brand, Tel Aviv Close-up on Hansi Brand Siegmunt Forst with a photograph of Rabbi Michael Weissmandl, NYC Hermann Landau, NYC Reading Weissmandl’s handwriting over Hermann Landau’s shoulder Claude Lanzmann and André Steiner, Atlanta Lanzmann and Steiner in matching shirts with garden backdrop Tadeusz Pankiewicz and Claude Lanzmann, pointing to the window of the former Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy Tadeusz Pankiewicz outside the former Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy: ‘Zapraszamy/Welcome’ Tadeusz Pankiewicz in the reconstructed pharmacy Hersh Smolar, Tel Aviv, to Lanzmann: ‘You are my son!’ Hersh Smolar: ‘I will not speak German!’ Leib Garfunkel with Claude Lanzmann and Irena Steinfeldt-Levy, Tel Aviv Leib Garfunkel: close-up on the eyewitness Peter Bergson, NYC Peter Bergson and newspaper headlines: ‘Action Not Pity’ John Pehle, Washington, sweeping leaves John Pehle with backdrop of trees Claude Lanzmann and Roswell McClelland, Washington, DC Close-up on Roswell McClelland

3 4 16 16 20 27 29 40 46 63 66 71 73 73 87 93 95 98 103 109 113 123 123 131 132 137 140

Illustrations

5.7 Claude Lanzmann and Robert Reams at the water’s edge: ‘It’s a very good fish’ 5.8 Robert Reams instructs Lanzmann on the golf course 5.9 Robert and Dotty Reams at home 6.1 Yehuda Bauer with children and dog in the background, Israel 6.2 Yehuda Bauer at night 6.3 ‘No open space’: Richard Rubenstein with backdrop of Wakulla Springs 6.4 Claude Lanzmann and Richard Rubenstein, looking in different directions 6.5 Ya’akov Arnon, Jerusalem 6.6 Ya’akov Arnon, holding a pipe: ‘A good man for quiet times’ 7.1 Henry Feingold, NYC 7.2 Claude Lanzmann and Henry Feingold with night-time backdrop 7.3 Faivel Zygielboim reads beneath a photograph of his brother Shmuel

vii

146 148 149 155 155 164 167 171 173 188 189 190

Acknowledgements I am grateful to many people for their insights and support, including Nathan Abrams, Jenni Adams, Frances Babbage, Anna Barton, Gerd Bayer, Amanda Bernstein, Jeffrey Bernstein, Sandra Booer, Joe Bray, Madeleine Callaghan, Bryan Cheyette, Maurizio Cinquegrani, Boaz Cohen, Fabienne Collignon, Robert Eaglestone, Katherine Ebury, Rachel Falconer, James Fenwick, Kieran Foster, Shirley Foster, Jo Gavins, Alex George, Susan George, Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan, Simon Goldberg, Marilyn Gregory, John Haffenden, Nicky Hallett, Bob Hill, Dex Hill, Susana Onega Jaén, Eleanor Kent, Irmela Krüger-Fürhoff, Barry Langford, Paul Leman, Carmen Levick, Elizabeth Lydon, Agnes McAuley, Robert McKay, Elisa Mai, Felix Mai-George, Bob Moore, Merilyn Moos, Beate Muller, Denisa Nestakova, Jo Pettitt, Griselda Pollock, Jonathan Rayner, Nina Schmidt, Jonathan Shepard, Nicola Shepard, Cathy Shrank, Leesa Spence, Axel Stähler, Duco van Oostrum; Dominic Williams for his excellent insights, and the other members of the White Rose ‘Future of Holocaust Memory’ Network: Emily-Rose Baker, Michael Holden, Daniel Lee, Diane Otosaka, Lisa Peschel, Hugo Service and Max Silverman; Doris Bergen and her wonderful students, including Joanna Krongold; Erin McGlothlin, Brad Prager, Markus Zisselsberger and all the participants at the groundbreaking workshop on Claude Lanzmann’s outtakes held in 2015. David Forrest gave invaluable comments on the entire manuscript, and Tim Cole generously provided historical expertise. The following responded generously to my questions, including supplying copies of films and other information: Corinna Coulmas, Michael Kovner, Dina Porat, Pierre Sauvage, Martin Smok, Michał Trębacz and Max Wallace. Rebecca Barden, Anna Coatman, Camilla Erskine, Veidehi Hans, Suriya Rajasekar and all the staff at Bloomsbury; Lindsay Zarwell, Leslie Swift and all the archive staff at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I took on this project thanks to a British Academy Senior Fellowship. I am also grateful to the School of English, University of Sheffield, for a period of research leave and support for reproducing the colour images.

Acknowledgements

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All images are used by permission of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem. And thanks also to family members Elizabeth and Tony Vice, John Vice, Harriet Coles, Pip Vice, John Slaytor, Flossie, Luke and Nell Vice-Coles, Millie and Jake Slaytor, Pete Lyons, Kathryn, Sam and Teresa Kelly.

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Introduction: Reacting to genocide

In the context of the impending end of the ‘era of the witness’, as the number of living Holocaust survivors declines, Claude Lanzmann’s archive is remarkable in offering the opportunity to see 220 hours of almost entirely unknown interviews with survivors and other testifiers.1 The archive consists of over 220 hours of footage which was excluded during the twelve-year-long making of Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary Shoah, now held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC.2 The fact that the entirety of Lanzmann’s archive, consisting of interviews, location footage and transcripts, is now freely available to view in digitized form makes it paradigmatic of what Caroline Wake calls the ‘new mobility’ of video testimony as it migrates online for public viewing.3 One of the aims of the present study is to encourage the widest possible engagement with Lanzmann’s archive that such ‘mobility’ has enabled, given that anyone with internet access can now watch the Shoah outtakes. In doing so, this study advocates viewing this excluded footage for its own sake, as material that is valuable and fascinating in visual and historical terms. Watching this unedited footage also allows, or even requires, the viewer to imagine it shaped and edited into a final form, to consider what artistic and documentary decisions might be entailed in such a process, and to what end. It is an approach of this kind that I have followed in the present study, in exploring the engagement of many of the excluded interviews with those topics of rescue and resistance that are not at the heart of Shoah, with its focus rather on destruction. As recent work on the history of his project has shown, Lanzmann started planning towards what became Shoah in 1973, undertaking interviews from as early as 1975, but the majority of the encounters, with individuals in Poland, Israel, Switzerland, the United States and Germany, took place over the course of just two years, between 1978 and 1979.4 At least fifty of a total of over seventy testifiers were excluded from the released film, a few of whom appear in subsequent releases,

2

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

and Lanzmann’s archive also includes extra footage from those interviews that do feature in Shoah alongside over thirty hours of unused location footage. This collection of exclusions was acquired by the USHMM in 1996, and, after over a decade of painstaking restoration, made publically available. Although the present study is not primarily an analysis of Shoah nor a history of its creation, watching the outtakes necessarily allows us to see how the focus of the released film was arrived at through identifying the nature of what was left out.

The outtakes viewer I argue here that the unedited form of the interviews in Lanzmann’s archive offers the opportunity for the imaginative spectatorship of this extraordinary footage before directorial decisions about excision and shaping have been made.5 In other words, while the material is enthralling and significant on its own account, it is possible for the viewer to envisage what use could have been made of it in Shoah, or as part of another, quite different film. The examples on which I have chosen to focus are ones from which no extracts were ever used by Lanzmann, either in Shoah or in any later release. The present study is therefore not one about Lanzmann and his team’s editorial practice, since none of this interview material has been cut or shaped for release. The viewer of these unused and unfamiliar outtakes is able to watch the interviews in their pre-edited state, to imagine the kinds of narrative they could be shaped to convey, and in what form. It is likely that, had Lanzmann edited for release any of the material discussed here, he would have continued to use the distinctive techniques of Shoah, although some of these were modified in his later films. Thus, although familiarity with Shoah itself is not necessary for engagement with the outtakes, the viewer’s watching of the footage might include their awareness of Lanzmann’s avoiding such documentary staples as extradiegetic music or voiceover, and reliance instead on present-day utterance in the place of archival imagery. We might equally perceive in individual outtake encounters moments that have the potential to match some of Shoah’s emphases, including the presence of highly charismatic witnesses and the ‘reincarnation’ of past affronts in the present time of the interview. Yet the nature of the excluded testifiers and those moments that are re-enacted are ones that concern not the process of killing, as they do in Shoah, but attempts at resistance and rescue, the latter often contemplated by individuals located far from the genocidal events of the war.

Introduction: Reacting to Genocide

3

Even a cursory glance at the USHMM catalogue reveals that, alongside extra material from those figures who do appear in Shoah, Lanzmann’s archive includes previously unseen encounters with individuals as diverse and significant as the poet Abba Kovner, the World Jewish Congress president Nahum Goldmann, the activist Hansi Brand, a group of former Jewish policemen from the Riga Ghetto, the historian Yehuda Bauer, the Red Cross official Jean Pictet, and a secretly recorded interview with the wartime Auschwitz camp guard Pery Broad, among many others (Figures 0.1 and 0.2).6 Since this material was recorded in the late 1970s, Lanzmann had access to the stories of many who were his contemporaries. Among the survivors are those, including most of the historians, who were born into the Jewish communities of pre-war Europe and, like the director, experienced the effects of the conflict in their early adulthood. This contrasts with testimony recorded in the twenty-first century, which is necessarily delivered by those who were child survivors in what is now their old age. The material in Lanzmann’s archive is thus of two kinds: extra footage from those encounters that are included in the 1985 film, and interviews from which no material at all was used. Some of the footage in both categories has been edited into individual films by Lanzmann since Shoah. These are A Visitor from the Living (1999), Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4pm (2001), The Karski Report (2010) and The Last of the Unjust (2013), concluding with The Four Sisters (2018), released the day before the director’s death at the age of ninety-two on 5 July 2018. The concerns of these separate releases, with subjects that include

Figure 0.1  Former Jewish policemen of the Riga Ghetto.

4

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

Figure 0.2  Jean Pictet, Geneva.

responses to the news of genocide on the part of such external institutions as the Red Cross and the White House, armed revolt in a death-camp, the leadership of the Jewish Council in Terezín and experience of rescue by the so-called Kasztner Train initiative in Hungary, might seem very disparate. However, they give a sense of the focus of the unused outtakes as a whole, on the reactions to and responsibility for not halting the wartime mass murder, while revealing the potential for editing yet more of the excluded footage for separate release. At first sight, the outtake material en masse might be welcomed simply in relation to its constituting a remarkable and wide-ranging collection of previously unseen video testimony. However, rather than considering this material in relation, for instance, to the video testimonies now available through the Shoah Foundation or the Fortunoff Archive, I have approached Lanzmann’s unseen interviews as incipient art-works, recorded by the director and his crew at the same time as the other footage that eventually constituted Shoah, through an editing process that rendered its imagery and dialogue symbolic as well as historical.7 Lanzmann’s outtakes are not simply factual interviews with individuals, but footage that would have been decisively cut and interleaved as part of a more communal representation. I began this exploration knowing that I would be focusing on the interviews that were wholly excluded from Shoah and have not appeared in any subsequent release. However, I imagined that this would take the form of considering these outtakes in terms of the categories and phenomena which were followed or emerged during the editing of Shoah’s final version. Such an approach would have meant asking whether the interviewees

Introduction: Reacting to Genocide

5

in the outtakes possess the star quality, and if they relive or resurrect the past, in the ways that Lanzmann sought for Shoah, while also exploring complementary encounters on particular topics or set in shared locations. But a closer analysis quickly revealed that the majority of the footage that was not used, yet was carefully retained, shares a coherent focus. These wholly unused outtake interviews centre on the nature of the responses and behaviour of those trapped in occupied Europe, as well as those witnessing from the outside. Apart from some secretly recorded interviews with former Nazis, wartime workers on the German railways and the reels of location footage, most of this entirely excluded material consists of encounters with former partisans, campaigners, rescuers, members of the Jewish Councils (Judenräte) in Europe and the War Refugee Board (WRB) in the United States, as well as historians of the period. As these categories of interviewee suggest, the interviews from which no extract appears in Shoah or in Lanzmann’s subsequent releases centre on those responses to genocide that took the form of attempted rescue and resistance. It is on this footage that the present study focuses.

The outtake footage Ziva Postec, Lanzmann’s chief editor on Shoah, has made clear in her writing and in interviews, including those in Catherine Hébert’s eponymous 2019 documentary on her work, the principle that emerged during the process of preparing for release over a demanding six years material from the original undifferentiated hours of footage.8 Postec says that the final film is about ‘death’ and the ‘process of the death machine’, so that in Shoah we hear from individuals who were eyewitnesses to the fate of the Jews in occupied Europe, especially to the system and enactment of genocide by means of gassing in the extermination camps of occupied Poland. The largely unseen and unfamiliar encounters in Lanzmann’s archive as considered in this study centre rather on responses to the developing awareness, both within and outside occupied Europe, that genocidal murder was taking place. Indeed, such a gradual realization, involving the gathering of information, its transformation into understanding and then into action, was foundational to undertaking rescue and resistance.9 One of Lanzmann’s consistent interests is in the precise moment at which such understanding occurred. The outtakes centre on different facets of rescue and resistance, including underground and partisan activity, negotiations to enable escape, the offering

6

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

of bribes or ransom, the actions of leaders in the Jewish Councils and ghettos of Europe, sometimes involving a belief in the saving potential of work, and, in one case, a local rescuer, alongside responses from outside, on the part of the Allies, the Red Cross and Jewish communities in the rest of the world.10 The interviews undertaken by Lanzmann in the late 1970s follow his particular convictions, as well as showing the influence of the era’s historiography concerning rescue and resistance.11 Although in the event the excluded encounters often evade his plans or take their own course, there is clear evidence of Lanzmann’s wish to bring out what he considered to be central questions of this kind. These include the behaviour of Jewish leaders and the Judenräte; the ‘myth of Jewish passivity’ as well as instances of armed uprising; the cases of Hungary and Slovakia, not least in relation to claims that information about the reality of deportation was suppressed; the ‘triple indictment’, as Robert Wistrich calls it, that could be levelled against the Allies in relation to their unwillingness to accept refugees, their rejecting or obstructing negotiation with Germany even for the sake of rescue and the refusal to bomb Auschwitz or the railway lines serving the camp.12 Rescue and resistance remain debated terms, in their own right and as actions that are often in opposition to each other. Large-scale efforts at wartime rescue might seem at odds with resistance, as Michael Marrus puts it, since, in the context of harsh reprisals, ‘resistance was guaranteed to punish Jews, rather than assist them’.13 On the other hand, their potential to be closely connected in some circumstances is clear in the example of Lanzmann’s interview with Hersh Smolar, a former partisan in Minsk who was also responsible for assisting people to flee the ghetto for the forest. The historian Yehuda Bauer has argued that resistance on the part of the Jews constituted ‘any act that opposed’ the process of ‘dehumanization that ultimately culminated in death’, while the provision of aid, in the form of self-help or from non-Jewish assistance, became resistance in the context of the knowledge of mass murder.14 This expansion of the notion of resistance beyond that of armed revolt, now often referred to as Amidah, from the Hebrew meaning ‘to stand (up)’, became more widespread during the time of Lanzmann’s filming in the late 1970s, even in the context of the traces remaining in his interviews of earlier thinking in relation to Jewish passivity and cooperation. Indeed, given the great variety of actions recalled, Lanzmann’s encounters are consonant with the increasing reluctance to focus on resistance above all other responses. Yet they also bear traces of the different kinds of emphasis that emerge in retrospective estimates. Thus Lanzmann’s interviewee Henry Feingold claims in his published work that giving priority to armed rebellion is an effort to retrieve what could be considered ‘lost honor’, and argues

Introduction: Reacting to Genocide

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instead for ensuring a balance in which resistance is ‘neither overstated nor ignored’.15 While Yisrael Gutman questions the very use of such terminology as ‘revolt’ or ‘uprising’, since in circumstances such as those of the Warsaw Ghetto, fighting was the Jews’ ‘only recourse’ if they were not simply to go to their deaths, Raul Hilberg concludes that over-emphasis on any such armed struggle risks transforming the ‘drastic actuality of a relentless killing’ into the ‘more familiar picture’ of a ‘struggle – however unequal – between combatants’.16 The collective impression given by Lanzmann’s outtake interviews on questions of this kind succeeds in conveying the vexed and complex nature of responses to and responsibility for genocide, rather than one that is a triumphalist endorsement of resistance or rescue, nor one that seeks straightforwardly to apportion blame for the failure to prevent mass murder. In contrast to Shoah, with its focus on witness to the process of deportation and murder, these excluded interviews involve testifiers’ words on the topics of endeavours to publicize the news of genocide, protest, galvanize action, save lives or rebel, as much as the mechanics of the commission of mass murder. Yet the genocide and the responses it occasioned are difficult to separate, so that attempted rescue and resistance are closely related to the ‘process of the death machine’, in Postec’s wording, even if such efforts are at a conceptual and sometimes geographical distance from the murders.17 Indeed, of necessity most of the survivor-testifiers to destruction in Shoah had taken part in either individual or collective escapes or revolts.18 The Warsaw Ghetto fighters Simcha Rotem and Itzhak Zuckerman appear in Shoah, alongside camp escapees and evaders including Inge Deutschkron, Filip Müller and Rudolf Vrba, all of whom are included in the catalogue for a Wiener Library exhibition on Jewish resistance.19 However, rescue and resistance are not the central concerns of Shoah itself. The interviews considered here address in a wide-ranging sense the question of reactions to the ‘fantastic emergency’, in Lanzmann’s phrase, as part of the way in which it was possible for genocide to continue to take place, even as they concern specific instances of rebellion or salvation.20 Equally central to these responses is the cognitive revolution in the understanding that was required in realizing, as they occurred, that the Nazis’ killings were not localized or retributive, nor could they be circumvented by a need for the Jews’ continued existence to supply labour for the war effort. Our present-day recognition that the mass murder was part of a plan for total annihilation makes it hard to imagine a time when this was not yet understood, and when, as Bauer puts it, the fact of wholesale murder was ‘literally unbelievable because it was unexpected and unprecedented’.21 Thus the interviews with eyewitnesses, and episodes in which individuals speak or

8

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

recite from documents on behalf of absent others, reveal ‘different readings’ of the same overall situation, for instance on the part of the Judenrat member Leib Garfunkel in Kovno versus that of the partisan Abba Kovner in Vilna.22 It is possible in this sense to imagine the shadow form of a larger cinematic project on Lanzmann’s part, establishing a connection between the released film and these excluded interviews, in which the failure to rescue and near-impossibility of resistance are the enabling context for the process of murder.23 However, as emerges from the examples analysed here, such an approach would have been likely to result not only in a film considerably longer even than the 9.5-hour extent of Shoah, but would have implied that there might have been a way to evade the mass murders, which became far less possible once the war had started, or which emphasized the kind of causal exploration that Lanzmann called ‘obscene’.24 The outtake interviews can be seen rather as aspects of the wide range of responses to the developing knowledge that genocidal murder was taking place, with which many of those filmed were themselves threatened. Such reactions included efforts at self-rescue on the part of groups in Belarus, Slovakia and Hungary, as well as resistance of kinds that included armed insurrection, as that took place in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and was contemplated in Vilna and elsewhere, but also other activities, ranging from evasion and escape to deception and sabotage. Even some of the material cut from those interviews which do feature in Shoah, such as the extra hours filmed with Rudolf Vrba, addresses topics of this kind, in this case the Auschwitz escapee’s conviction that the Jewish leadership in Slovakia and Hungary had not forewarned people of their fate.25 The wholly excluded outtakes also include an unexpectedly wide-ranging representation of responses on the part of the Allies and those witnessing from outside occupied Europe, as we see in the series of interviews Lanzmann conducted with former WRB members, American-based campaigners, Henry Feingold, an academic specializing in American Jewish history, and Faivel Zygielboim, the brother of Shmuel Zygielboim, the Polish National Council member in London during the war. The archive holdings bear out Lanzmann’s insistence in his correspondence with prospective interlocutors that his film was to include a particular focus on Allied ‘rescue politics’, yet this is far from the form of Shoah as it was released, where no such interviews appear.26 Even though all the interviews discussed here exist only in their pre-edited state, they are given shape by means of Lanzmann’s extensive background research, conducted with the support of his assistants, including Corinna Coulmas and Irena Steinfeldt-Levy, as well as being carefully constructed in terms of the topics addressed and the details of mise-en-scène.27 Indeed, kinds of visual

Introduction: Reacting to Genocide

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and aural symbolism that are not present in Shoah are evident in the outtakes, including emphasis on unconventional and arresting backdrops in Florida, Israel and Manhattan, repeated takes of apparently inconsequential actions on interviewees’ part such as sweeping leaves or studying letters, as well as the extensive use of utterance on behalf of others and the reading aloud of documents as a way of embodying the past. There is ample evidence of the potential for formal innovation, in the existence of series of interviews tightly focused on the same topics in relation to which experimental methods of crosscutting and montage can be envisaged. Lanzmann’s comments and instructions to his interlocutors, often audible in the outtakes, and the visible presence of the cinematographers, sound recordists and other crew members, including William Lubtchansky, Caroline Champetier, Jimmy Glasberg, Dominique Chapuis and Bernard Aubuoy, augment such an impression of pre-production planning as well as its collaborative form. On occasions when the director is not visible in the interview footage, there is often a concluding reel devoted to imagery of his silently listening face, allowing for the future construction of shot-reverse-shot sequences between him and his interlocutor, a technique used in some of the separately released films although not in Shoah itself. Although both Lanzmann and Postec describe how the act of editing generated the focus of Shoah on the mechanics of death, consideration of the rescue and resistance outtakes, which make up the majority of the director’s archive of exclusions, shows that a differentiation of emphases existed even as the filming took place. In the absence of storyboards or scripts, such shaping arises from Lanzmann’s evidently extensive research prior to each interview, and the discussions that occurred both before and during the filming. Thus, for instance, Lanzmann says to Feingold towards the end of their 1.5-hour encounter, ‘Now, say what you want to say about Auschwitz’, in a clear reference to prior acquaintance with and discussion of the historian’s views on the failure to bomb the camp. Such crafting in consonance with the director’s agenda is perceptible in the interview with Roswell McClelland, in which the American WRB is the central subject, rather than what its former representative witnessed in occupied France; as is acquaintance with the late Rabbi Michael Weissmandl in that with Hermann Landau, in preference to his own wartime experience as a member of the Belgian Jewish Council, the so-called Association of Jews in Belgium, or his flight to Switzerland. Despite this evidence of shaping prior to any process of cutting, there remains great scope for the viewer of these excluded interviews to engage in their own process of imaginary editorial work. As Adam Roberts argues, of his plan to release a film composed entirely from outtakes, the hierarchy of kinds of

10

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

footage is challenged by such a return to apparently discarded material, in which ‘the status of a detail or “cutaway” is the same as the “master shot” or “establishing shot”’.28 In the case of Lanzmann’s archive, the topic of rescue and resistance is retrieved at the moment we turn our attention to the interviews’ status as pre-edited visual and aural outtakes, of the kind that Roberts describes. Such preliminary shaping means that particular preoccupations on Lanzmann’s part sometimes emerge starkly in the unedited interviews. The encounters with testifiers to the Allied perspective tend towards raising for debate what Michael Fleming calls the ‘entrenched’ argument of the time, that ‘winning the war was the way to save Jews’, such that its eventual conclusion with a ‘costly victory for the Allies’ entailed ‘irrecoverable loss for the Jews’.29 Any assistance earlier in the war was rendered impossible by such significant ‘barriers’ to action as ‘political beliefs and expediency’ on the part of individuals and organizations alike, the interviews serving to expose in filmic ways the trivial or tendentious nature of some of these concerns, as well as their grave consequences.30 Bauer and Hilberg, despite their frequent differences of opinion, concur that the effects of what the latter calls the ‘desertion’ of the Jews by the free world entails moral and psychological as much as practical reflection on these acts of omission, facets of all of these aspects appearing in these encounters.31 Alexander Groth argues that ‘the Allied failure was not in the magnitude of possible rescue. That could never have been assured and it is not knowable today. The stupendous failure was in not even trying’.32 Conveying the significance of inaction without enlisting counterfactual speculation or retrospective judgement, as Groth argues for here, accords with the mode of Lanzmann’s rescue and resistance interviews.

The interviews In contrasting terms, Lanzmann’s debt to Raul Hilberg is implied by the director’s decision to include only that historian’s perspective in Shoah. At times it might seem, from the cast of some of the director’s questions to his interlocutors, that he is following Hilberg’s notorious critique of forced cooperation and his insistence on the absence of rebellion on the part of the Jews. However, even seeming to draw on such a line of argument tends to provoke its own on-screen subversion. This befits Lanzmann’s refutation of accusations of passivity, as well as his sympathetic filmic portraits not only of the ‘heroic’ members of the Sonderkommando, who had themselves been accused of ethical compromise, but of the Jewish Council leaders Adam Czerniaków in Shoah and Benjamin

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Murmelstein in The Last of the Unjust.33 Although Lanzmann’s own views are often withheld or only emerge obliquely in the interview setting, it seems that the sole category of Jewish effort on which he passes negative judgement is that of choosing whom to save when such a choice entailed the death of others. Thus, as Chapter 1 shows, Lanzmann’s confronting the former Vilna partisan Abba Kovner with a wartime appeal to resist that reproaches his fellow Jews for going ‘like sheep to the slaughter’ is dramatically contested when it emerges during the filming that Kovner was not its author. In the place of such admonition, Kovner puts forward a notion of resistance and the eschewing of selective rescue that could only entail death. This encounter therefore sets the scene for the present book’s argument that it is often hard to draw a clear line between efforts at resistance as portrayed in the outtakes and the process of murder on which Shoah focuses. Chapter 2 centres on Lanzmann’s encounter with the wartime activist in Budapest, Hansi Brand, during which the director’s sceptical questions about selective rescue as embodied in the so-called Kasztner Train initiative are challenged by the interviewee. Once more, this subversion centres around a controversial post-war phrase, in this case the description of Brand’s colleague Rezső Kasztner as having ‘sold his soul to the devil’ through negotiating with the Nazis. Although Brand is initially defensive and unforthcoming, a mid-interview change from Hebrew to German enables her to talk with more engagement about the events of the war, and with greater directness in challenging Lanzmann’s critiques, through using the language of the past. Watching the outtake interview with Brand, as in that with Kovner, gives the spectator an insight into those dramatic and formal aspects, such as errors of attribution and changes between languages, which are likely ultimately to have been cut out of any final edit. The blurring of the usual distinction between kinds of footage, as either disposable or worthy of release, which is challenged by all the outtake footage, is central to these interviews’ significance. Chapter 3 argues that cinematic form is significant in a different sense as part of Lanzmann’s efforts to construct an impression of the late Rabbi Michael Weissmandl, who was a member of the clandestine Bratislava Working Group during the war, by interviewing three of his close associates, Siegmunt Forst, Hermann Landau and André Steiner. This indirect testimony is of a kind with the potential to surpass even that about the late Adam Czerniaków in Shoah, in its self-consciously composite representation of the charismatic Weissmandl’s efforts to negotiate with the Nazis in Slovakia. Weissmandl’s ambitious attempts to use bribery in order to halt deportations from Slovakia, and eventually from

12

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

the whole of Europe, could be conveyed by means of an experimental collage form that differs from any such ‘interview with the dead’ in Shoah. Chapter 4 centres on a range of experiences from the ghettos of Nazioccupied Europe, including that of the rescuer Tadeusz Pankiewicz from the Kraków Ghetto, Leib Garfunkel, the former deputy leader of the Judenrat from the Kovno Ghetto, and Hersh Smolar, who had been a partisan and resistance leader in the Minsk Ghetto. In each case, the formal elements of the interview offer the possibility for new or disruptive meaning, including Pankiewicz’s reenacting in the present the self-effacement with which he undertook wartime rescue, the reading aloud from Garfunkel’s history of the ghetto by Lanzmann’s assistant Irena Steinfeldt-Levy, making her an embodiment of the necessary ‘mediation of experience’ in encountering such a history, and Smolar’s deliberate choice to speak in Yiddish for the camera.34 Chapter 5 draws on evidence for another composite interview format, one that is as unusual in Lanzmann’s oeuvre as that about Rabbi Weissmandl, this time concerning the establishment of the American War Refugee Board. In this case, interviews with the Irgun activist Peter Bergson, the WRB director John Pehle, the European-based WRB representative Roswell McClelland and onetime State Department official Robert Reams, hint at the possibility of a four-way encounter. By contrast to the Weissmandl interviews, such composite testimony about the WRB would take a conflictual form, given the opposed positions of the interviewees. While Bergson remains sceptical about the WRB’s achievements, the role of Pehle and McClelland in bringing to light the delay and obfuscation on the part of the State Department which prompted its founding collides with Reams’s status as a former State Department official, and his refusal during the interview to talk directly about the past. The achievement of establishing the WRB to assist the civilian victims of the Nazis is set against its belated occurrence and limited remit, in order to convey Allied attitudes towards rescue. Chapter 6 takes as its focus three interviews in which Lanzmann seems to return to Hilbergian questions of wartime complicity on the part of the Jewish leadership, in his encounters with the historian Yehuda Bauer, the theologian Richard Rubenstein and the survivor Ya’akov Arnon, the nephew of Abraham Asscher, one of the Judenrat leaders in Amsterdam. In each instance, a cinematic counterargument to the notion of the Nazis’ success in ‘soliciting the cooperation of the victims’, in the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s phrase, is apparent.35 This takes place explicitly in Bauer’s case as he and Lanzmann disagree on-screen; in Rubenstein’s by means of the opposition between his assigning responsibility for genocide to the technologies and labour practices of modernity, versus the

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interview’s visually arresting setting on the waters of Florida’s Wakulla Springs; and the self-questioning account given by Arnon of his uncle Abraham Asscher’s behaviour, along with his disquiet in the present at the damning retrospective estimates levied against a man whose belief that he was acting for the best outcome was nonetheless challenged at the time by his nephew. Finally, the conclusion draws on the interviews with the historian Henry Feingold, and the brother of the late London-based Bundist Shmuel Zygielboim. Feingold examines American wartime responses, in claiming that the Jews’ rescue was neither a priority nor a war aim for Roosevelt’s government. Faivel’s ventriloquizing the utterances of Shmuel Zygielboim, who killed himself in London in protest at Allied inaction, conveys those in Britain. Feingold’s adherence to a political analysis is a contrast to Zygielboim’s despair, as voiced by his brother, giving this pair of encounters the role of a possible coda to any film on the topic of rescue and resistance, as they are to the present book. However, although Feingold’s pragmatism, even when likening the Allied attitude to refugees to that of the Nazis, seems well suited to Lanzmann’s purposes, the historian’s unease in front of the camera matches the distance of his viewpoint from events in Europe. Such a conceptual and geographical distance evident in the interview with Feingold exemplifies what seems to have motivated this and other exclusions from Shoah itself. What could seem to be Lanzmann’s preoccupation with political and historical detail throughout these outtake interviews is confirmed by that with Feingold, and the ventriloquism by his brother of Shmuel Zygielboim, rather to have the kind of philosophical and aesthetic significance that is apparent in Shoah, as a meditation on such questions as the ethical responsibilities of bystanders, and the powerlessness of the Jews.36 Seen in this light, the rescue and resistance footage considered as a whole addresses what Lanzmann, emulating Hilberg, calls the ‘how’ of the events rather than their ‘why’.37

Exclusions from Shoah As Jennifer Cazenave has argued, the footage in Lanzmann’s archive allows us to reconstruct ‘the making of Shoah’ and its history by tracing what was cut out in order to create the film’s final version.38 Such a view is enhanced by the fact that the footage used in Shoah is not present in Lanzmann’s archive: everything available to view is an outtake. Indeed, in its form of the original eleven-minute reels constituting interviews that in some cases last for over ten hours, and before

14

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

the editorial intervention of Lanzmann and his colleagues, this material exists on the boundary between testimony and art. The distinction between ‘not-yetedited’ and ‘never-to-be-edited’ footage is likewise blurred,39 allowing the viewer of the outtakes to imagine what shape a notional film might take, and what kinds of shot would be retained. Each online interview is accompanied by a transcript, including a version in its original language if this represents a direct exchange in the French, German or English that Lanzmann could speak, and, where it is not already in English, a translation. As is also the case for Shoah, no transcript exists for the testifier’s utterances in their own language where a translator is present: instead, the translator’s version of the interviewee’s words is transcribed. Thus, for instance, the transcript in Abba Kovner’s case is in French, reflecting the dialogue’s taking place in that language, with Francine Kaufmann in the role of translator for his Hebrew, and is accompanied by a translation into English.40 The outtake transcripts and translations exist in provisional form, even beyond Lanzmann’s custom of remaining faithful to the work of the translators rather than the original dialogue, and the omissions and decisions these documents encode in relation to what we see and hear on-screen equally solicits the viewer’s interpretive analysis.41 As André Habib observes in relation to Shoah, translation is part of the experience but also the meaning of Lanzmann’s filmmaking.42 Each interviewee’s use of a particular language determines how their utterance is experienced by the viewer and whether a translator is present. In the outtakes, the process is visible in an early state. The absence of subtitles from these unedited interviews means that the experience of watching those conducted in languages a viewer cannot understand is even more subject to delay and indirection than that in Shoah, in its requiring the simultaneous reading of the translation or USHMM catalogue description.43 Yet, in relation to the total absence of subtitles, the outtakes approach a more democratic state than that of the released film, one for which Gary Weissman argues in regretting that ‘subtitled translations’ were not provided ‘for all “foreign languages” included in Shoah’, rather than just for those Lanzmann did not speak.44 In Lanzmann’s filmmaking, the act of translation is often a part of the action, even though in Shoah only Barbara Janicka, the interpreter from Polish, is ever visible on-screen.45 Thus, the change from Hebrew to German in Hansi Brand’s interview entails the off-screen translator’s falling silent, while that from German to Yiddish in Hersh Smolar’s case unexpectedly continues without requiring such a figure. While Elizabeth Cowie has suggested the idea of creating an ‘avant-garde documentary’ composed of extracts from the outtake material, there already exist examples in the public realm where filmmakers have borrowed from and shaped

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Lanzmann’s unused footage.46 These include the appearance of illustrative extracts in documentaries about Lanzmann’s work, including Adam Benzine’s Spectres of the Shoah (USA, 2015) and the USHMM’s film ‘Shoah’: The Unseen Interviews (2012) about his archive. Pierre Sauvage’s documentary on the subject of Peter Bergson’s campaign for rescue in the United States, Not Idly By: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust (USA, 2019), uses material from Lanzmann’s outtake interview with the wartime activist for his own artistic purposes, including cutting out the figure and voice of the original director. The provisional nature of editorial decisions, as well as a change in artistic ownership, is made clear by this means, since we know that, by contrast to Sauvage’s practice, Lanzmann’s principle is to retain the audible and visual presence of himself as interviewer. Responding to Lanzmann’s refusal to give permission to show any clips from Shoah, Cathérine Hébert’s documentary Ziva Postec: The Editor behind the Film ‘Shoah’ features extracts from the freely available outtakes rather than the released film, including such distinctive but unidentified sequences as that of a pensive Lanzmann apparently alone in the boat on Wakulla Springs which was the setting for his interview with Richard Rubenstein, and another of the film-crew driving up to a farm in a village near Treblinka to initiate a conversation with its proprietor. The latter’s being viewed at first only through the car window conveys Lanzmann’s preference for remaining at a distance in such a scenario, although the excised footage of the farmer’s family constitutes unusual and eye-catching imagery (Figures 0.3 and 0.4). The dialogue from the outtake interviews has sometimes been cited in historical studies on its own account without reference to the image-track, either because the footage was not yet available to view, or because the quotations appear in a context where reference to the visual element seemed unnecessary. Thus Max Wallace quotes from Lanzmann’s interview with Hermann Landau in his study of Recha and Isaac Sternbuch’s rescue campaign in Switzerland, Joel Fishman from that with Ya’akov Arnon in an article where he contrasts Lanzmann’s with his own earlier interview, while Rebecca Erbelding critiques some of Lanzmann’s questions to Roswell McClelland in her optimistically titled account Rescue Board about the WRB.47 Even these examples of small-scale visual or verbal citation show the potential to edit the outtake footage and its dialogue for a range of divergent purposes, and, as the present volume argues, they offer precedents for the use that could be made of the interviews for a rescue-and-resistance film modelled on Shoah. Such an impression is supported by the existence in Lanzmann’s archive of material that was filmed or its transcripts marked up for editing, signalling that its incorporation into the released film was considered up to a late stage. This

16

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

Figure 0.3  Claude Lanzmann and farmer, village of Treblinka.

Figure 0.4  Children and mother at farm gate, Treblinka.

includes the second, formal take of an interview with a farmer from the village of Wólka Okraglik near Treblinka, who describes finding in his fields, ‘like stalks of cut wheat’, the corpses of Jews who had been shot while trying to escape from the camp, while the transcript for Leib Garfunkel’s interview is annotated in handwriting to be edited for use.48 Although neither instance was included in Shoah and has not appeared elsewhere, these examples give an insight into the editorial steps taken towards release, while it seems likely that other interviews

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were filmed in order to be placed or interleaved together, in the case of the Weissmandl and WRB series. In further instances, it is possible to take advantage of the analytical freedom offered by considering the material before an auteurist stamp was placed upon it, in the way Postec puts it of Shoah’s centring on the process of killing: ‘We understood it as we edited the film.’49 In contemplating the outtake interviews in Lanzmann’s archive, the viewer or critic can assume the role of virtual editor, one who chooses on which aspects of a particular encounter to focus and which to analyse. Thus my organization of the chapters in the present study suggests that, for instance, the encounter with Ya’akov Arnon centring on the Amsterdam Judenrat is a contrast to Richard Rubenstein’s assertions about modernity’s tendency to enlist even its victims, although Arnon could equally be considered alongside other ghetto-centred interviews, such as that with the Kovno Judenrat member Garfunkel. I have placed the case of the wartime solidarity and shelter offered by the ‘righteous gentile’ Tadeusz Pankiewicz in Kraków alongside the practice of the ‘forest model’ of resistance in Minsk which also entailed rescue, as recounted by Hersh Smolar, yet it could be considered beside that of the very different rescue initiative in Budapest as recounted by Hansi Brand.50 As Cazenave puts it, the excluded footage itself and the kinds of voices it records are alike ‘relegated to the margins’.51 She refers particularly to the fact that using so little material from the interviews that were recorded with women, twenty further hours of which can be ‘recovered’ from Lanzmann’s archive, means that Shoah offers a ‘universalizing and masculine representation of traumatic memory’.52 The voicing of Leib Garfunkel’s words by Irena Steinfeldt-Levy in the outtake interview about his experience of the Kovno Ghetto draws attention not only to the mediation of the experience whose details she translates, but also to the paucity of female interlocutors even in the archives. This is particularly the case once Lanzmann had released material from the previously unseen encounters with Hanna Marton and Ada Lichtman, which is used alongside more footage from the interviews with Paula Biren and Ruth Elias that appear in Shoah, as part of The Four Sisters. The absence of the former partisan Vitka Kempner in apparent preference for her husband Abba Kovner, the focus on Rabbi Michael Weissmandl of the Slovakian underground rescue movement rather than his close colleague Gisi Fleischman, and Lanzmann’s failing to consider Dotty Reams, the former secretary to Breckinridge Long in the State Department, as a witness even though she is present during the encounter with her husband Robert Reams, are missed opportunities. This is a compounding of the effect of Lanzmann’s ‘fascination’, as Erin McGlothlin, Brad Prager and

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Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

Markus Zisselsberger put it, with the testimony of those who were forced to take part in the ‘machinery’ of death in the camps, including the ‘Sonderkommando of Auschwitz, the Arbeitsjuden of Treblinka, and other Aktion Reinhard camps’, all of whom were men.53 The ‘absence of gender difference’ from the finished film is a feature that it is hard to make good, even for a viewer of Lanzmann’s outtakes who assumes the role of a virtual editor.54 Overall, the provisional form of the outtake interviews in their pre-edited state suits what might seem to be the relatively peripheral topic in Holocaust history of attempted rescue and resistance. Such a sense reaches its extreme in those encounters centring on absent witnesses, including Rabbi Weissmandl and Shmuel Zygielboim, whose status definitively off-screen is an extension of, rather than an exception to, Lanzmann’s filmic practice. The outtake interviews centre on efforts at rescue and resistance, but more specifically their failure. As Tim Cole puts it in his analysis of the popularity of Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), despite the latter film’s emphasis on the ‘solace’ of rescue by an external individual, it sits uneasily alongside our knowledge that ‘the Holocaust is about mass killing and not survival’.55 Such an observation sheds light on Lanzmann’s sceptical response to Spielberg’s film, which is not only a critique on the formal grounds of its fictively ‘fabricating archives’, but, in the light of his own archive, an argument against giving priority to this model of rescue.56 Considered in their entirety, the outtake interviews construct an overall sense that any notion of evading or halting the genocide was not only all but impossible, but was thwarted or undermined at every turn. Yet, as the very existence of Lanzmann’s encounters emphasizes, it is the ‘intent of striking a blow against the Nazi machine’ that is significant in conceptions of resistance, rather than an exclusive focus on ‘what was accomplished’.57 Indeed, as Robert Rozett observes, emphasis on resistance ‘need not overshadow our understanding of the heart of the Holocaust, which is comprised of terrible suffering, impossible dilemmas and death’.58 The closeness of the outtakes’ concerns to those of Shoah, and that of attempts at rescue and resistance to the machinery of death, becomes abundantly clear as we watch.

1

Abba Kovner: ‘Like sheep to the slaughter’

Claude Lanzmann’s almost-five-hour-long interview with the Hebrew poet and former partisan Abba Kovner was conducted in Israel in late September 1979. The meeting takes the form of the director’s investigating the phrase ‘like sheep to the slaughter’, in relation to that utterance’s apparently characterizing the Jews with a culpable passivity. Yet Kovner’s use of the phrase is in its opposite sense as an exhortation rather than a condemnation, as emerges during the encounter. Lanzmann’s interest in the phrase is an element of his exploration of responses by the inhabitants and leaders of the ghettos, arising from his having read Kovner’s testimony, in common with several of the most prominent interviewees in Shoah, as delivered at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. As part of his witness statement in Jerusalem, Kovner read to the court in Hebrew the ‘appeal’ to resist, written by him in late December 1941 and issued by the FPO (Fareynegte Partizaner Organizatsye, or United Partisan Organization) in the Vilna Ghetto on 1 January 1942. On that occasion during the war, it was read out at an FPO meeting which was disguised as a new year’s party, by Kovner in Yiddish and by Tusia Altman, a colleague from Warsaw, in Hebrew.1 Kovner’s biographer Dina Porat describes the appeal as a ‘key document in the history of the Holocaust and the Jewish people’, in its claiming ‘for the first time in occupied Europe’ that the Nazis planned to kill all the Jews under their dominion, and that such a realization must be followed by resistance.2 Both the historical instances of reading the appeal aloud, in the Vilna Ghetto and at the Eichmann Trial, suggest that Lanzmann’s aim might have been to re-enact such a reading in the present, but, as we will see, the director’s own attempt at such a recitation takes a partial and disruptive form.3 Lanzmann’s stated focus for the interview is the period between the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 and the manifesto’s appearance on 1 January 1942 (Figure 1.1). The appeal’s promulgation just over six months after the invasion signalled its author’s awareness that the mass murders taking

20

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

Figure 1.1  Abba Kovner, Israel.

place in Vilna were not just local or isolated incidents, nor did they have specific causes, such as reprisals against Jews for being seen to support the Communist regime which had ‘snuffed out Lithuanian independence’.4 Such a view entailed the erroneous belief that the ordinary, ‘non-ideological people’ would be spared.5 As Kovner puts it to Lanzmann, ‘The idea grew up in me that all that happened around us was leading us to death.’6 Yet the director’s interest in the ‘sheep to the slaughter’ phrase as one of critique for the failure to revolt undergoes a dramatic challenge in the course of the interview. This occurs as a result of Lanzmann’s reading out the wrong version of a call to arms of this kind, one that Kovner did not compose and which uses the very rhetoric of blame that is absent from his. Kovner’s certainty about Hitler’s ‘intent to destroy all European Jewry’, as he puts it, was voiced in the appeal some weeks even before the decision for extermination was formalized by the Nazis at the Wannsee Conference.7 At the time, Kovner reports that this idea generated ‘the most violent discussions’ and disbelief among his FPO colleagues as well as emissaries and leaders of other ghettos, including those from the nearby towns of Białystok and Grodno, who could not believe that killings of the same kind would take place there as they had done in Vilna.8

Abba Kovner: ‘Like Sheep to the Slaughter’

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Although Evgeny Finkel describes Kovner as ‘intuiting’ that genocide was taking place, the latter gives an account of working out this unprecedented truth about planned total destruction in a more systematic way.9 Yet at the time, Kovner had only his own conviction to go on. He claims that he developed this revolutionary insight during the ‘long nights’ he spent hiding in a Dominican convent in the suburbs of Vilna, as well as thinking back to the experience of reading Mein Kampf just before the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, and discerning in Hitler’s text the ‘plan’ to ‘exterminate all European Jews’.10 As he puts it in the present interview of the Vilna Ghetto in 1941, that plan was now ‘developing under our eyes’. During the six months that interest Lanzmann, Kovner pieced together information from accounts given by escapees of the shootings, and from the priest who officiated at the convent where he was hiding, who confirmed that, although thousands of Jews had been deported to Ponari, no work-camp or ghetto existed there. As Kovner put it in a letter to Vitka Kempner in April 1946, having contemplated suicide on learning of the murders, he concluded instead, ‘As long as they want it [to happen], we won’t do it. Let there be struggle! It was then the “proclamation” was conceived in the innermost recesses of my soul.’11 The proclamation was formally composed by Kovner in the monastery in late 1941.12 As Porat says of his testimony at the Eichmann Trial, Kovner tries to explain to Lanzmann ‘as well as to himself ’ in the present interview how he came to the realization that genocide was taking place.13 As he puts it, acknowledging the presence of genocide of this kind meant that ‘for the first time in Jewish history, there was nowhere to flee’, so that ‘only a few individuals could escape, but the whole people was condemned’.14 In addition, as Kovner argues, in a universe of death, the rescue of individuals would not help the others, the ‘majority’, for whom ‘there was nowhere to go, no possible exit’.15 Therefore, in the logic of his manifesto, deciding upon one’s own end in revolt offered the only free choice possible. As this insight suggests, resistance against an insuperable antagonist was advocated for ‘affective’ rather than military or instrumental reasons.16 It was never expected that the ‘gargantuan’ power of the Nazi side could be challenged, much less vanquished. Although no uprising occurred in the Vilna Ghetto, Kovner and other FPO members undertook individual acts of sabotage during the Nazi occupation, and he survived until the war’s end, living as a partisan in the Rudnicki forest outside the city.17 The balance between individual and communal fates, implicit in the very notion of resistance undertaken for affective reasons that would entail one’s death, emerges as a central theme in the present encounter, and its implications are central to Lanzmann’s rescue and resistance interviews as a whole.

22

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

As Zvia Ginor has observed, Kovner’s biography is a ‘model of Jewish life’ in the twentieth century, encompassing its great extremes. Kovner had full experience of the richness of a pre-war European milieu, in moving from Sebastopol, where he was born in 1918, to Vilna, the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’, where he studied architecture and started to write poetry.18 He witnessed the Soviet invasion of Lithuania in 1939, and then, during the struggle to survive after the Nazi invasion of 1941, including a period sometimes spent dressed as a nun while he was hiding in the convent, became the leader of the FPO. This was followed in the immediate post-war period by Kovner’s membership of two underground organizations: Nakam, a group which attempted to exact murderous vengeance against German citizens and prisoners-of-war, and Bricha, which assisted survivors in leaving Europe for British Mandate Palestine. Kovner’s role as education officer for the Giv’ati Brigade in the combat to found the state of Israel in 1948 was followed by his testifying at the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem in 1961; finally, he lived on a kibbutz and worked as a writer until his death in 1987.

The appeal The phrase ‘like sheep to the slaughter’ that provoked Lanzmann’s curiosity appears twice in Kovner’s appeal of 1942. It forms the freestanding prefatory exhortation and is repeated in its concluding lines. The full text of Kovner’s document, in the form in which it was read out at the Eichmann Trial, although significantly not in the encounter with Lanzmann, is below in its English translation: Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter, Jewish youth! Do not believe those who are deceiving you. Out of 80,000 Jews of the Jerusalem of Lithuania (Vilna), only 20,000 remain. In front of your eyes our parents, our brothers and our sisters are being torn away from us. Where are the hundreds of men who were snatched away for labour by the Lithuanian kidnappers? Where are those naked women who were taken away on the horror-night of the provocation? Where are those Jews of the Day of Atonement? And where are our brothers of the second ghetto? Anyone who is taken out through the gates of the ghetto, will never return. All roads of the ghetto lead to Ponary, and Ponary means death. Oh, despairing people, tear this deception away from your eyes. Your children, your husbands, your wives – are no longer alive – Ponary is not a labour camp. Everyone there is shot.

Abba Kovner: ‘Like Sheep to the Slaughter’

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Hitler aimed at destroying the Jews of Europe. It turned out to be the fate of the Jews of Lithuania to be the first. Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter. It is true that we are weak, lacking protection, but the only reply to a murderer is resistance. Brothers, it is better to die as free fighters than to live at the mercy of killers. Resist, resist, to our last breath.19

Kovner’s use of the phrase ‘sheep to the slaughter’ is central to the appeal’s compelling rhetoric, in its proceeding by means of ‘repetitions, questions and exclamations’20 in urging the Vilna Ghetto inhabitants to recognize the totality of destruction, and, with that insight, to determine their own fates. At the time of the appeal’s promulgation, the insistence on the planned murder of all Europe’s Jews was judged to be ‘unthinkable, a wild exaggeration’, while the summons to resist was received more positively and became influential as the first such public call to armed self-defence.21 From the perspective of Lanzmann’s interview in 1979, and for viewers of the outtakes today, the reverse is likely to be case: while knowledge of genocidal murder is taken for granted, the idea of resistance without the possibility of success is harder to contemplate. Indeed, choosing the nature of one’s own death is a goal of which the fictional version of Kovner, as depicted from a second-generation perspective in his son Michael Kovner’s graphic novel Ezekiel’s World, admits, ‘Nobody wants to hear that.’22 In a tribute to his mother, Vitka Kempner, Michael Kovner adds, in terms which distance him even further from his father’s wartime priorities, that ‘in my environment it’s practically contemptible to fight for honor. Life is the highest decree and staying alive is the most sacred’.23 Bridging, or even acting out, this cognitive and temporal gap in relation to the appeal’s significance then and now is one of the interview’s goals. The long history and equally extensive afterlife of the ‘sheep to the slaughter’ phrase has often taken the role of encapsulating debates about Jewish selfdefence and resistance, both before and after the Holocaust years, as well as during the very period in which genocide was taking place. Versions of the phrase are quoted in the many urgings to revolt in the wartime ghettos that followed Kovner’s manifesto in Vilna. Yael Feldman points to the phrase’s use from the Middle Ages onwards, as a way to characterize the ‘persecution’ and ‘helplessness’ of Jewish communities ‘all over the world’, its long pre-Holocaust history forgotten or even repressed.24 The aphorism’s wording is a fusion of biblical phraseology from Psalms 44.22, a lament by Israel to God, ‘Yea, for thy sake are we killed all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter,’ and Isaiah 53.7, where we read of the book’s ‘suffering servant’ that ‘he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter’. Yet the use of the phrase for quite the opposite

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Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

meaning, as a call to reject such helplessness by means of action, has its own extensive lineage, one whose origin lies in a tenth-century history of the Jews, the anonymous Sefer Yosippon.25 The inversion of the biblical phrase’s mode of lamentation occurs in this narrative in the context of the story of Hanukkah and the Hasmonean Revolt, in an account which, as Feldman points out, became a founding text for Zionist activism in the twentieth century. As she concludes, ‘Possibly, it was the Hanukkah story Yosippon-style that surfaced in [Kovner’s] memory under the pressures of the events of December 1941.’26 As Kovner’s case shows, ‘the negation’ of the ‘sheep to the slaughter’ phrase, in urging the Jews of Vilna not to act in a certain way, is just as important as its judgemental usage, as a critique of how individuals had already behaved.27 In his analysis of the historiography of Holocaust resistance, Robert Rozett uses the aphorism to sum up the generalized view in the first decades after the war of those who did not take up arms, or at least flee from the Nazi onslaught: ‘They were bunched together under the rubric of having gone to their deaths “like sheep to the slaughter”.’28 Thus, for instance, an anthology from 1978 of documents on Jewish resistance is titled Not as a Lamb: The Jews against Hitler, pitting a variant of the phrase against its ‘exalted’ opposite, armed rebellion.29 Rozett’s own view of twenty-first-century thinking about the spectrum of Jewish behaviour during the Holocaust years, which does not centre only on resistance, nor on its being narrowly conceived as armed revolt, is summed up by the title of his 2013 article, ‘Beyond Lambs and Lions’.30 Although for Rozett the utterance ‘sheep to the slaughter’ is so commonplace that he does not give this ‘rubric’ a specific source, its precise wording alters in small but highly significant ways in different contexts. It is in Isaiah that use of the ‘passive verb’ of the phrase ‘led’ or ‘brought to the slaughter’ first appears, and becomes the standard formulation in preference to the other variant, simply ‘to be slaughtered’.31 Such phrasing as that in Isaiah implies both the presence of another agent and a full submission to the process of killing. Although the aphorism has been used extensively in reference to a ‘meaningful religious death’ and meriting praise rather than any suggestion of blame,32 in the interview with Kovner, Lanzmann’s interest centres on what he takes to be its use as a critique of passivity. Lanzmann’s choosing to interview Kovner is part of his filmic exploration of Holocaust-era resistance in general, but also reveals the influence of Raul Hilberg on his thinking at this period. As Rozett points out, Hilberg’s The Destruction of the Jews of Europe (1961) was one of three studies, the others being Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and Bruno Bettelheim’s The

Abba Kovner: ‘Like Sheep to the Slaughter’

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Informed Heart (1960), which appeared just before or after the Eichmann Trial and in varying ways attribute ‘part of the blame for the Holocaust to the Jews themselves’.33 Hilberg’s quoting a version of the ‘sheep to the slaughter’ phrase in his study, to which Lanzmann gives high praise, is an element in the historian’s argument that the Nazis’ victims were instrumental in their own fate. Hilberg implicitly invokes the Vilna Ghetto’s FPO, although he does not name it: ‘Jewish resistance organizations attempting to reverse the mass inertia spoke the words: “Do not be led like sheep to the slaughter”.’34 This is a mischaracterization of the FPO’s view of the ghetto inhabitants, which Kovner delineates in close detail during the course of the encounter with Lanzmann. Hilberg symptomatically uses here the form of a prohibition, ‘Do not’, rather than the imperative request of ‘Let us’, as Kovner does.

The error Despite being prompted to interview Kovner by his having recited the distinctively worded ‘appeal’ of January 1942 at the Eichmann Trial, Lanzmann makes a remarkable error two hours into the encounter. He reads aloud, and has presumably had in mind until this moment, the wrong version of a wartime appeal to resist. The text Lanzmann recites is not Kovner’s from January 1942. Rather, it is a document of uncertain authorship whose location in the archive at the Ghetto Fighters’ House in Israel alongside Kovner’s appeal seems to have generated this confusion.35 The text Lanzmann reads out is based on that included in Lucy Dawidowicz’s anthology, A Holocaust Reader, translated by her from the original’s Yiddish and first published in 1976, just three years before the present interview.36 The appeal included in Dawidowicz’s collection is presented as if it were Kovner’s, an error subsequently repeated in other anthologies.37 Although Dawidowicz’s translated version starts with the same exhortations as Kovner’s call to arms, it is a clearly different and much longer document with separate sections on, for instance, how to behave ‘in the presence of the German soldier’, and another urging the Jewish police not to betray their brethren. Most strikingly, the later version’s tone throughout is one that Lanzmann describes as a ‘violent condemnation’, by contrast to Kovner’s one of urgent persuasion.38 Lanzmann is no stranger to the cinematic device of reading in French from documents with varied addressees when these are crucial to his filmic vision. In Shoah, he reads a letter from Willy Just to Walter Rauff on the subject of modifying the gas-vans at Chełmno, while in the outtakes he is filmed

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reading from the legal judgement against Gustav Laabs, who had been the driver of a gas-van at the same camp.39 In the present case, Lanzmann’s decision to read out the appeal becomes one of action as well as ventriloquism, since it arises from the moment in which his error comes to light. Lanzmann begins by characterizing the appeal in a way that clearly confounds Kovner: LANZMANN:  The text of the appeal is … very violent, and it is a condemnation of the Jews. OK. It is the first appeal … that states that … the Jews … allowed themselves to be taken as sheep to the slaughterhouse, and … I would him to talk about this. KOVNER:  Is it my last sentence that surprises you? Of which appeal are you talking? That … in my appeal there is a violent condemnation of the Jews? Can you tell me what matter you are addressing? LANZMANN:  Then … we are going to read for you … No, no, I’ll read it in French first.40

The final sentence of Kovner’s appeal, which the latter imagines Lanzmann might be describing as ‘violent’ or implicitly condemnatory, reads, ‘Brothers, it is better to die as free fighters than to live at the mercy of killers. Resist, resist, to our last breath.’ Kovner’s own glossing of this line is not in terms of its violence, as he says during the encounter: ‘It is better to fall as fighters’, although ‘even in a fight there is no chance of success’.41 In lieu of replying directly to Kovner’s questions, Lanzmann’s reading the appeal in French at this point functions to bring his mistake, and the preconceptions it encodes, out into the open. Given Lanzmann’s opinion that the negative usage of ‘sheep to the slaughter’ was unjust, the error of attribution subverts the need to expose or refute the phrase in the encounter with Kovner, who is shown to share the director’s view of its injustice.42 The very first section of the other appeal, as we hear it from Lanzmann, registers its great difference from Kovner’s, while also making clear its indebtedness to the earlier version. Like Kovner’s, it begins, ‘Let us not be led like sheep to the slaughter’, or, as Lanzmann puts it in French, ‘Ne nous laissons pas conduire comme des moutons à l’abattoir’. Rather than using a word like ‘abattage’ for ‘slaughter’, ‘abattoir’ appears in both of Lanzmann’s renditions of the phrase in the interview. Its apparently concrete referent makes it seem, in English as well as French, as if the destination of the victims is not just death but a specific location, ‘the slaughterhouse’, redoubling the sense of abject and animalized helplessness.43 The tone of the appeal Lanzmann reads out quickly alters, after this opening exhortation shared with Kovner’s, into that of a harangue. Lanzmann voices the author’s claim that the present ‘terrible misfortune’ is even greater because of ‘the disgraceful conduct of Jews today’:

Abba Kovner: ‘Like Sheep to the Slaughter’

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LANZMANN:  Never in its long martyrdom did the Jewish people not give proof of such abasement, of such lack of human dignity, of national pride, and unity, of so much generalized inertia and submission to the assassins. The heart hurts more when one thinks about the conduct of the Jewish youth educated during twenty years in the ideals of pioneering and defence, and today apathetic, lost, not up to the demands of today’s tragic struggle.44

Kovner’s immediate repudiation of wording of this kind is clear in his startled flinching as Lanzmann starts to read the appeal in French, followed by his definitive denial of having written the document after the translator begins to present it in Hebrew. Lanzmann does not reach the end of this other manifesto in his reading aloud during the interview, since Kovner interrupts: ‘No need to continue, I have never written something like this’ (Figure 1.2).45 The rendition of the misattributed appeal here, in the form of Lanzmann’s French version of a translation from the Yiddish, perhaps drawing on Dawidowicz’s English version, is highly mediated, even more so for the viewer of the outtakes, for whose reference there is no published or authorized transcript. What is clear, however, is that Lanzmann believed that the appeal

Figure 1.2  Abba Kovner listens to Lanzmann reading aloud the wrong appeal.

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Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

he had come to discuss was of a condemnatory kind. In the case of the version he reads out, the presence of a ‘violently’ censorious discourse is undeniable, even if its use is strategic. The call to arms that Lanzmann reads constitutes an extreme elaboration of the notion of Jews as sheep who are inert and submissive, ‘apathetic and lost’. By contrast to the dialogic response required of those hearing Kovner’s manifesto, which the latter describes as, ‘an appeal that mainly posed questions’, the rhetorical mode of that read out by Lanzmann is one of judgement and statement.46 Lanzmann is taken aback by the mistake of reading aloud the wrong appeal, and can be heard out of shot explaining that ‘Irène’ (his research assistant, Irena Steinfeldt-Levy) had located the text, which he describes as a translation from Hebrew. Kovner is more sanguine, urging the director not to ‘get upset’ over ‘unimportant things’.47 Among the ironies of this reading out of the wrong appeal is that Kovner’s original is itself never recited and is indeed barely quoted from directly, in an interview which was occasioned by, and revolves around, this very text. Although Kovner’s voice and commentary in the present time of the film substitute to an extent for his reading aloud of the appeal, the text is seen here rather than heard. In the second half of the encounter, Kovner holds a printed copy of the appeal, which he has clearly sought out during a break in the filming, after noting earlier that ‘I do not have the appeal in my hands’.48 This is a visual reminder of the scenario in 1942 as he describes it, in which, after it was recited to ‘the activists’ in the ghetto, ‘the whole Jewish population of Vilna had this appeal in their hands’.49 Yet it remains unvoiced on this occasion, present only in the form of a visual trace.

Visualizing the past The subversion in this way of Lanzmann’s wish to explore a version of the ‘sheep to the slaughter’ phrase, from a text which it turns out that Kovner did not write, is supported by the interview’s look. The encounter was recorded in the grounds of Kovner’s post-war home at the kibbutz Ein HaHoresh in Israel, established by the socialist-Zionist group Hashomer Hatzair to whose youth wing he had belonged in pre-war Vilna. The clearly hot and sunny outdoor setting, with its Mediterranean plants and neatly maintained tree-lined paths, contrasts sharply with Kovner’s words, as he recalls occupied Vilna, the cramped and unheated ghetto living-spaces during winter, and the mass shootings in the nearby forests of Ponari, which had been a pre-war holiday destination. In the soundtrack

Abba Kovner: ‘Like Sheep to the Slaughter’

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as it stands, we hear such ambient sounds as birdsong, the rustling of leaves, thunder, aeroplanes and the voices of children, which act in their unedited state to counterpoint the dialogue. Some of the interview takes place at night, and in this footage the lack of natural light is substituted for by close-ups on Kovner’s face, while the darkness gives a look of even greater dramatic intensity to the exchanges (Figure 1.3). Yet Lanzmann and Kovner remain at a conceptual and visual distance from each other throughout the encounter, giving filmic expression to the vexed questions of wording, translation and attribution that are central to the interview. They seldom appear together in a shot, the camera focusing for the most part only on Kovner. There are also some stretches where the figure of a listening Lanzmann is present in which, although we hear Kovner speaking, he remains invisibly off-screen. This footage could be edited to give the impression of an exchange, but in its present state it offers a correlate to what seems to be a lack of sympathetic connection between the two men. As he sometimes does in Shoah when an interviewee uses a language to which he cannot respond directly, Lanzmann refers to Kovner throughout in the third person, addressing his remarks in this way to the translator, Francine Kaufmann. Although Kovner is

Figure 1.3  Abba Kovner, night-time, holding the ‘appeal to resist’.

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Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

sometimes so concerned to reply to, refute or question his interviewer in turn that he reveals his ability to understand Lanzmann’s French directly, and always addresses him in Hebrew as ‘you’, the translator’s presence embodies our sense of the difficulties of establishing communication and rapport. For the most part, Kovner avoids eye-contact with his interviewer, and equally does not look into the camera, although occasionally he fixes Lanzmann with an intently attentive expression of widened eyes with his hand covering his mouth. Such an effect of distance alternating with wary or sceptical connection is visible alongside Kovner’s more frequently turning away from Lanzmann, holding his head in his hands or even closing his eyes. Dina Porat quotes individuals at all stages of Kovner’s life acknowledging his ability instantly to command attention with his eloquence and the timbre of his voice, while in Ezekiel’s World, Michael Kovner contrasts his father’s outward-facing image as ‘strong, aloof and inflexible … a quasi-prophet castigating the world’, with the loving private individual.50 Indeed, it is the public rather than the private elements of Kovner’s compelling visual and verbal presence that are in evidence in the present time of the interview. Although Kovner’s manifesto is neither read out nor quoted from during the interview, its central elements are presented by means of the dialogue between the two men. The appeal’s issuing from within a social body, rather than constituting a critique from without, is clear from its opening use of the first person plural, ‘Let us’. Kovner frequently emphasizes to Lanzmann that he and the other FPO members did not seek individual safety or to ‘save their skin’, but saw themselves as ‘a collective which represents the community’.51 This is conveyed by Kovner’s having eschewed any possibility of safety on his own behalf by hiding in the convent, or going into exile. As he observes of the exodus of Jews from Lithuania after the Nazi invasion in June 1941, ‘Many had successfully left Vilna with the Red Army, with passports to Panama, or other places … Shanghai, but an essential part of the population remained. I wanted to stay with them.’52 In this invocation of collective responsibility, the external perspective of the manifesto Lanzmann has in his possession, with its phrasing of prohibition and castigation, is implicitly subverted even before the emergence of its wording. However, Lanzmann’s mistake in reading out the wrong appeal possesses high drama, not only in revealing his preconceptions and reliance on a historiography of Holocaust resistance which was indebted, at that time, to Raul Hilberg. It also embodies, by means of Kovner’s interruption and the director’s consternation at his mistake, the divergence between the opposing senses in which the ‘sheep to

Abba Kovner: ‘Like Sheep to the Slaughter’

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the slaughter’ utterance is used. Its status as a ‘twofold phrase’, either lamenting passivity or heralding martyrdom, is made visible as well as audible.53 Despite Lanzmann’s error of attribution, half-way through this interview occasioned by and centring on Kovner’s differently oriented appeal, the former partisan nonetheless continues to talk, outlining an unusual and bleak ethics of conduct in such circumstances. Such an outline disrupts any conventional understanding not only of resistance during the Holocaust years, but also of rescue and survival.

Poetic discourse Kovner’s discourse is described as ‘poetic’ in the USHMM annotations to the interview, perhaps drawing on the estimate of Moshe Landau, the judge at the Eichmann Trial, who observed of the former’s testimony, ‘we have heard shocking things here, in the language of a poet’. However, this is not a wholly accurate characterization of Kovner’s manner of speaking. Although he assents to being identified at Jerusalem by the chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner as ‘a poet and a writer’, and uses various rhetorical means at the trial to convey the difficulty of answering questions, it is often the case that when his statements seem most metaphorical or ‘poetic’, they have their most concrete reference. As Ginor puts it, using biblical imagery of a poetic kind herself, in Kovner’s case ‘the poet is always subordinate to the warrior’.54 In his representation of the early days of the Nazi invasion, Kovner draws on his trademark style of shifts from general commentary or caveat to specific detail. The ‘speed’ of events is conveyed by his description of witnessing the Russian response to the Nazi invasion: ‘seeing the Russians leave so soon – Russian parachutists escaping, sometimes without even pulling up their pants, was a tremendous shock for everybody’, adding that it left no time to ‘organize’ the escape eastwards to Leningrad that he advocated to young people at the time.55 Yet escape was not possible in any case, since the Nazis were ‘already further east’, cutting off any route to Leningrad. As Kovner puts it of the advance guard of German parachutists, ‘They were not in Vilna yet, but they were already in Minsk.’56 The shift to specificity, and the use of detail for synecdochic purposes, is the effect by means of which the ‘poetic’ nature of Kovner’s discourse is evident, rather than its constituting an absence of narrative order. This is clear in relation to Kovner’s use in the interview of the image of the window, as a figure for both being inside the home and for seeing the alien reality of the outside world. Thus Kovner describes his experience of the German invasion on 6 June 1941: ‘I opened my window and I saw a group

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Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

of planes passing and bombing, no need to ask who and what, in fact it was already the Germans who were here.’57 The window is both a testimonial and a rhetorical image, conveying the suddenness and proximity of these events in Vilna as well as Kovner’s domestic circumstances at the time. The same image is used to address the notion of the difficulty of revolt or escape. Kovner urges an empathetic view of those who saw their forced resettlement in the newly created ghetto as ‘protection’, away from ‘the terror of the streets’: KOVNER:  Why didn’t the Jews flee, in fact, at that moment? Well, OK, put yourself in the place of the Jew who’s at the window, who knows he has fifteen more minutes to come downstairs.58

Kovner’s evocation of what did concern such an individual, in place of the question of escape, turns into a description similar to his own family situation: KOVNER:  He isn’t alone, he has with him … his mother perhaps, perhaps a grandfather, a brother, a sister, and in fact, at that moment the greatest concern is, first, how to stay together.59

Yet, even though the third person narrative about the man at the window draws even closer to the testifier and his audience by becoming a description in the second person – ‘Well, so, you are at the window, you see the thousands of people coming down the street with a pack, a bundle for the whole family’ – it is shown to be the product of Kovner’s ‘poetic’ yet down-to-earth imagination, rather than a real-life example. As he says to Lanzmann, ‘You know why I’m telling you this so carefully, in such detail? Because myself, I wasn’t there.’60 Indeed, Kovner’s situation outside the ghetto, and his ability to occupy the viewpoint of individuals who were resettled there, cohere in Lanzmann’s question to him, via the translator: LANZMANN:  Is it because of the fact that he spent a long time out of the ghetto that influenced, in some way, how he wrote his appeal?61

Kovner praises Lanzmann’s question as ‘very logical and intelligent’, one that is ‘rarely put to me’ although it is ‘a question that I have asked myself many times’.62 As well as implying the presence of a kind of survivor guilt, it reveals that Kovner was able to picture the very situation that militated against escape or revolt, even as he urged it on those looking out of their windows. Kovner conveys the conceptual revolution in his understanding of the ‘system’ underlying the Nazis’ apparently erratic acts and atrocities in Vilna through the ‘poetic’ means of using small concrete details to represent historical forces. He

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focuses on the elaborate system established in the ghetto of different ‘certificates’ or Scheine, which were issued to imply people’s safety by reason of their work or family status. Indeed, this section of the interview has been annotated ‘Schein’ and marked up for cutting, implying the possibility of its filmic use, perhaps as a complement to the discussion of a similar use of such certificates in the interview with Leib Garfunkel about the Kovno Ghetto, or Yehuda Bauer’s reading aloud from speeches by the Vilna Judenrat leader Jacob Gens. Through these means on the Nazis’ part, Kovner argues that a method was deliberately set up to prevent ‘panic’, and to make destruction easier to accomplish because it seemed less ‘military’.63 He ascribes the establishment of the Vilna Judenrat under Gens to the same impulse. This ‘system’ was one that established competition between individuals for life, by making ‘people understand that all did not have the same destiny’, as he concludes: ‘I believe the method can be defined by a simple word: Schein, that is: certificate.’64 In this commentary, an implicit riposte to the slur of ‘sheep’ is mounted and responsibility for the deaths of Vilna’s Jews returned to the Nazis. For Kovner, the moral danger accompanying that of physical destruction, is, to quote Primo Levi, another of the Nazis’ ‘crimes’.65 Such an attitude generates his unexpected conclusion that ‘the most horrible, the more tragic [situation] … was the ghetto, it was not Ponari’, since the ghetto made systematic the notion of competition among people to live.66 As Kovner elaborates, ‘The opposite of “sanctity of life” is not murder, it is the desecration of life that is – to eliminate, in life, what forms its human value.’67 The Nazis, he argues, ‘sought to make of us wild animals, to prevent us from caring for each other’. For this reason, he claims that ‘the rebellion starts at the moment when we were able to reverse the steam, to the contrary, to care about others’.68 As one of the cruel paradoxes of the era, such ‘care’ took the form of urging a particular form of death on the ghetto inhabitants. Yet at the same time, it moved away from extreme focus on the individual to a view of the community more widely. This insight runs counter to customary conceptions not only of resistance versus compliance in the Holocaust years, but of survival itself. It seems to offer a code of conduct at odds with the humanist postulates, foundational to Jewish thought, of valuing individual life above all else. The Talmudic precept that ‘he who saves a single life, saves the world entire’, associated for instance with Oscar Schindler, does not apply so directly in the circumstances as described to Lanzmann by Kovner.69 As well as Kovner’s own refusal to go into exile or remain in hiding for his own sake, the appeal of 1 January 1942 entailed a response that he calls ‘unique in the whole history of the Nazis in Europe’, in which, as he describes:

34

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes The young boys and the young girls who belonged to our movement [Hashomer Hatzair] left their hide-outs – which were safe, sometimes they had Aryan documents, or like myself they hid in a convent, anyway they were safe. And from that instant they left.70

Such a situation depicts an almost reverse pattern to that of customary conceptions of survival. The impasse is made clear in Kovner’s recounting the offer made to the FPO by a group of Lithuanian partisans, who were such an exception to the widespread local collaboration with the Nazis that he adds, ‘I remember … with great respect and admiration this small group, the faces of each one of these Lithuanian freedom fighters’.71 Their offer was to ‘prepare a hide-out outside Vilna, for 20–25 individuals’ whom ‘we wanted to save – writers, artists, thinkers, politicians, individuals who would have a place in history’. Yet, Kovner explains that ‘we refused to give them such a list’.72 Kovner’s rejection of the phrase and concept of the ‘list’ stands out here. It implies a new and uncomfortable way of seeing the example of Schindler’s rescue, and, for Lanzmann, that attempted by Rezső Kasztner in Budapest, and even more directly that of the leader of the Vilna Ghetto Jacob Gens, which aimed at saving as many individuals as possible, yet necessarily at the expense of the remainder. Kovner, by contrast, insists, ‘we refused to choose’.73 He emphasizes the example of the Lithuanians’ offer of a hideout in his interview with Lanzmann, ‘because I believe, when explaining our problem in detail, you will understand better that the situation we found ourselves in was quite unique’. Here, the addressee, ‘you’, extends beyond the director and immediate interlocutors, to the future audience of the planned film and the post-war world as a whole. The Lithuanian partisans of the past are themselves included in the audience, since ‘they did not understand’ the refusal of their offer, despite the efforts of FPO members to explain ‘what we were rebelling against’.74 Kovner relives this argument in the present, its logic both compelling, as Lanzmann’s comment below shows, yet at the same time hard to accept: KOVNER:  They were asking us to make a selection, of course positive, to give them a list of 20 persons, of 30 persons, who deserved to live, but we told them: is it for this that we are rebelling? To make this selection, to decide who had the right to life or death? LANZMANN:  Who has the right to live or die.75

In this way, as Kovner puts it in his attempt to summon up an alien way of thinking in the present, ‘We had formed our group starting from a precise ideology, our fight was not for self-preservation. It was not a question of saving

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myself, to save you, to save a neighbour. It was to fight the Germans.’76 Kovner relives the response of the Lithuanian ‘freedom fighters’, anticipating the possible incomprehension of a present-day audience: KOVNER:  They asked me: ‘But … don’t you have any interest in saving Jews, another Jew? Isn’t every Jewish life important to you?’ And we answered: ‘Of course, if we succeed in hiding a Jew under the roof of a Russian house, in a Lithuanian house, it would be very important to us. But try to understand that we are there as a collective body, which represents the community. And as such, you cannot ask us to base our action with … a selection.’77

This reanimation of voices is presented as the opposite logic not only of that espoused by the Vilna Judenrat, whose policy, in Lanzmann’s phrasing here, was to ‘give lives to save others’.78 It is perhaps also the opposite of one of the most prevalent contemporary ways of understanding the Holocaust by means of individual testimony, each recounting a remarkable feat of lucky survival – yet against a backdrop of mass annihilation. Indeed, it could be argued that the very form of the released version of Shoah, in its appearing to centre on individuals whose life-histories it then disregards for the sake of their revivifying a communal history, acknowledges in such a way this ethical dilemma.

Conclusion It cannot be doubted that, in part for the very reason of his intense reserve, Kovner possesses the ‘star’ quality that Lanzmann sought in his interviewees. Unlike most of the witnesses in Shoah, Kovner was already a celebrity by the time of the interview in 1979 in his roles as a partisan, avenger, trial witness, independence fighter and Israeli poet.79 The portrait of him as it appears in Lanzmann’s interview is that of an older version of the well-known visual images encapsulating these roles, particularly that of him a carrying a rifle in the newly liberated Vilna, and as a slightly older witness at the Eichmann Trial some fifteen years later. Like Michael Podchlebnik, whose face Lanzmann described as ‘the site of the Shoah’,80 and whose interview in Shoah is noteworthy for its close-ups, the familiarity of Kovner’s lean-faced and unsmiling expression, his wide-eyed stare, and his hair, the appearance of which he was very particular about as a young man,81 all make his filmed presence itself a historicized one. Kovner later expressed his regret at having used the ‘like sheep to the slaughter’ aphorism at all, one he had chosen in order to ‘goad’ the ghetto fighters and

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residents ‘to give up their illusions’ in what he considers an ‘appropriate’ fashion, but which was used unjustly ‘decades later’ to ‘judge and “condemn” those who did not fight’.82 As Ginor quotes Kovner, seeming to label the Jews ‘as passive sheep’ was to ‘desecrat[e] their deaths as martyrs’.83 In just the way he feared, in the immediate post-war period, particularly in Israel, Kovner had been considered ‘the originator not only of the audacious call for resistance but also of its implied obverse charge’, that of inactively accepting death.84 The double-sided nature of the phrase is acted out in the present interview through Lanzmann’s confusing its exhortatory and accusatory uses. For Dalia Ofer, the very citation of the utterance in a post-war Israeli context, ‘far away from the killing grounds’, made it sound like ‘an accusation and condemnation’; while the same phrase, ‘when voiced in European ghettos, was more evidently a lamentation or a call to resistance’.85 It is partly for this reason that Yehuda Bauer argues that only ‘victim communities’ should use the utterance at all.86 As was his reaction in the court at Jerusalem, Kovner is attentive from the very outset of the interview with Lanzmann to the kinds of latter-day criticism directed at the Jews in Vilna and occupied Europe. Speaking of the first days after the Nazi invasion, he describes how, after the war, ‘I was asked – by people who had not been there, who could not understand … why the Jews did not escape, why they did not escape from the ghettos, the mass assassinations’.87 At the Eichmann Trial, Kovner likewise countered any hint of condemnation in relation to the question that he claims is ‘hanging over us here in this courtroom: how was it that they did not revolt?’ He replies, with his customary conviction, that ‘I, as a fighting Jew, would rise in protest with all my strength at this question, if it contains a vestige of accusation’.88 Indeed, any accusation implicit in the phrase on Kovner’s part was directed instead at a God who could abandon people to be killed in such a way. Fortunately for the sake of the present interview, Kovner does not interpret in terms of an ‘accusation’ Lanzmann’s presenting a condemnatory appeal as if it were his own. Kovner’s living to testify to such certainty of death paradoxically includes his observing that personal survival was not his goal, giving him the revenant status that Lanzmann valued in the interviewees who do appear in Shoah. Much of the value of Lanzmann’s encounter with Kovner lies in its returning to, or even reincarnating, the very moment when the knowledge of genocide was being arrived at. Porat describes the occasion of the appeal’s being read out in Vilna on 1 January 1942 as a ‘turning-point in the consciousness of the Jews in conquered Europe as a people’,89 one clearly fitting for a filmic project such as Lanzmann’s which centres on the fact of the common destiny of occupied

Abba Kovner: ‘Like Sheep to the Slaughter’

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Europe’s Jews: that of death. As the director puts it in the present interview, ‘Vilna people were the first to understand what was happening and what was going to happen’, but not because they were ‘more intelligent or more courageous than other Jews, those in the Polish ghettos’.90 Rather, such foresight was due to ‘the conditions when extermination began in Lithuania, in the Baltic countries generally, and in Ukraine after the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Germans’, and ‘the very particular character of the extermination rhythm of Jews in the Soviet territories’.91 In this sense, Lanzmann echoes Kovner’s appeal, with its observation that, in relation to the Nazi goal of extermination, ‘it turned out to be the fate of the Jews of Lithuania to be the first’. Genocidal intent was revealed in this context, not, in terms of Lanzmann’s focus in Shoah, through the news of murder by gassing, although this had been carried out since November 1941 by means of gas-vans at Chełmno, but by the Vilna Ghetto inhabitants learning of the mass shootings in the forests of Ponari. The experience of Vilna is not entirely absent from the final version of Shoah. The interview with the Lithuanian-born Motke Zaidel and Itzak Dugin in the released film centres on their wartime role as prisoners having to dispose of the bodies of those who had been shot at Ponari, and the men are filmed in the present in the Ben Shemen forest in Israel, where smoke from a bonfire drifts into the sky. However, edited into the wider context of Shoah, those interviews are not so much about death by shooting, resistance or escape, nor events in Lithuania in particular, but about the process of disposing of evidence alongside visible reminders of atrocity in the present.92 Most notably, Lanzmann’s interview with Kovner takes the form of a confrontation between different versions of the ‘sheep to the slaughter’ phrase, at a moment in which the historiography of Holocaust resistance itself was changing. It does so not by means of dialogue or debate, but through the error of attribution that Lanzmann makes. The appeal that he starts to read uses the phrase ‘like sheep led to the slaughter’ as an accusation, whereas Kovner’s version is a negation of the phrase itself, urging resistance to the very notion of being easily led: ‘not as sheep to the slaughter’.93 Kovner’s efforts to direct the interview as he wishes, and his reluctance to establish any kind of eye-contact with director or spectator, suggest that his view has prevailed in filmic terms too. The line between the two senses of the phrase as lamenting fate and heralding martyrdom can become ‘very thin’, as Feldman argues.94 Yet Lanzmann’s mistake, and his ‘flabbergasted’ response (‘ça me sidère’, as he says in French to Kovner), symbolizes the change from one tradition in rhetorical and historiographical use to another.95 It does so by enacting and making visual a moment in which such condemnation is shown to be the wrong response.

38

2

Hansi Brand: ‘Selling one’s soul to the devil’

Claude Lanzmann’s interview with Abba Kovner was prompted by the director’s wish to address the call to wartime resistance, as well as its obverse, the accusation levied against the Nazis’ Jewish victims that they went to their deaths ‘like sheep to the slaughter’. In his 1.7-hour interview with Hansi Brand, a different but similarly denunciatory utterance is implicit in the exchange. In this case, it arises from the summing-up at the 1954–5 trial in Israel of the Hungarian-born amateur journalist Malchiel Grünwald. Grünwald was charged with libelling Brand’s colleague Rezső Kasztner, whom he had accused of collaborating with the Nazis in occupied Budapest during the last years of the war.1 However, the defence of Grünwald by the Israeli lawyer Shmuel Tamir turned the trial into an attack instead on Kasztner, and the verdict was found in Grünwald’s favour. In his summing up, the judge at trial, Benjamin Halevi, described Kasztner, and by extension those who had worked with him in the underground Hungarian Aid and Rescue Committee, as having ‘sold his soul to the devil’.2 This damning judgement vindicated Grünwald’s accusation that Kasztner had ‘collaborated’ with the Nazis, by entering into wartime negotiations with highranking SS officers. Negotiations to exchange one million Jews for ten thousand trucks failed, but led to the departure of 1,684 Jews for Switzerland on the socalled ‘Kasztner Train’ in 1944. Although Kasztner negotiated in an effort to save Hungarian Jews from deportation and death, it was alleged that his conduct had assisted ‘indirectly’ in and ‘prepared the ground’ for the Nazi murders.3 The Nazi officials with whom Kasztner negotiated included Adolf Eichmann, the infamous head of the RHSA, or Reich Security Office, who was in Hungary to supervise the process of deportation and murder, and Kurt Becher, head of the Economic Department of the SS Command, a pair of whom Yehuda Bauer, quoting Kasztner, says, ‘The Germans were brilliantly organized: Becher robbed, and Eichmann killed.’4 It was further alleged at the trial that Kasztner’s bad faith was revealed by his attempting to save Becher, and also Dieter Wisliceny, from prosecution at Nuremberg after the war by testifying in his favour.5

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Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

In the present interview with Brand, versions of the painful practical and ethical responses to unprecedented circumstances which characterized the interview with Kovner are also central in this different context (Figure 2.1).6 Their effects are evident not only in the wording and language of the dialogue, but also in relation to Brand’s bodily presence on screen. The malign significance for Brand of Halevi’s phrase, which she uses ironically during the present encounter, is clear in the title of the memoir she published after the war with her husband Joel Brand, The Devil and the Soul (in Hebrew HaSatan ve HaNefesh) (1960).7 It was named thus in riposte to the slur that was widely condemned as inappropriate for a legal verdict, but equally became entrenched in public discourse.8 If the interview with Kovner attempted to address the post-war image of Jews going to their deaths as passively as ‘sheep’, then the present one with Brand aims to debate and return to a version of the same period of postHolocaust thinking about ‘guilty victims’, whose very survival was attributed to acquiescence or collaboration. In the present encounter, Brand has reluctantly agreed to be interviewed and is reticent and defensive, until a change in the language of the exchange from Hebrew to German prompts her more freely to address the events of the past.

Figure 2.1  Hansi Brand, Tel Aviv.

Hansi Brand: ‘Selling One’s Soul to the Devil’

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Lanzmann interviewed Hansi Brand in the autumn of 1979 at her home in Tel Aviv. She was by that time the only surviving member of the wartime Aid and Rescue Committee, and her role in its activities forms the subject of this encounter. During the war, Brand worked alongside others, including her husband Joel, Otto Komoly and Kasztner, in rescuing and assisting refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. After the Nazi invasion of Hungary in March 1944, as Brand puts it here, the conditions of life changed ‘utterly and completely’.9 The Committee’s efforts turned towards trying to save the lives of their fellowJews in Hungary by a variety of means. These included efforts on the part of Komoly to secure the support of Hungarian political and church leaders, while Joel Brand and Kasztner entered into discussions with the SS officers Becher and Eichmann, at the latter’s instigation. The deal as proposed by Eichmann would have involved supplying goods to support the German war effort in exchange for Jewish lives, following the example of the bribing of Wisliceny as part of the ‘Europa Plan’ overseen by Rabbi Michael Weissmandl in Slovakia.10 While she had no official role in the Committee and it is Kasztner with whom the negotiations are usually associated, it was Hansi Brand who introduced her colleague to Eichmann and she was present at many of the meetings between them.11 As Brand puts it to Lanzmann, by the time of the occupation of Hungary, ‘We knew that the Germans were losing the war and it was only a matter of time before they would lose completely.’12 However, that did not prevent the Nazis from sending hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in 1944. In Andrea Pető’s description of the period between May and July 1944, ‘The deportation of 430,000 Jews from Hungary was the quickest in the history of the Holocaust … with the active participation of Hungarian civil servants.’13 In keeping with the Committee’s rescue efforts, Joel Brand agreed to be sent by the Germans to Istanbul to try to convince the Allies to go along with the Nazis’ offer to exchange goods for lives, but no deal to rescue Jews in this way was ever struck. Lanzmann asks Hansi Brand if a different negotiator, perhaps Kasztner himself, could have achieved a different outcome, to which she replies, ‘my personal opinion is that no one would have succeeded’, since ‘it wasn’t an issue of who goes. What was important, in and of itself, was the offer’.14 Some commentators see the negotiations as akin to a ‘high-stakes poker game’ on the Committee’s part, a bluff aiming at least to buy time in the hope that lives would be saved by the delay.15 Brand highlights the fact that, meanwhile, Eichmann ‘was actually glad that Joel wasn’t reporting anything, so he had free rein’ to continue the deportations.16 This thread of discourse supports what comes across as Brand’s incontrovertible conclusion on the imputation of complicity: ‘For the

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Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

Germans were capable of destroying all of the Hungarian Jews. They didn’t need our help,’ as part of her rhetorically and physically defensive demeanour.17 Yet Brand argues that Joel’s being sent to Istanbul raised the Committee’s hopes. They were ‘so sure Joel would accomplish something’ that they put to Eichmann the request that the Jews ‘should now be protected and should be preparing for the emigration’ while the details of the exchange were being finalized.18 This comment represents a time-capsule of understanding to which it is hard to return in the present, in full knowledge of the deal’s failure and high rate of Hungarian Jewish deaths. Such an observation fits with Lanzmann’s engagement throughout the outtakes with interviewees such as Ya’akov Arnon and Yehuda Bauer who invoke the perils of judgement based entirely on retrospection or outcome. However, in the present case, the Committee’s activities did see some practical results, although their status in both factual and ethical terms is disputed, in the present interview and more widely. These include the ‘Kasztner train’ initiative, by means of which 1,684 Jews were taken from Hungary to safety in Switzerland via some months in Bergen-Belsen, as well as the transfer of 15,000 Jews to Strasshof, a labour camp in Austria where most survived, rather than to death in Auschwitz. In 1944, Brand and the Committee thought that the Allies might agree to go along with the plan to provide the Germans with goods and trucks in exchange for Jewish lives. As she puts it, ‘This is how we looked at it at the time: this is about the remaining Jews, that the free world would do something by whatever offer to save this remaining … That was after five million Jews had already been killed.’19 Yet the hope that the Allies would ‘do something’ was not fulfilled, in part due to their ‘declared policy’ of demanding only unconditional surrender from Germany with ‘no separate negotiations’.20 Looking back a half-century later, Bauer puts it in a way that preserves the dehumanizingly mercantile nature of the proposed transaction: ‘The Germans may have been willing to sell the Jews, but the Allies could not pay the price the Germans demanded.’21 The two clauses of this phrase mirror the structure of the ‘deal’ itself, with its apparently orderly but horrifying exchange, as does Brand’s verdict on the Hungarian authorities’ confusion at Joel’s being sent to neutral Turkey: ‘They thought that the Germans had come to exterminate the Jews, not to sell them as German goods.’22 The failure of the plan of exchange is interpreted by Brand in the present in a chilling manner, recounted with her usual cynical and deadpan delivery: BRAND: Joel’s rescue mission failed because the Jews weren’t able to do anything without the Allies, and the British weren’t interested in the Jews. The British waited for the Germans to do a thorough job, and no single Jew was to be left in Europe, so that they wouldn’t have a problem with Palestine.23

Hansi Brand: ‘Selling One’s Soul to the Devil’

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Such a sentiment accords with Lanzmann’s interest elsewhere in the outtakes in exploring the role of institutions and governments outside Nazi-occupied Europe in rescue, including the US government and War Refugee Board (WRB), within the context of the viewer’s necessary knowledge of their failure. Although Lanzmann’s engagement is often with the epistemological question of knowing about or believing in the situation’s ‘fantastic emergency’, he is also concerned to unearth the other, often more material or trivial, considerations that prevented the saving of lives. As Brand’s words here show, these ranged from Realpolitik on the British side,24 to the slowness of action on that of the WRB.

The devil The idea of a Faustian pact as raised by Halevi’s accusing Kasztner of having ‘sold his soul to the devil’ has preoccupied commentators, forming the basis of historical accounts as well as plays, films and television drama.25 Although the libel trial judgement was revoked by the Israeli Supreme Court on appeal in 1958, on all counts apart from his post-war support of Becher, Kasztner did not live to hear his name cleared. He had been assassinated a year earlier by Ze’ev Eckstein, one of a group of three members of Lehi, a right-wing militant group from Israel’s prestate days.26 Such a violent and unexpected event shows the complex entwinement of Kasztner’s wartime actions and his post-war fate with the politics of Israel’s recently acquired independence in the 1950s, at a time in which, as Shoshana Barri puts it, ‘not only was [Kasztner] being deprived of the glory of his wartime rescue work, but … was in fact being condemned for it’.27 Kasztner’s public role in the Israeli Mapai (Labour) government of the time meant that Grünwald’s pamphlet ‘did not reach its natural place – the wastepaper basket’, in Yechiam Weitz’s phrasing, and he was urged to press charges or resign.28 Opponents of the government, including Grünwald’s defence lawyer, Shmuel Tamir, saw the trial as an opportunity to expose the failure of the Mapai leadership, ‘who in the 1940s had stood at the head of the Jewish Agency and during the 1950s still led the State of Israel’.29 In this way, as Tim Cole argues, ‘Attacking Kasztner’s wartime role amounted to an attack on Mapai’s – and by extension Ben Gurion’s role – during the war.’30 The trial was seen by Grünwald’s supporters as a chance to reveal that the country ‘was controlled by Diaspora-minded politicians’, with their tendency to negotiate and acquiesce, as Kasztner was said to have done, instead of ‘the rightful leaders, the fighters of 1948’.31 Brand herself put it starkly in another interview, describing the rejection in Israel of ‘the way the public go-betweens

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Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

chose to save the lives of Jews, the traditional way of Jews in Europe: appeal, bribe, avoid, outsmart, and pay lots of money’.32 Indeed, when the original verdict against Kasztner was handed down, the Mapai government fell. As is also the case with the notion of ‘going like sheep to the slaughter’, developments in Holocaust historiography and changing attitudes towards its victims have altered public perceptions of the activities of Kasztner and the Committee. Such changes are notable in relation to views of resistance in Kovner’s case and of rescue in Brand’s, starkly so in their shared context of Israel’s early years of independent statehood. Yet the debate about the nature of the Committee’s wartime negotiations with Eichmann and Kasztner’s role in them has continued, in what is often a bitter and painful manner, into the twenty-first century. Such debate persists among historians as well as survivors, including those who were the passengers, or their descendants, on the ‘Kasztner train’. As Paul Sanders argues, Kasztner is viewed historically from two starkly opposed positions, in the terms of either ‘vilification’ as a collaborator or ‘heroisation’ as a rescuer.33 This trend is typified even by the titles of two recent books about his wartime actions: Anna Porter’s Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust (2008) and Paul Bogdanor’s Kasztner’s Crime (2016). In his encounter with Hansi Brand, Lanzmann addresses those events in the Committee’s history to whose interpretation hindsight has brought such polarization. These include whether Kasztner chose not to warn the Jews of his home-town, Koloszvár (Cluj), about their impending deaths in Auschwitz, in order to preserve the lives of ‘a small and select number of Jews’;34 how the criteria for that ‘small number’ on the ‘Kasztner train’ were arrived at; and whether Kasztner was motivated by a wish for personal power, or, as Lanzmann claims, acted out of ‘vanity’, or ‘Eitelkeit’, as he puts it in German.35 Brand’s defensive and uneasy demeanour throughout the interview testifies to the personal cost of estimates divided between the extremes of acclaim and condemnation, as well as the painful nature of the accusations themselves. Her responses are enacted in bodily and linguistic form as we hear her rebuff any suggestion of questionable behaviour on her own or Kasztner’s part. For instance, at the opening of filmreel eight, Lanzmann launches straight into a confrontational dialogue, asking Brand about Kasztner’s rescue of individuals from Koloszvár, which the director calls by its German name of Klausenburg: LANZMANN:  But surely you know, it is also said that Kasztner saved his own people in Klausenburg, for example, Dr. Fischer, his father-in-law, and Zionists from Klausenburg and … what do you think about that?

Hansi Brand: ‘Selling One’s Soul to the Devil’

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BRAND:  I ask you, if you were in the same situation, wouldn’t you be thinking about your own family? … He wouldn’t have been a ‘Mensch’.36

Lanzmann’s response to Brand’s argument here, ‘That’s a very good answer’, is hard to take at face value, since it functions more as a facilitation of the interview than an expression of his own opinion. In his interview in the outtakes with the defending lawyer Tamir from the Kasztner Trial, whose role turned in effect into that of Kasztner’s prosecutor, Lanzmann appears to go along in a similar manner with a diametrically opposite view of these events.37 However, such moments in the director’s construction of an interviewer-persona have the effect of allowing for a future use of this footage, as if the possibility of editing together divergent views on the questions surrounding rescue and resistance is being prepared for in the dialogue.

Languages and body language As the interview opens, we see Brand seated in a small brocade armchair in front of a cluttered bookcase in her home. Lanzmann is not visible, and indeed, apart from the occasional intrusion of his gesturing hand into the frame, he remains unseen throughout. Brand’s expression is one of a wary and controlled discomfort. A gradual close-up on her face shows her blinking rapidly, appearing apprehensive to the extent that tears seem only just to be restrained as the encounter begins (Figure 2.2). Brand holds herself very still, although her anxiety is betrayed by her visibly agitated breathing – as indeed it is during her witness testimony in the filmed record of the Eichmann Trial – and she sits at first with her arms crossed in a defensive posture.38 Almost all extant photographs, apart from one pre-war image of her as a smiling young woman, show Brand with the same expression of a grim reserve.39 Paul Sanders describes Brand as being ‘on guard’ in each of the few interviews she gave during her post-war life in Israel, and it is possible to discern in a self-presentation of this kind the effects of the ordeal of the occupation, followed by the accusation of collaboration in 1954, and the murder of her colleague and friend Kasztner three years later.40 It is equally not hard to see the importance of this projection of blankness in those extreme situations, during the wartime negotiations, and in the post-war trials where she was a witness, in which Brand’s words and demeanour were a crucial element of the proceedings. She recounts the importance of performing ‘the role of a negotiating partner’ in the meetings with Eichmann, where, despite

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Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

Figure 2.2  Close-up on Hansi Brand.

the ‘abject inequality’ of the two sides, she had to appear business-like, using what she calls a ‘normal, sociable, let’s say ordinary manner, so that no one would know that we were afraid of [the Germans]’.41 The concealed emotional reality was expressed at the time in bodily form, on an occasion when she and Kasztner were considering abandoning the negotiations: ‘My hands were trembling, and Kasztner’s hands were trembling … [we] decided we would say goodbye to Eichmann and go.’42 Geva’s apt description of Brand’s testimony at the Eichmann Trial as one delivered in a ‘calm, self-controlled voice’, by contrast to that of her agitated and often-emotional husband,43 is also apposite in the present context. Her voice in responding to Lanzmann could even be described as gentle, in opposition to the often-brutal and distressing events about which she speaks. This exercise of self-control seems to be Brand’s way of coping with the difficulty she describes in talking about the past at all. Indeed, the encounter with Lanzmann both begins and ends with her declaration of its problematic and even inadvisable nature. ‘If I begin once again to discuss this I will have to relive the tragedies of our people and of my life,’ she says at the very outset, and she concludes by invoking the likelihood of ‘historical distortions’ following whatever she might say: ‘And …

Hansi Brand: ‘Selling One’s Soul to the Devil’

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that’s why I really didn’t want to do this interview.’44 The present encounter thus forms an interview despite itself. However, Brand’s demeanour and attitude alter over the course of the interview within the constraints of her watchful reserve, in a way that arises from a change in language. The question of national language and translation is invariably more than a technical matter in Lanzmann’s interviews, in Shoah itself and in the outtakes, forming instead an integral part of the meaning.45 In the present case, language plays a significant role in the way Brand presents herself. The interview begins with her speaking Hebrew, then translated into English in answer to Lanzmann’s questions, which he poses in English and which are in turn translated into Hebrew so that Brand can respond to them. The interpretation here thus follows the ‘four steps’ as described by Lanzmann in reference to translations between Polish and French via an interpreter, all of which are retained to be heard and sometimes also seen in the final version of Shoah.46 But although the present interview shares the four-part structure of translation that Lanzmann describes, and follows the example of the outtakes of the interview with Simon Srebnik, in which Hebrew is replaced with German, the situation at the outset of Brand’s interview is unusual.47 Neither director nor interviewee is speaking in their native tongue, as is the case in the scenario of translating between French and Polish, nor do they use a shared foreign language. As Francine Kaufmann, the translator between Hebrew and French in Shoah and Sobibór (2001), points out, in the finished film there are three translators whose voices we hear. In this way, there is always ‘one same voice … “embodying” each language (Polish, Yiddish or Hebrew)’.48 Alongside Kaufmann’s interpreting the Hebrew, these roles are taken by Fanny Apfelbaum for Yiddish and Barbara Janicka for Polish, of whom only Janicka appears on-screen. Kaufmann convincingly ascribes this to the ‘essential’ role of the Polish settings, in which Lanzmann and Janicka are seen walking together with such eyewitnesses as Jan Piwonski at the site of Sobibór, as part of ‘recreating the authenticity of the “scene of the crime”’.49 In those interviews filmed in Israel or other locations, such as the Swiss setting of the encounter in Shoah with Richard Glazar, we see only domestic interiors or outdoor backdrops to the person who speaks, and any location footage crosscut with these settings is from elsewhere. Even where landscape sequences are shown from other locations than Poland, for instance Motke Zaidel and Itzhak Dugin walking in Ben Shemen forest in Israel, the translator is invisible. However, the interpreter for Brand’s interview is not one who features in Shoah.50 In this case, the translator’s American-English accent and vocabulary introduces another unusual element into the first thirty minutes. The unfamiliar

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Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

nature of the translation in this case is redoubled by the fact that the interviewee as well as the interpreter is female. With the more usual presence of a male interlocutor in most of Lanzmann’s encounters in Shoah itself, as Kaufmann points out, retaining the translator’s voice rather than editing out that process and replacing it with subtitles, dubbing or translation in voiceover, ‘suppresses any possibility of confounding the interpreter’s words with the original testimony’.51 It seems that in the present case Lanzmann, who can be heard commanding, ‘Coupez!’ [‘Cut!’] on several occasions before the reel’s eleven minutes of footage time is up, is dissatisfied with the interview’s conduct up to this point, since it proceeds at a slow tempo, with long pauses between utterances. Between reels four and five a change takes place, so that, for the remainder of the interview, Brand and Lanzmann speak directly to one another in German without the translator’s intervention, while Hebrew and English are abandoned. The translator can still be heard, offering advice on some of the director’s wordchoices, yet barely audibly since she is now evidently at a distance. The change from Hebrew to German takes place after Brand has described Joel receiving the initial invitation to go to the Gestapo to meet Eichmann. As Brand adds, ‘The offer that Eichmann made was that for every truck we gave him, he would set 10,000 Jews free,’ a proposition with the result that ‘Joel was so shocked by the words that he couldn’t find an answer, and asked for time to think … and that he must consult the others’.52 The last words to be translated into English, before the direct exchanges in German begin, are about the Committee’s reaction to Eichmann’s proposition, in the form of a cliff-hanger at the end of a reel of film: ‘Since there was no choice, we began to discuss the prospects.’53 It is fitting that the interview turns to questions about the wartime wish to rescue and the post-war slur of collaboration, at the very moment the language in which it is conducted turns to German. This change marks a return to the language of the past, reminding the viewer that all the negotiations with Eichmann also took place in that way. Indeed, while she is still using Hebrew, Brand quotes the SS officer’s words in initiating the negotiations: ‘But I have an idea: we can make a deal,’ as part of which she comments on the turn to the language of the transaction: ‘(and I must say this in German): Blut für Waren und Waren für Blut’ [blood for goods and goods for blood].54 Eichmann’s phrase, ‘blood for goods’, which, like the notion of ‘selling one’s soul to the devil’, is an element of the ‘linguistic legacy’ of the Committee’s negotiations,55 undergoes defamiliarization in the present through its rendition by a Hungarian-born woman quoted within her Hebrew-language narrative. Brand’s returning the phrase to its original German restores the criminal responsibility to where it belongs.

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The change of language in the present interview from Hebrew to German repeats the pattern of Brand’s delivering her testimony at the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem in 1961, where, as Sharon Geva points out, she was ‘the only woman to have personally met with Eichmann’.56 On that occasion, Brand began speaking the Hebrew in which she was not yet fluent, and then asked to change to the more familiar German, since, as she said of herself, ‘I am agitated.’57 She was thus ‘among the few witnesses to be cross-examined by defense attorney Dr Robert Servatius’, and able to respond to his questions directly in a shared language.58 In the present interview, speaking German enables Brand’s more ‘agitated’ and animated expression and allows Lanzmann to question her in an unmediated mode that seems to thaw her stillness. Brand uncrosses her arms, for instance, to gesture at parts of her body to support her description of being arrested by the Hungarian secret police, who interrogated her on the subject of Joel’s secret mission to Istanbul, as she describes: ‘I was beaten on the head and the soles of the feet.’59 It also speeds up the exchanges between interviewer and interviewee to the extent that they speak over and interrupt each other, giving an impression of high emotion. Nonetheless, the encounter with Lanzmann might seem uncomfortably to replicate the structure of Brand’s post-war trial appearances, in which she ran the risk of turning from witness to defendant. Benjamin Halevi, about whom Brand is dismissively critical, was one of the judges at the Eichmann Trial, as he had been at the Kasztner Trial. Indeed, she turns Halevi’s infamous phrase back against him, claiming that Kasztner ‘would have said that [Halevi] sold his soul to the devil’, for the sake of his political career.60 It is rather to the meetings with Eichmann that Brand contrasts the encounter with Lanzmann, in responding to the director’s request that she describe the ‘situation’ on those occasions, ‘because it’s so hard to imagine’. Brand answers by claiming, ‘It wasn’t the way we are now, sitting across from one another and having a nice conversation on a sofa, and you ask and I answer.’61 Even if there is both historical bathos here and some irony in Brand’s characterizing the interview with Lanzmann as a ‘nice conversation’, her reply deflects what we can only imagine to be one of the director’s goals, to draw her back into the world of the past. The change to speaking German rather than Hebrew might have begun such a process, and allowed the interview to become an opportunity, like the Eichmann Trial, to ‘tell the Committee’s story and once more prove the late Kasztner’s innocence’.62 Indeed, during the course of the interview we hear Lanzmann remind Brand of the large audience to be expected of their discussion, as he puts it of the situation in Hungary in mid-1944: ‘I want to understand and to see [the situation], and

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Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

not just for myself, but for the people who will see this film.’63 However, Brand’s practised resistance and her unwillingness to ‘relive the tragedies’ of either a personal or public kind does not allow for the past’s reincarnation here. At the beginning of reel nine, Lanzmann effects another abrupt shift, in this case from the question of warning others of their fate in the preceding reel, which ends with Brand’s observing that ‘there was nowhere to flee from Hungary’, to trying to elicit from her a sense of the feeling of the time: LANZMANN: Hansi, really now, you have to help me. I want to understand … What was your situation from a human point of view, and the situation for Kasztner? For there was this unbelievable urgency, every day 12,000 people, Jews, were being sent to Auschwitz, to the Auschwitz gas chambers. And, of course, you knew that and you were in these negotiations with Eichmann in order to save a number of them, a small number. And for you it was … How was it? It was a big emotional burden.64

This effort to prompt a return to the past has the most success of any of Lanzmann’s gambits in this interview, provoking Brand to reflect: BRAND: Well, well, after thirty years, I can … I have to go back … literally, how it was. I’m just surprised at the question; I’ll say why. It has become so well known, this whole tragedy, that I don’t know if I can find the right words even to express my emotional state. So, it wasn’t a setting, it wasn’t a setting where anyone was taking down minutes. There was always a constant fear of death, although we hoped and believed that these negotiations would result in something, would lead to something. And this fear of death hovered over us, and when you ask now about the emotional state … well, we always [lived] between fear and despair and hope.65

Lanzmann’s question to Brand includes a phrase, ‘emotional burden’, or seelische Belastung in German, with such a particular history, in the judicial and linguistic aftermath of the Holocaust, that it cannot but catch the outtake viewer’s attention. Her reply includes a slightly but significantly altered version: ‘emotional state’, seelische Zustand, rather than burden. The wording Lanzmann uses appeared in the defence given by Heinz Schubert, who was among the accused at the Einsatzgruppen Trials of 1947–8, to convey the psychological cost of mass shootings for those who orchestrated or carried them out. The emotional burden or ‘seelische Belastung’ is a phrase that clearly preoccupied the director, for its suggestion of both perpetrator self-pity, and a trace of personal, if not moral, discomfort at the murders, and Lanzmann quotes it not only in the secretly recorded interview with Schubert himself, but also in that with another former

Hansi Brand: ‘Selling One’s Soul to the Devil’

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Einsatzgruppen member, Karl Kretschmer, and with the former Auschwitz camp guard Pery Broad. In the present context, it might simply have been an apt phrase to convey in German the notion of psychic pressure in the volatile and dangerous circumstances that Brand describes as, ‘like being in a windmill; it turned and moved’.66 However, the director uses it on a second occasion, as a prelude to his reading two passages from the report Kasztner wrote in post-war Switzerland:67 LANZMANN: Yes, but I want to come back to the emotional burden. All these dealings with Eichmann were for you and Kasztner, I think, very difficult, very dangerous, also very unpleasant.68

Lanzmann’s twice using the distinctive phrase ‘seelische Belastung’, with the associations of its perpetrator context, makes it into a linguistic symbol of the enforcedly close proximity of the Committee members to the Nazis with whom they had to negotiate, and what is at least the director’s unconscious judgement.

Time and knowledge The notion of ‘selling one’s soul to the devil’ in the present interview implicitly raises the question of the difference between information, knowledge and understanding in relation to genocide. As outlined by cultural historians, the series of actions in the ‘social process’ of turning information into knowledge takes the form of ‘discussion, verification, order, classification and dissemination’.69 The first and last stages in the chain of intellectual transformation were rendered difficult, if not impossible, in the Hungary of 1944 by the conditions of the Nazi occupation, as Brand puts it in ironic terms: ‘It wasn’t possible to put an announcement in the paper or to give a speech on the radio that Jews should flee.’70 In this case, it is not just the failure of knowledge but its active disavowal that is at stake, according to Brand, who claims that ‘the Hungarians knew what it meant when the Germans arrived’.71 This is to acknowledge the status of Hungary as a location from which wartime events had been monitored in relative safety, news of which had been heard on illicitly owned radios, from Polish and Slovakian refugees, and from the April 1944 report by the Auschwitz escapees Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler. Yet, as Brand concludes, ‘Those who heard it, they said, that’s not possible, that won’t happen in Hungary.’72 Just as Kovner described what he considered the deadly effects of ‘illusion’ in Vilna in 1941 and 1942, so too Brand uses the same term in the context of Hungary in 1944 (Irrtum in German).

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Speaking of her own case, in relation to an earlier wartime instance of facts being transformed into knowledge, Brand cites the influence of news about the August 1941 murder of 23,600 Jews in the Ukrainian city of Kamenets-Podolskiy, a massacre carried out by the Nazis’ mobile killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, and assisted by Hungarian soldiers and Ukrainian police. She feared that members of her own family had been deported to be shot: You can imagine how overjoyed we were at first when my sister and brotherin-law had been found after we thought they were dead, but of course our joy was very short-lived, because they brought us the first eye-witness reports of what had been happening in Kamenets-Podolskiy, and they told us about Jews who had had to dig their own graves and about people who had been buried alive. Needless to say, this had a tremendous influence on us, and when I say that we were horrified this would be a mere understatement.73

This utterance occurs in the early, Hebrew-language section of the interview during a ten-minute section without video, the absence of an image leaving the viewer with only the sound as a way to perceive Brand’s distress. The imagetrack is ruptured, even if no such affective breakdown occurs.74 In the chain of transforming information into knowledge, the final step customarily consists of ‘groups in society’ using that knowledge for ‘various purposes’.75 Although Brand describes how the facts of her family members’ narrow escape in 1941 led her and Joel to a conclusion – ‘we decided that we must begin to act’ – such resolve in the face of information received, in the present case to shelter refugees, is hard to muster in such circumstances.76 In the context of occupied Hungary, Yehuda Bauer distinguishes ‘information’ from ‘knowledge’ in a way that supports Brand’s contentions, as part of his analysis of how the fact of extermination was received in the Hungary of 1944: ‘Many Hungarian Jews had, or could easily have had, the information; but they did not have the knowledge, that is, the realization that the information was correct, and that they should act accordingly.’77 Yet, as Brand argues, ‘Hungary was surrounded … We [the Committee] knew too and we didn’t flee. There was nowhere to flee to.’78 Given that none of the various possibilities of fleeing, hiding, being helped or undertaking armed resistance was possible, Bauer concludes that part of the ‘gap’ between information and knowledge on the part of Hungary’s Jews arose from ‘the fact that if they had admitted that the information was true, they could have done very little to save themselves’.79 The impossibility of the action that usually arises from information’s translation into knowledge meant that the earlier

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stages of the process too were resisted and repudiated. Bauer’s bleak conclusion is that, in the light of local and international circumstances, caught between Nazi domination and the Allied war effort, the majority of Jewish people in Hungary ‘were inevitably lost’.80 Such a ‘trap situation’, where no action was possible, led to a third response beyond ‘fight or flight’, described by Ladislaus Löb as that of ‘freeze’, or the inability to act, one that was ‘understandable, almost inevitable’.81 The notion of information turning into knowledge in a context for which there was no prior model is central to most of Lanzmann’s outtake interviews. The idea of reincarnation’s return to the past in the interview’s present could offer a way out of the ‘teleological retrospection’ that characterizes not just the post-war knowledge of the mass killing of the Jews, but is also ‘used to judge the participants in those events as though they too should have known what was to come’.82 In such a way, the question of knowledge is at the heart of Lanzmann’s separately released film The Karski Report (2010), whose thirty-minute extent centres on the inability of Roosevelt’s colleague Felix Frankfurter to believe the news imparted by the Polish courier Jan Karski about the Jews’ mass murder. It also underlies Lanzmann’s encounter with Abba Kovner, in relation to the latter’s own ‘intuitive’ understanding of universal murder, in contrast to an inability on the part of others to reach such a realization and constituting one of the reasons why mass insurrection was impossible. In the present case, those looking back with retrospective judgement include individuals who were themselves part of the events of the ‘trap situation’ from which there was no clear escape route. As Bauer argues, a post-war ‘refusal to remember’ the situation as it was led to the search for scapegoats, even on the part of those who were its victims.83 While the Committee’s agreeing to negotiate with the Nazis could be seen as one of the sole possible responses to the circumstances, what was in the event the negotiations’ only partial and selective success generated censure after the fact. As Brand puts it of Kasztner’s postwar accusers, ‘It’s unbelievable [unglaubwürdig] that they insist that they knew nothing at all’ (my italics).84 The notion of ‘belief ’ is used by Brand here about the post-war view of those who could not ‘believe’ what was happening at the time. In the present interview, the matter of who had information about the fate awaiting those who were deported to Auschwitz, whether that was translated into knowledge by those who did possess it, and what they might reasonably have done as a result, is crucially at stake. This is partly because withholding information of this kind formed one of the charges against Kasztner at the 1954 trial. It was a central element in his being portrayed as not wanting to jeopardize negotiations about the Kasztner train by passing on potentially destabilizing news. Lanzmann directly broaches with Brand the question of imparting

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information, eliciting responses from his interviewee which deal instead with what is, as we have seen, the rather different subject of the absence of knowledge. After the change-over between film-reels seven and eight, Lanzmann abruptly moves from the topic of Eichmann’s demeanour during Brand’s meetings with him, to one that is closer to home: LANZMANN:  I have a question: Kasztner is accused, for example, of not having warned the Jews of Cluj of their terrible fate in Auschwitz, or what do you think of these, these … BRAND:  That is the most heinous lie [übelste Luge].85

As the conviction of her refutation suggests, Brand finds survivors’ assertion of ignorance, and later seeking to blame others for that state, impossible to credit, and she says of individuals at the time, ‘They didn’t want to acknowledge it. They just couldn’t accept it, because as long as they kept it away, they could just keep on eating, drinking, smoking, living a normal life like everyone else in Hungary.’ For such individuals, as Brand concludes, it was ‘better not to know’. This is a sardonic acknowledgement not only of the existential difficulty of facing the truth of one’s own impending murder, but also of the Hungarian Jews’ national loyalty, making the spectacle of Nazi actions elsewhere seem inapplicable to them. In keeping with his interest in the moment when individuals realized that ‘all the Jews were to be put to death’,86 Lanzmann presses Brand further on this ‘very important’ question: LANZMANN:  Yes, but you know … why do I have such a question? There are some people from Cluj, who were sent to Auschwitz and they, they later came back. And these people say, they say, that they didn’t know, that ‘we weren’t warned.’ BRAND:  Well … people wouldn’t acknowledge this total Jewish extermination. LANZMANN:  That’s very important; go ahead.

Lanzmann’s provocations to Brand of this kind exist not only for the sake of dramatic cinema or move towards reincarnating the past. Rather, they are inextricable from the very question of resistance as a response to the unpredictable and unprecedented events of the Holocaust years. In her article on those post-war trials, including the Kasztner Trial, which contributed to the development of Holocaust consciousness in Israel and beyond, Hanna Yablonka quotes from the verdict of Gideon Hausner, the lead prosecutor at the Eichmann Trial: ‘If fate had been cruel to us and we were

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there – our fate would have been the same as theirs, and our heroism no less. The differences do not lie within the nation, but in the “here and there”.’87 Hausner’s verdict summed up a change of attitude in moving away from such discourses in relation to Holocaust history as that of blaming the victims, viewing armed resistance as the only worthy response, and negatively contrasting the Jews in Europe with those in wartime Palestine and post-war Israel. His use of everyday wording is equally far from that of ‘selling one’s soul to the devil’, with its implication of metaphysical evil, or ‘like sheep to the slaughter’, with its biblically inflected judgement. As Yablonka puts it, Hausner emphasizes that ‘only a chronological accident, not a moral or qualitative factor’ separated those Jews in occupied Europe from those outside.88 Indeed, Hausner’s summation does away with any moral superiority of geographical or temporal distance in his phrase ‘here and there’, allowing for a different way of looking back at the events of the Holocaust. In this case, such a view might instead acknowledge the ‘personal risks’ undertaken by the Committee, ‘by at least trying to influence the course of events’, and crediting Brand’s aggrieved defence of Kasztner, ‘I don’t know if there are a lot of people living in Israel today who, let’s say, saved 1,600 Jews’, even if this is not a view wholly shared by Lanzmann.89

Conclusion Lanzmann’s interest in the efforts at rescue in Hungary, as part of his exploration of that topic more generally, is evident not only in the present interview, but in others he undertook and which are also excluded from Shoah. These include his encounter with Hanna Marton, whose life and that of her husband Ernst Marton were saved by their inclusion on the Kasztner train, and with Shmuel Tamir, the Israeli lawyer who acted in Grünwald’s defence and against Kasztner at the libel trial. The present interview with Brand is relatively short, and Lanzmann raises many questions in the last thirty minutes of its extent. Each new reel opens with a provocation that Lanzmann puts to his interviewee, in a manner far from the orderly and long-drawn-out pattern which Rémy Besson identifies as characterizing the majority of his other encounters.90 This is despite Lanzmann’s opening invitation to Brand, via the translator, to describe freely the ‘personalities’ of the time: ‘She can talk as long as she wishes.’91 Nor does Lanzmann include any footage from this encounter in his final film, The Four Sisters, where his interviews with women from a divergent range of backgrounds are placed side-by-side. The fact that one of these interviewees is Hanna Marton

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suggests that, in filmic terms at least, her view as one of the Kasztner Train’s passengers superseded Brand’s in the director’s eyes. While Brand claims that it is ‘hard to recreate the spirit of the present’ following the events of the past, Marton’s interview ends with just this kind of retrieval, since her final words are a comment on the ‘real tears’ that afflict her in the present when looking back. It might therefore seem that Lanzmann was perpetuating Hansi Brand’s marginal status in the historiography of attempted rescue of the Jews in occupied Hungary. His own remarks during their meeting could be taken to imply that she is merely a substitute for her husband Joel or for Kasztner, both of whom had died by the time of this interview. Lanzmann describes Brand at the opening of their encounter as, ‘the wife of Joel Brand and the collaborator of Rezső Kasztner, the two men who were the most important in the negotiations about the fate of the Hungarian Jews’.92 It is as if he is typifying by this remark Sharon Geva’s argument that, although Hansi Brand’s role was central to the Committee’s activities, it is omitted or only fleetingly acknowledged in later accounts, so that ‘whatever she said was viewed as aiming to support, complement and endorse “his story,” whether “he” was Joel Brand or Kasztner’.93 In the present interview Brand herself mentions the liability of being judged negatively as a woman. She describes for Lanzmann’s camera the response to her role as Joel Brand’s representative in the negotiations with Eichmann during her husband’s absence in Istanbul: ‘Some people on our Committee protested against that, saying that a woman can’t represent Jewish concerns by herself.’94 At the Kasztner Trial in post-war Israel, Geva argues that the ‘heroic bias’ for stories of armed resistance was set against the notion of the ‘contemptible’ behaviour of ‘go-betweens, symbolizing the weakness of the Jews in the Diaspora’, and given a gendered twist, since neither Brand nor Kasztner ‘had been involved in actions identified with men, such as carrying arms and fighting’.95 Brand challenged these binaries in her testimony at the Eichmann Trial, in her response to being asked if the Committee had considered assassinating Eichmann. She claimed that they had indeed done so, but, mindful of the likely reprisals for an act whose practical result was uncertain, decided against it: ‘We were a Committee for Aid and Rescue of our people, and none of us was a gibor, a hero … So what we bore in mind was how we could try and keep people alive.’96 Her use of the Hebrew word ‘gibor’ links the biblical and post-independence senses of this word, giving it an ironic inflection. The term as she uses it implies action for its own sake, offering evidence for a much later view of Brand as ‘the most outstanding example’ of defying a ‘one-dimensional’ image of Jewish heroism.97

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Historians have more recently acknowledged the ‘crucial’ nature of Brand’s wartime role as the Committee’s ‘real brains’.98 In a similar way, during the course of the encounter with Brand, it becomes apparent that Lanzmann was indeed interested in her eyewitness perspective, exactly because of the behindthe-scenes status of advisor that Brand had assumed, despite being its ‘motor’. Sanders argues that Brand deliberately maintained a low profile after the war, like Benjamin Murmelstein, the former Eldest of the Jews in Terezín, about whom Lanzmann declares at the outset of The Last of the Unjust that he had to search throughout Rome to find him, by contrast to Kasztner’s public post-war role. For Sanders, such a decision to retreat from view, followed by Murmelstein and Brand but not by Kasztner, is one that is called for on the part of those who can be judged as ‘dirty hands’ leaders. As a variant of Primo Levi’s ‘grey zone’, this notion of ‘dirty hands’ refers to the ethical tainting likely to be undergone by those in positions of authority in times of duress or catastrophe, whose very decision to take action, rather than doing nothing, means that they have to make choices with results that are uncertain or morally ambiguous. As Sanders defines it, the phrase applies to ‘good people who find themselves under an obligation to commit transgressions which they themselves would deem unethical in other contexts’.99 Although a helpful concept in the case of the Committee, whose actions could not achieve the mass rescue or halting of genocide as they wished, and which ‘coincided’ instead with mass deportations, the ‘dirty hands’ category leads Sanders in effect to make Kasztner responsible for his own post-war fate, rather than, for instance, viewing his having ‘tragically paid’ for his efforts at rescue ‘with his life’.100 Sanders argues that Kasztner disregarded ‘an unspoken principle of “dirty hands”: after dancing with the devil, you do not hold your head high, and you do not step into the limelight’.101 It is revealing that, although the metaphysical notion of Kasztner’s selling his soul has been replaced in Sanders’s phrasing with the more equal and ordinary one of ‘dancing’, the sense of unwonted proximity to the devil for one’s own entertainment or gain remains. It is therefore fitting that Brand gives an example of turning the slurs directed at the Committee, in this case the allegation of their wish to preserve the lives of some at the expense of others, back against the actual wrong-doers. As she says of the Germans’ suggestion that Joel be sent to Istanbul to broker a deal to save Jews, ‘there were many [Nazis] who wanted to save their own lives through this offer’.102 It is a reminder that, as Yablonka puts it of the Nazis in Hungary as conceived of in later eras’ Holocaust consciousness, ‘the “devil” alone remained guilty of all charges’.103

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Rather than Hansi Brand being enlisted in response to Barri’s plea not to view Kasztner ‘in isolation’ when judging his actions, in Lanzmann’s interview with her, it is the other way around: Kasztner is invoked to provide a context for her. Although Lanzmann’s questions are often about her opinions of other Committee members, they are clearly also directed at Brand herself, her wartime actions, encounters with Eichmann and what the director calls ‘her own point of view’ about them in the present. Like this encounter, that with Kovner centres on the dilemmas of the time and the phrases that summed them up: while the victims were said to be ‘like sheep to the slaughter’, negotiating might lead to ‘selling one’s soul to the devil’. In each case, the impasse of realizing that all the Jews were targeted for murder, having nowhere to flee and being ‘alone’ without outside help led to different conclusions arising from the distinct conditions in Vilna in 1941 versus Budapest in 1944. Brand’s status as a well-known figure, and the many intersecting factors in post-war Israeli politics contributing to estimates of the Committee’s efforts at rescue,104 all add to the overdetermined nature of the questions raised. The moral and practical difficulty of taking action at times of duress takes centrestage in this interview, rather than its directly addressing the fate of the Jews. It is this sense of being at a remove from the process of killing that underlies the exclusion of Brand’s interview from Shoah. Like the other encounters examined here, it centres on responses to rather than the witnessing of genocide.

3

Indirect testimony: Rabbi Michael Weissmandl

Claude Lanzmann claims that the fact of Nazi annihilation, followed by efforts to destroy its evidence, meant that he was ‘obliged to construct’ Shoah from ‘the traces of traces’, since they were all that remained.1 In Shoah, the prominence of the story of Adam Czerniaków, the wartime head of the Warsaw Ghetto Judenrat who killed himself in 1942, suggests that such a ‘trace’ could take the form of an interlocutor whose viewpoint is highly valued even in the face of their death. In the outtakes, the rather different instance of an attempted interview with a former Nazi, the one-time gas-van driver from Chełmno, Gustav Laabs, takes place in the form of a filmed event despite the fact that the interlocutor, although still alive, never appears.2 In both these cases, substitution for the individual’s presence is made by the camera, as well as by the reading aloud of documents: while Raul Hilberg recites from Czerniaków’s diary in Shoah, in the outtake footage Lanzmann reads out the judgement brought against Laabs at his post-war trial. On several other occasions in the released film and in the outtakes, Lanzmann reads aloud wartime communications written by those who are no longer living, including a report about modifying the gas-vans sent to the SS officer Walter Rauff by Willy Just, as well as a letter from the rabbi of Grabów, Yaacov Sylman, to friends in Łódź about the killings at Chełmno. However, Lanzmann’s wish to interview Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl, who had been the religious representative in the wartime Bratislava Working Group and took a leading role in its actions of attempted rescue, points towards a more consistently presented alternative on the director’s part to the usual linking of body and voice in testimonial films. This chapter examines the interviews Lanzmann conducted with three of the late rabbi’s associates, and these encounters’ wide-ranging and self-conscious ways of using dialogue and image in order to invoke not Weissmandl’s presence, but the implications of his absence. Weissmandl, who had died in 1957, over twenty years before Lanzmann’s filming began, would have been a significant figure in any cinematic treatment of

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attempted rescue and resistance. As a member of the Working Group in Slovakia, Weissmandl used bribery initially to gather and disseminate information about the Nazis’ killings, to secure the release of individuals and to distribute aid to deported Jews. More systematically and on a larger scale, payments were used in efforts to halt expulsions first from Slovakia, and later, in the so-called Europa Plan, from all occupied European countries.3 Since he could not interview the late rabbi, Lanzmann has to construct an indirect or composite sense of Weissmandl’s presence, through the words of others and by means of a range of cinematic techniques. It is possible to imagine ways in which the footage, already carefully composed, could be edited to present an impressionistic representation of Weissmandl. By such means, what would have been the rabbi’s clearly charismatic persona, characterized by his conviction and persuasiveness, emerges even though he is absent. Weissmandl was unusual as an orthodox rescuer, whose faith enjoined the saving of life above all else, even though his physical appearance, use of rabbinical language and religious world view made some of those with whom he worked wary of his actions and appeals.4 Weissmandl was born in Hungary in 1903, moved with his family to Tyrnau in Slovakia as a child, then to Nitra to study under Shmuel Ungar, the Chief Rabbi of Slovakia, whose daughter he married.5 Weissmandl’s scholarly expertise led to his identifying a misattributed Hebrew manuscript during a series of visits to Oxford’s Bodleian Library in the 1930s, where he also undertook some prewar rescue initiatives.6 When deportations of Jews from the Nazi satellite state of Slovakia to Auschwitz and other camps began in 1942, Weissmandl and others in the ‘shadow government’ of the Working Group bribed the Slovak and Nazi authorities to halt the expulsions. The deportations were indeed discontinued for two years, until their resumption in 1944 in the wake of the Nazi suppression of the Slovak National Uprising. Although post-war estimates contest their conclusion, the Working Group were convinced that it was the acts of bribery which were responsible for a halt of this kind that was ‘unparalleled’ in occupied Europe.7 After his arrest by the Gestapo in 1944, Weissmandl succeeded in escaping from a transport bound for Auschwitz by cutting his way out of the train with a saw he had concealed in a loaf of bread, following the very method he had urged other people to practise, but his wife and five children were sent to their deaths at the camp. The rabbi fled back to Slovakia, where he spent the remainder of the war in hiding in a bunker, while continuing his efforts at bribery and rescue. In 1946, Weissmandl left Slovakia and established a yeshiva, based on the one at Nitra, in New York’s Mount Kisco, where the first pupils were young men orphaned by the war. He remarried and had more children, but, as Lanzmann’s interviewees and

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the fact of his own early death attest, Weissmandl found it hard to adjust to the post-war world in the light of the losses he had been unable to prevent. Lanzmann was clearly intrigued by the notion of religious imperatives to prioritize the saving of life, both one’s own and those of others, and in each of the present interviews turns to the same episodes in Weissmandl’s wartime biography, particularly the law-flouting acts of bribery, escape from the deportation train and the rabbi’s post-war ire at those who had not helped. Lanzmann’s attention is focused on Weissmandl, despite the noteworthy role played by all the Working Group members, most significantly its left-leaning and secular Zionist leader, Gisi Fleischmann. Fleischmann was Weissmandl’s second cousin by marriage, a family connection that allowed him, as an orthodox man, more readily to work alongside a woman.8 Fleischmann, who was sent to her death in Auschwitz in 1944, is credited with holding the Working Group together, in the face of its composition of ‘practically all the divergent ideological Jewish trends of our time’, as Yehuda Bauer puts it.9 In André Steiner’s phrase, during his interview with Lanzmann, Fleischmann was ‘in a woman what Weissmandl was in a man’.10 However, Lanzmann did not try represent her in the indirect way he chose for the late rabbi. In Weissmandl’s stead, Lanzmann interviewed three of the rabbi’s close associates, Siegmunt Forst, Hermann Landau and André Steiner, from different periods of his life, and it is on these encounters that the present chapter centres. The director also interviewed other individuals, including the Israeli lawyer Shmuel Tamir, who had known Weissmandl after the war, and Mr Becher, a present-day member of the Mount Kisco yeshiva, suggesting the possibility of a multifaceted indirect portrait.11 Forst speaks for the rabbi’s pre- and post-war religious life, Landau addresses his wartime appeals for money and Steiner his activities in the Working Group, while Tamir praises Weissmandl as a rescuer at the expense of Rezső Kasztner, and Becher recounts details of the rabbi’s view of the past from his post-war North American vantage point. Each of Weissmandl’s three main associates, Forst, Landau and Steiner, has their own fascinating story of life in and escape from wartime Europe, including in Steiner’s case membership of the Working Group itself and the narrow evasion of deportation to Auschwitz in 1944. However, in each instance the interviewee is in agreement with Lanzmann that their primary subject is not their own history but that of the late rabbi. Nonetheless, an image of the efforts of the Working Group and the individuals who constituted it emerges, providing material for a film either about the Group and its activities – as the filmmaker Martin Smok claims that Lanzmann promised – or for one about Weissmandl as the embodiment of ambitious rescue attempts through bargaining and bribery.12

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Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

In Lanzmann’s outtake footage, Weissmandl is represented in the light of his absence by a variety of means, including cinematography, elements of bodily reenactment, the appearance of symbolic objects in the mise-en-scène, dialogue and the reading aloud of documents, including letters and cables written by him. Although all of these filmic strategies appear in Shoah and elsewhere in the outtakes, their effect here is of a different kind in these unusual circumstances. The ‘double focus on experience and distance’ that is customarily what viewers gain from video testimony is taken to an extreme.13 This makes the projected composite testimony about Weissmandl not the exception that it appears to be, but, rather, a paradigmatic expression of the complex interplay in this format of presence and absence. Pieter Vermeulen argues that ‘video testimony affords an immediate experience of the non-experience of the disaster’, and this is just the effect in this instance of the rabbi’s ‘non-presence’.14

Siegmunt Forst: ‘I was fascinated by him’ Siegmunt Forst, an artist and Hebrew calligrapher, emigrated to New York from Vienna with his wife and two daughters in early 1939.15 He first met Weissmandl in 1931, through designing a book cover for one of the rabbi’s publications, and again after the war in the United States.16 The interview opens in Forst’s Williamsburg home with the mention of an unusual visual element, that of the photograph of Weissmandl on his desk (Figure 3.1): LANZMANN:  Dr Forst! FORST:  Mister Forst! LANZMANN:  OK, Mr Forst. This is the man? FORST:  This is the man we will talk about, yes.17

Forst’s status as intermediary is clear from the outset, even in Lanzmann’s opening error in calling Forst ‘Doctor’, as if he sees in his interlocutor a reembodiment of the learned rabbi, an impression enhanced by Forst’s adding that Weissmandl was ‘about my age’.18 As is made clear by the photographic image of Weissmandl, a third figure marked by absence will feature in the interview. Forst adds, about Weissmandl after the war, ‘he was here, in this room’, just as the rabbi’s photograph, lit up by the reading-lamp, is now.19 Lanzmann famously rejects archival footage, but, although this is the only time in any of the outtake material that we glimpse the late rabbi’s face, the photograph of Weissmandl is presented an object in the film’s mise-en-scène rather than a piece of

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Figure 3.1  Siegmunt Forst with a photograph of Rabbi Michael Weissmandl, NYC.

documentary evidence. The same is true in Shoah in the different circumstances of Lanzmann’s confronting Josef Oberhauser, the only defendant to be found guilty of war crimes at Bełżec, with a photograph of Christian Wirth, the camp’s first commandant, on the sole occasion in the released film that such an image appears.20 In Weissmandl’s case, the status of the photograph as an object rather than an indexical sign is highlighted by the way it is filmed. There is no close-up on his face, which remains framed not only in the everyday sense of its display on Forst’s desk, but also by the dialogue. Despite Weissmandl’s practical-seeming responses to the war’s unprecedented events, Forst invokes the notion of ‘two worlds clashing’ in relation to the project of attempted rescue.21 He ascribes the failure of the rescue initiatives to the affinity of Jewish leaders in the United States, who might have provided the funds Weissmandl sought, for ‘the polished gentlemen of the State department’, whose counsel not to interfere with the war effort followed their disinclination to respond to demands from ‘those orthodox, bearded Jews’.22 Forst presents the failure to gather funds for wartime rescue as the result of requirements for ‘orderly’ and ‘logical’ budgets and accounts, which suited neither the emergency nor Weissmandl’s attitude that money ‘meant nothing’ yet was an essential tool:

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‘He could give money left and right when it could indirectly help somehow pave a way.’23 As we hear from Hermann Landau, even the plan to rescue by bribery was based on the religious imperative to pay ransom, following the fact of the head of the community’s ‘right to tax the people how much to give for the release of prisoners’.24 Lanzmann sums up the notion of clashing worlds in a rhetorical question that underlies his own filmic interests, phrasing the impasse in geographical terms: ‘How is it possible to imagine Treblinka from New York?’25 At times, Weissmandl was able to bridge what seemed to be differences in world view of this kind. Forst recounts the rabbi’s description of visiting London and persuading the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, to support a pre-war rescue plan, although the archbishop was not ‘friendly to Jews’, and Weissmandl was dressed so shabbily that he was not allowed into Lambeth Palace.26 In wartime Slovakia, this rabbinical unkemptness became a greater liability, as André Steiner describes the potentially dangerous nature of Weissmandl’s appearance in his black coat with hat and beard. This meant crucially for Lanzmann’s purposes that others had to speak on the rabbi’s behalf to authority figures in the past, as they do in the present to us. Forst’s words about Weissmandl’s demeanour in the immediate post-war period constitute a prelude to those of Landau, at whom the rabbi’s anguish was more personally directed. While Forst, like Landau, heard Weissmandl’s pleas for money during the war, these were in the communal form of letters read out at his synagogue in New York. Forst admits that, although the congregation understood the situation in occupied Europe ‘intellectually’, their understanding was ‘not with the heart’.27 For his part, Forst recounts that there was a ‘vast gap’ between the kind of discrimination against the Jews that he had witnessed in pre-war Vienna and the act of ‘killing them’.28 Lanzmann’s calling this a ‘very important point’ refers not only to the content of the testimony and Forst’s portrayal of his own wartime responses, but also to the director’s wish to represent the difficulty of accepting that genocide was taking place even as it unfolded. Forst’s commentary is characterized by his account of Weissmandl’s post-war status as a ‘completely broken man’. The rabbi was sequestered in a small room in Williamsburg, ‘hammering his fists on the wall’, ‘crying and screaming’ against ‘the whole world’, including Forst himself, at whom he shook his fist.29 In a way that might remind the viewer of the philosophical meditations on the relationship between culture and barbarism by Theodor Adorno and Jean Améry, the rabbi was so disenchanted with the ‘pseudo-order’ of Western life that he considered moving to Morocco, away from Europe and the United States, or living on New York’s Bowery among others who were outside everyday existence.30

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Forst’s account of Weissmandl’s wartime experiences, arising from his hearing about them during the fraught post-war period, takes the form of his own attempts to elaborate on the late rabbi’s thought by viewing the rescue initiative within the context of his religious convictions and pragmatic experience. In this way, Forst contrasts Jewish and non-Jewish responses to catastrophe, describing the notion of paying off the Slovak and Nazi authorities as a larger-scale version of long-standing habits of ‘bribing the gentile’. Such a response, leading to what Forst calls the ‘insane yet realistic’ Europa Plan, is placed by him in opposition to the idea of a ‘hero’ who sacrifices his life for a cause.31 Forst declines to speculate on what Weissmandl thought at the moment of his escape from the train to Auschwitz – ‘I cannot’, as he says – but describes him as a hero in the different sense of adhering to the ‘divine commandment’ of ‘not giving one’s life away’.32 Such a discourse contrasts sharply with that of Abba Kovner’s ‘appeal’ to the Jews of Vilna to resist by choosing their own deaths. It is possible to imagine Forst’s voicing Weissmandl’s dismissal of such an impulse – ‘The act of revenge, the use of physical power, even in a hopeless situation where it doesn’t have any effect, that is the gentile way’ – being placed alongside Kovner’s advocacy.33 Lanzmann’s demeanour in the interview with Forst, to whom he listens with notable attentiveness, so that his off-screen presence is often signalled only by wafts of cigarette smoke, suggests the director’s high level of engagement, at least for the purposes of his film, with the orthodox religious perspective presented by this ‘strictly observant’ interviewee.34 Forst is able to relay Weissmandl’s beliefs not only on the absolute priority of preserving life, but also on his religious opposition to political Zionism, while continuing to distinguish between his own views and those of the late rabbi. Forst speaks for Weissmandl’s critical view of Zionism, in the sense of its goal to establish a nation-state, and of the importance of preserving European orthodoxy. He ventriloquizes the rabbi’s view that to ‘transplant the assimilated Jew into his own territory’ where ‘he will be like another nation’ is to effect an unacceptable ‘change of identity’ for the Jewish people, since, in Weissmandl’s words, in the diaspora ‘we are a universal religion, a universal people’.35 Forst replies to Lanzmann’s query about the effect of the Holocaust on such thinking to say that it did not change: a wish to ‘channel’ Jews to Palestine during the war was just a matter of ‘mechanics’, and did not affect the ‘deeper’ significance and advisability of the Jews’ being ‘dispersed among the people’.36 Although Lanzmann attempts to persuade Forst to present the religious view on such ‘mechanics’, including the clear reference to the Hungarian situation’s ‘tragic’ fact of ‘choosing’ between people, Forst declines.37

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Hermann Landau: ‘What could have been done and what was not done’ Hermann Landau was born in Antwerp, and became a member of the Belgian Judenrat after the country’s occupation, but fled to Switzerland with his wife and brother in 1942.38 He was unable to save his parents, who were sent to their deaths in Bełżec after being deported to the Kraków Ghetto. In Switzerland, in his role as the secretary for a fund assisting Jewish exiles in Shanghai and elsewhere, Landau worked alongside the rescue mission of Recha and Isaac Sternbuch, and received Weissmandl’s pleas for money to support the Bratislava rescue plans.39 Landau met Weissmandl for the first time in Switzerland in 1945, before emigrating to Toronto.40 Lanzmann’s focus in the present encounter in New York is on the correspondence Weissmandl sent to Switzerland during the war, as well as Landau’s impressions of the rabbi after they met in 1945 (Figure 3.2). During the course of the interview, Landau takes up Weissmandl’s position in contradictory ways that are nonetheless full of filmic potential. He does so by a mixture of individual recall and the reading aloud of the late rabbi’s wartime letters, revealing their turning from pleas for help to accusations against those, including the Swiss representative of the American Joint Distribution

Figure 3.2  Hermann Landau, NYC.

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Committee, Saly Mayer, whom he saw as failing to provide money. In a way that evokes different modes of representation, Lanzmann asks Landau if he had seen a photograph of the rabbi before their first post-war meeting. Landau had not, and, in place of the portrait photograph that was present on Forst’s desk, the interview opens with a kinetic reconstruction of the late rabbi’s presence and his reaction after the war to the fact that insufficient funds were provided to bribe the Nazis. Of the first meeting between Landau and Weissmandl, we learn: LANDAU:  [Weissmandl] was even so enraged, that he hit me, he was hitting, he really hit me with his fist … I was running around the table, he was running after me until he catch up with me and hit me with his fist and say … ‘why did you not do more, you could have done much more’.41

In the present time of the interview, Landau speaks as if from Weissmandl’s subject-position, even though the question posed by the rabbi was originally addressed to him – ‘why did you not do more?’ – and his own hand intrudes into the frame, re-enacting the rabbi’s assault. Landau’s gesture here emphasizes the fact of Weissmandl’s absence even as it substitutes for the late rabbi’s actions. By this means, Landau’s actions and words conform to, rather than disrupt, video testimony’s ‘paradoxical combination of spatiotemporal distance and emotional copresence’.42 Having Weissmandl’s post-war grief reported by an onlooker, rather than by Weissmandl himself, acts as the filmic equivalent of literary polyphony, in the sense not just of the presence of many voices but of the construction of an image of that subject from varied external perspectives.43 However, after their fractious initial meeting, the two men became so close that Landau says his wife demanded of him, ‘are you married with Mr Weissmandl or are you married with me?’44 Lanzmann’s pressing Landau to adopt Weissmandl’s first-person subject position by reading out the rabbi’s letters and cables takes this image of closeness further, to that of speaking in his place. As the example below shows, the letters include supplication and accusation, with Landau voicing the first-person position which had originally constructed him as the addressee: LANDAU:  ‘We beg of you with tears running from our eyes, you have but one obligation: to give money and money and money in large quantities … cry to them about the souls of old people … tell them about the souls of hundreds of thousands of Jewish children … tell them about the souls of the thousands that were suffocated by smoke in the death houses’.45

In the transcript, the quotation marks signal the presence of Weissmandl’s voice, in an effort to register the complex nature of this act of revoicing. Landau’s role is twofold. His appearance, as a bearded orthodox man, whose own long black

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coat is visible hanging on a wardrobe door and who is filmed praying at the conclusion to reel 11, constructs him as a visual stand-in for the rabbi. He is also Weissmandl’s former associate, possessing his own role in the events he recounts. Indeed, there is a temporal and vocal layering of this kind in Landau’s recitation of the letter. Landau concludes, ‘If I read this letter, I get myself tears in the eyes, because I remember that in this time we were mightless.’46 The tears described in Weissmandl’s letter as ‘running from our eyes’ provoke Landau’s as he reads it aloud, conveying a confluence of past with present. Instead of being at odds with the rabbi, as the letters’ exhortations to act and Weissmandl’s postwar assault suggest, Landau is not just an intermediary, but a medium, for the late rabbi. Lanzmann’s decision to ask Landau to read out Weissmandl’s communications, rather than doing so himself, marks a divergence from his usual practice. Indeed, it is for the very reason that Landau did not write the letters that he is enlisted to recite them. In his interview with Kovner, Lanzmann’s reading what he took to be the interviewee’s appeal was to make the role and content of that document a part of the dialogue, whereas in the present encounter it is the act of reading, as well as what is read, that is significant. Landau speaks in a dramatic present tense about the past, as if the events are still unfolding, as we see in his introducing another extract from Weissmandl’s letters: LANDAU:  And now he writes – it’s very heart-breaking – ‘And now we ask, how can you eat, sleep? How can you live? … Remember that [every day] they lead [to death] 13,000 of your brothers and your sisters, men and babies, women and old people … If you say you have done everything, we shall say it is not true. For God’s sake, do now and do quickly.’47

The repeated adverb ‘now’, used in Landau’s prefatory words and in those of Weissmandl which he quotes, delivered in a shaking voice, gives the impression of a continuous present. Lanzmann asks Landau in varying ways about his own situation during the war, the ‘very difficult personal experience’ of living ‘in Switzerland, in Montreux, and to get these letters coming from the “Nacht und Nebel”’.48 This emphasis on Landau’s wartime position in a neutral country culminates in his defensive response after he reads out some cables sent to the American State Department in Bern: LANZMANN:  There is this contrast between the speed of the information and the fact that nothing was done. Everybody knew … LANDAU:  That you have to ask the Jews of America. You can’t ask me, I was in Switzerland.49

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The third of Weissmandl’s letters from which Landau reads is the one to which the absence of response at the time, and in the present, is most striking. The letter, addressed to Nathan Schwalb, the director of the office of the Zionist youth movement Hechalutz in Geneva which also attempted to assist Jews in occupied Europe, is dated May 1944, at the time of the mass deportations of the Hungarian Jews. As Landau puts it, Weissmandl writes with his ‘full heart’: LANDAU:  ‘Our brothers! Have you gone mad? Don’t you know in what hell we live? Who do you keep that money for? … Crazy murderers! … Who permits you to demand from me a report and budget, as if it concerned bargaining over clothes and articles, before you give us one per cent of a thousandth of what we need?’50

Lanzmann’s interests, including the gulf between knowledge and understanding, rescue attempts by religious versus secular individuals and the changes in the rabbi’s rhetorical style, are fully represented by this letter. Landau’s reading of it prompts the director to ask about the ‘bureaucratic’ answer the letter received, and to elicit from the interviewee his view on whether the facts of mass murder were known in Switzerland and the United States. Landau responds: ‘They had knowledge of [the murders] … but they didn’t understand what it meant, that Hitler was out to kill completely the Jews of Europe.’51 However, Weissmandl’s words are voiced in order to represent his attitude and viewpoint, rather than to be taken at face value. By this means, distractingly historicist questions about the efficacy of bribery, and what the actual reasons were for the halting of deportations from Slovakia in 1942, are avoided. Not only does Lanzmann ask each of his interviewees if they believe that the scheme of bribery did halt the deportations, a hint that the historical record suggests otherwise. He also encourages Landau to explain Weissmandl’s own doubts about the Nazis’ good faith. These had a material effect, causing the rabbi to hesitate between different kinds of action, in Landau’s phrasing: ‘If he should act in the way he started his dealings with the Germans, or if he should use the way of terror.’52 Lanzmann’s interest in Weissmandl’s uncertainty over these options, and the rabbi’s gradually becoming convinced of the necessity for violent action, is part of the director’s wish to represent the different facets of his character. Over the course of the three interviews Weissmandl is variously described as a ‘partisan rabbi’ who personally amassed dynamite in order to blow up the train-tracks leading from Hungary to Poland, yet also one following what Landau calls ‘the old way of the intermédiaire, to bribe people’, as well as a religious leader, the ‘Pope of the orthodoxy’. Once more, Weissmandl’s thoughts are given expression by Landau’s reading aloud from the rabbi’s letters to Switzerland:

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Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes LANDAU:  ‘There are two ways’ … (assumption (a), he calls it), ‘that we should try further to deal with the Germans – maybe they mean it, maybe you can believe them. And on the other side, maybe they do this only to bring us peace of mind so we, the Jews in Slovakia or Hungary, think the Germans want to deal with them … so it would be easier for them to deceive [the Jews] and deport them’.53

The weighing up of these options is evidence of Weissmandl’s ‘fighting within himself ’, in Landau’s phrasing.54 Despite his own eventual preference for ‘terror’, as Landau argues, and his urging the Allies to undertake the bombing of the railway tracks to Auschwitz, neither Weissmandl nor the members of his yeshiva acted on these ideas for fear of communal reprisals. The cinematography in Landau’s interview emphasizes visually his role as a surrogate for Weissmandl, often by making him appear anonymous even as he recites letters and cables on the rabbi’s behalf. On several occasions as Landau reads aloud, the camera attempts to match his action by a gradual zoom on to his face, ending with an extreme close-up. This very tight framing on Landau’s eyes and mouth emphasizes the foundation of testimony in seeing, followed by reporting, yet dissolves his individuality. The possible role of such footage is revealed in an extra section where the camera silently films documents over Landau’s shoulder, suggesting that this sequence was to furnish visual material for which his voice, reading aloud the text of letters or cables, would be the soundtrack. Lanzmann’s plan to show the letters as Landau reads from them is evident in his frequent, and usually fruitless, instructions to his interviewee to read slowly and clearly, and his direction to ‘cut’ before the end of reel five when the interviewee does not do so.55 In this concluding footage, we see Landau’s finger trace the Hebrew of Weissmandl’s texts, including the rabbi’s initials. Although Landau is anonymous since his face is invisible, Weissmandl’s name is legible. The materiality of the missives, alongside their contents, emphasizes in visible form the extreme difficulty and expense of ensuring that they reached their destination, as well as the efforts Weissmandl went to after the war to reassemble his correspondence (Figure 3.3).56 Like the photograph with which Siegmunt Forst’s interview opened, the signature is a visible trace of the rabbi’s one-time presence. However, rather than enabling access to Weissmandl and his story, the photograph and signature are themselves images of the testimony’s indirect nature. These traces of the rabbi’s life encode his death, as Jacques Derrida puts it of the nature of the signature, or indeed the photograph: ‘The mark can do without the referent.’57 Lori Wike likens Roland Barthes’ analysis of the photograph to Derrida’s of the signature, and she

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Figure 3.3  Reading Weissmandl’s handwriting over Hermann Landau’s shoulder.

interpolates in square brackets Barthes’ term into Derrida’s argument from his essay ‘Signature Event Context’ to this effect, in order to show their similarity: By definition, a written signature [photograph] implies the actual or empirical non-presence of the signer.58

Lanzmann’s drawing attention to the signature and photograph in the interview with Landau shows that the closer to these traces the camera approaches, the more distant the late rabbi is. Derrida argues that the paradox of the signature rests on its apparent one-time uniqueness requiring that it also be reproducible: ‘In order to function, that is, to be readable, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to be detached from the present and singular intention of its production.’59 In this way, any impression of ‘the singular’ presence of Weissmandl’s signature and of his photograph is subverted by the ‘repeatable, iterable form’ they have here, as the products of mechanical reproduction shown on film. The photograph and signature are images of the concept of indirect testimony in which they appear. Yet, notwithstanding what we might see as the subversion of an illusion of presence in the case of these traces of Weissmandl’s existence, the interviews promise the possibility of a

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specifically filmic representation of his wartime life. Lanzmann’s project is taken to its logical conclusion in this footage for an indirect testimony. We can only expect the originary event, or in this case the testifying individual, to be accessed through the imagination.

André Steiner: The ‘Sprachrohr’ or mouthpiece In the montage of voices about Weissmandl, André Steiner speaks from the closest point to the late rabbi’s wartime activities, since he was on the spot with Weissmandl as a member of the Bratislava Working Group.60 Steiner was a Bauhaus-trained architect living in Brno when Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Nazis in 1939, and, as the possessor of a Slovak passport, fled to Bratislava. He became a member of the ÚŽ (Ústredňa Židov or Jewish Central Organization), the Slovakian equivalent of the Judenrat, taking part alongside Weissmandl, Fleischmann and others in the ‘shadow government’ of the Working Group and its rescue attempts. In the last months of the war, Steiner fled to the mountains where he and his wife and son were sheltered by peasants, then joined the partisans, before emigrating with his family to the United States. The present encounter takes place over the course of two days in the mid-century house in the Atlanta suburb of Druids Hill which Steiner had designed for his family. On the interview’s first day, we see the two men sitting together in close proximity on a sofa, with the director’s ash-tray balanced between them, the living room’s brightness enhanced by the yellow tones of walls and furniture and echoed by the colour of Steiner’s shirt (Figures 3.4 and 3.5). On the second day, Lanzmann and Steiner are filmed in a modern conservatory, a setting characterized rather by tones of blue and green, including their matching blue shirts, the picture windows revealing the wooded landscape surrounding the house. These visually arresting settings succeed in conveying the interviewee’s post-war success and his new life in the United States. However, as suggested by Steiner’s comment that, on his arrival in Atlanta in 1951, he was the first to ‘build modern homes as we in Europe considered a modern home to be’, the real significance of these settings is their encoding the past.61 They accomplish this by emphasizing the importance of Steiner’s profession as an architect and designer during the war years, as he puts it: ‘buildings … saved my life’.62 Under Steiner’s directive, the Slovakian forced-work camps outside Bratislava, those of Sered’, Vhyne and Nováky, not only became self-sufficient factories that ensured

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Figure 3.4  Claude Lanzmann and André Steiner, Atlanta.

Figure 3.5  Lanzmann and Steiner in matching shirts with garden backdrop.

the safety, at least until 1944, of workers who had been expelled from their own jobs and homes, but whose production of furniture was central to the efforts to bribe Slovak and Nazi officials. Steiner’s role here is to recount and re-enact his role as Weissmandl’s wartime spokesperson.63 By contrast, the later documentary André’s Lives (Brad Lichtenstein 1999) has Steiner as its protagonist, naming him ‘the Jewish

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Schindler’ for his acts of saving people by means of their labour. As the present interview’s emphasis on his profession suggests, Steiner differs from Forst and Landau in being a secular Jew, reporting that Weissmandl once said to him, in ‘a very joking way’, ‘André, just one thing is wrong with you – you are not orthodox’.64 Lanzmann’s questioning the reason he has a beard, to which Steiner responds that it is ‘not for religious reasons, just for fun’, emphasizes that the director values his interviewees’ visual likeness to Weissmandl.65 Following this notion of different reasons for resembling the bearded and bespectacled late rabbi, while the orthodox Landau described his relationship with Weissmandl as quasi-marital, it is the assimilated Steiner who responds to the rabbi’s religious aura and his ‘magic influence’ as a ‘Jewish prophet’.66 This aspect of the encounter with Steiner has an almost meta-cinematic function, in its centring on the tension between Weissmandl’s appearance and his intangible authority, in an interview resting on its protagonist’s absence. In the place of the photograph of Weissmandl in the meeting with Forst and his signature in that with Landau, Steiner gives an opening verbal portrait of the late rabbi that draws on colliding discourses. Steiner does so in the context of trying to convey Weissmandl’s ability to present practical arguments but by using a persuasiveness of almost otherworldly force. In his account of their first meeting, Steiner describes Weissmandl convincing him, in the face of his initial refusal, to ask the Slovak government minister Isidor Koso for permission to set up a kosher kitchen for the orthodox Jews in the work-camp at Sered’. Steiner’s physical descriptions of Weissmandl are a prelude to his account of the latter’s spiritual kind of sight, and the rabbi’s power of persuasion which depended in turn on invoking the realm of the bodily. Steiner recounts the effect of Weissmandl’s ‘beautiful blue eyes’, the ‘only beautiful’ aspect of the rabbi: STEINER:  Otherwise he was outside a pretty ugly Jew, like in the Stürmer’s … caricatures … of a Jew with a dirty kaftan, long payos and a big beard, very unkempt. [But], as I faced him eye to eye, suddenly I started to see not this outside, but through his eye, this incredible, beautiful human being.67

Weissmandl’s biographer, Abraham Fuchs, sees this kind of description, also uttered in Steiner’s testimony of 1964, as a tendentious expression of the gulf between assimilated and observant Jews, arguing that, for the non-religious Steiner, any orthodox man ‘with an untrimmed beard and sidelocks was “ugly”’.68 However, such a characterization on Steiner’s part acts rather as a critique of his own initial impulse to disregard the viewpoint of an orthodox Jew. This disruption of any notion of judging by appearances highlights once more the

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definitive absence of Weissmandl from the mise-en-scène, and his continued life in the imagination of his former associates and of the viewer. The unexpected importance of orthodox perspectives on wartime rescue is a significant element in Lanzmann’s outtake interviews, not only in relation to Weissmandl himself, but on rescue and resistance more generally. It is possible to imagine footage about self-critical preconceptions of this kind as voiced by Steiner placed alongside material from the encounters with American interviewees such as Roswell McClelland, who also registers his initial wariness at negotiating with orthodox individuals, as well as those with Jewish rescuers, such as the communist Hersh Smolar, with quite different political convictions. Steiner’s account of the rabbi’s words on this occasion reveals that Weissmandl himself counselled using the tension between physical and spiritual attributes as a rhetorical device. He voices the advice Weissmandl gave him to see Koso as only human when requesting the kosher kitchen. Like Landau’s reading aloud of the rabbi’s letters, this enables Steiner to repeat in the first person those words that addressed him in the past: STEINER:  ‘I’ll tell you something. You go to Dr Koso, and the moment you start to speak to him, you look at him sitting … on a toilet. And the very moment you look at him that way, he is the same human being that you are. You will see that suddenly you are going to dare to tell him anything you want. Don’t be ashamed; you will achieve it.’ And sure enough.69

For Steiner, the rabbi became more than his physical attributes precisely by urging him to see the Slovak and Nazi authorities as only that. The term ‘human’ is used ambivalently by Weissmandl, to endorse himself and undermine Koso, in their respective positions in wartime Slovakia of dehumanized powerlessness and Nazi-endorsed status. As Steiner puts it, Koso’s act of sitting down at a desk, in a situation where being left standing was a mark of lowly status, was transformed into one where the realm of the ‘lower bodily stratum’70 was suddenly visible: ‘I was looking at him as he sat down, exactly as Weissmandl had told me: that guy was naked in my eyes, seeing him naked sitting on the john’.71 In a way that allies the dialogue to the mise-en-scène of his mid-century American home, since it makes the past apparent in the present, Steiner claims that Weissmandl’s image of a powerful person as only human ‘even here [in the United States] in my profession influenced me very much’.72 The request for the kosher kitchen succeeded, not only due to its unexpected brazenness, but because even on that occasion, Steiner explicitly outlined his role as Weissmandl’s spokesperson. Indeed, this act of description itself persuaded Koso to agree to the kosher kitchen:

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Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes STEINER:  I started to smile, so Dr Koso asked me what I was smiling at. So I told him. LANZMANN:  You told him? STEINER:  I told him: ‘Dr Koso, I must tell you. You know Rabbi Weissmandl. He asked me to come to you … I was afraid even to come to you, but Rabbi Weissmandl told me I should look at you and see you sitting on the john. And I did, I really saw you sitting on the john. Now please listen to what he wants’. And a miracle happened, as Weissmandl had said. [Koso] said, ‘OK, go ahead. You can have it’.73

Steiner’s success in the past depended, as it does in the present interview, on his recounting, as well as enacting, Weissmandl’s words to interlocutors for whom the rabbi is absent. Steiner seems so mindful of this retrieval of the past that he likens the interview with Lanzmann to his wartime encounters where Weissmandl’s coaching was most crucial, those with Dieter Wisliceny, who was Eichmann’s deputy and the SS officer in charge of ‘the Jewish question’ in Slovakia: STEINER:  At the time, we had a very close relationship. We spoke with [Wisliceny] – both Gisi Fleischmann and myself – in the same way as I am speaking now with you.74

It was on the strength of his achievements with Koso that Weissmandl convinced Steiner to go to Wisliceny, in the hope of bribing him to stop the deportations from Slovakia with the offer of dollars and a post-war alibi. Following Lanzmann’s request – ‘You talked about the blue eyes of Weissmandl. Can you say more about the eyes?’ – Steiner invokes the rabbi’s eyes in order to account for his deciding to acquiesce in the rabbi’s urging him to approach Wisliceny: ‘Again he looked at me, I would say like a prophet … I dared to stand up to the German, not on the strength which I had, but on the strength which Weissmandl gave me.’75 Steiner recalls his encounters with the Nazi Wisliceny, emphasizing the difference between those with the Slovakian Koso and the SS officer by using a different method of reporting speech. In the meeting with Koso, the voices of the past were separated out: Steiner repeated to Lanzmann what Weissmandl advised him to say, followed by his recounting the act of explaining those very instructions to Koso. However, the higher stakes of the meeting with Wisliceny, as a Nazi official during the ‘very serious situation’ of mass deportations in 1942, are conveyed by the contrasting means of merging the reported and reporting voices. Steiner does not reflect on his role as spokesperson for Weissmandl to Wisliceny, as he did with Koso, but simply enacts it. In his account of the meeting with the SS officer, three interleaved voices are perceptible, as Steiner

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in the present repeats those words from the past that Weissmandl had told him to use. The transcript’s use of quotation marks for Steiner’s utterance should therefore be double ones, to signal the presence of a quote-within-a-quote: STEINER:  Once I was sitting with Wisliceny, I told him everything [Weissmandl] had told me … ‘You think you are going to win. We think you are going to lose, so be from now on our informer. We are going to pay you fine, and we are going to do certain things which will be good for us as Jews and good for you Germans too.’76

Steiner is once more Weissmandl’s ‘mouthpiece’, or ‘Sprachrohr’, as he was called by the Working Group, speaking to Lanzmann and to the viewer in the present as he did during the war when addressing Wisliceny.77 Like Forst, Steiner ascribes Weissmandl’s ability to exploit the power of money, and to declare that bribery is ‘a must’, to his viewing it as ‘just paper’.78 The rabbi’s faith in money purely as the means to the end of saving lives entails its instances of what Lanzmann calls ‘fantastic’ inventiveness, an adjective that aptly describes those elements of the offer to Wisliceny which were, even in these grimly compelling circumstances, fictive and hard to believe. Steiner’s presenting Wisliceny with a $10,000 bribe was followed by his making the declaration that ‘I, Steiner, am going to be the contact-man between you and world Jewry’.79 As Steiner recounts, this phrasing was drawn from Gisi Fleischmann’s advice that ‘under no circumstances should I say that it is the Slovak Jews speaking to [Wisliceny]’, because he would judge that they ‘are not strong enough’.80 However, Steiner describes the source of the dollars used to bribe Wisliceny on this occasion in 1942 as indeed coming from the Slovak Jews, a source nicknamed by the Working Group the Bodenkreditanstalt. Meaning literally ‘land credit bank’, Bodenkreditanstalt was the name of a well-known Viennese bank which, until its enforced merger with another institution in 1929, was a significant provider of finance for private and state ventures in nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury Austria. But in wartime Slovakia, the term was used for what Steiner describes as money which ‘orthodox Jewry had hidden in the ground’, drawing on the literal meaning of ‘Boden’. This source furnished the total of $50,000 used to bribe Wisliceny in 1942, in the form of paper money which had to be ‘cleaned, because often it was very dirty’, before being put in an envelope and handed over to him.81 The destabilizing interplay between reality and metaphor that this detail raises is compounded by Steiner’s account of Weissmandl’s expansion upon the imperative that Wisliceny should believe ‘that this is an action backed and financed by world Jewry’.82 Steiner describes Weissmandl’s thus exploiting

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the Nazis’ belief in their own propaganda about an all-powerful and fabulously wealthy Jewish conspiracy. To support this fantasy, Weissmandl created the figure of Ferdinand Roth, the ‘representative of world Jewry’, a man ‘who was supposed to be from Switzerland, and would negotiate money for the … rescue action’.83 Steiner’s account of the lengths to which Weissmandl and Fleischmann went in their invention includes his own symptomatic error: STEINER:  Weissmandl and Gisi Fleischmann forged letters from Switzerland written in a big Swiss hotel with a letterhead and so on … This they showed to Wisliceny. It was signed by Joseph Roth.84

Steiner’s slip of the tongue, in giving the invented Ferdinand Roth an incorrect first name, reveals his awareness of the consummate fictionality of this ruse by invoking the inter-war Austrian novelist Joseph Roth. The Germanic ‘Ferdinand’, by contrast to the Hebrew ‘Joseph’, was clearly carefully chosen for its suitable resonance, as the first name not only of several aristocratic rulers of Austrian and German states, but of figures central to twentieth-century German history, including the inventor of the Zeppelin aircraft. The apparent success of the bribery scheme, its fictive elements materially grounded in dollars dug up from the earth, in halting the deportations from Slovakia in the autumn of 1942, prompted Weissmandl and the Working Group to put to Wisliceny the even more ambitious Europa Plan, which proposed that payment would be made to ensure that all deportations of Jews in the entirety of occupied Europe should cease. However, neither the local so-called Bodenkreditanstalt nor Swiss or American sources of money were able to support the ‘divine arithmetic’ of this larger plan, by which Weissmandl calculated that, as one million Jews remained alive in occupied Europe, the Working Group would offer the Nazis $2 million: two dollars per person.85 This idea of comprehensive rescue was the rabbi’s response to the realization that genocide was taking place, the counterpart to Abba Kovner’s different reaction in the particular circumstances of occupied Vilna a year earlier. As if showing the potential for him to assume the late rabbi’s place, an extreme close-up on Steiner’s face accompanies his description of Weissmandl’s coming to learn through reports from Poland in late 1942 about the mass murders, which the rabbi read aloud with ‘his eyes completely full of tears … trembling with his whole body’.86 It is not only Steiner who was left perplexed by the ‘miscalculation’ on Weissmandl’s part that the inability to raise funds for the Europa Plan seemed to represent. Although the detail of events in Slovakia and their significance is still debated, it seems that, despite its members’ conviction otherwise, the Working Group’s bribery was not the main reason for the halting of

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deportations from Slovakia between autumn 1942 and the ‘second wave’ of 1944, nor is it clear that the Europa Plan, the Working Group’s ‘big idea’ which was its offshoot, could have succeeded even if the funds had been made available.87 As Steiner puts it of the news of extermination, gained by the Working Group in late 1942 on the evidence of reports from emissaries and camp escapees, STEINER:  We thought if the information went out abroad, to the English and to the Americans and Switzerland, about what deportation really meant – annihilation – then … suddenly every pocket would be opened and we would be inundated with money. But it didn’t happen.88

As is the case with the other Weissmandl-centred interviews, Lanzmann encourages the clarification of events for the sake of future viewers, since his own knowledge of the facts about which he poses questions is – as he frequently reminds his interlocutors – detailed and extensive. Thus Lanzmann says to Steiner on the topic of the Working Group as a ‘shadow government’ in the Bratislava Judenrat, ‘it is very important, and I think we are talking for people who don’t know exactly the situation’.89 Viewers of the outtakes can only imagine that the editing process would have resulted in the removal of much of this contextual and preparatory material, including Lanzmann’s own interventions. For instance, the director breaks the formal frame of the interview to comment on his other encounters, including that with Rudolf Vrba, who had lived as a child on the same street in Nitra as Weissmandl’s mentor and father-in-law Rabbi Ungar, and Steiner’s words enable the director’s sudden perception of the ‘key to the mystery’, ‘one of the surprises of making such a film’, in the form of a detail from Benjamin Murmelstein’s interview about a transport of Polish children mysteriously arriving at Terezín.90 Most strikingly, Lanzmann poses during the encounter the central questions about rescue and resistance that characterize all his outtake interviews on this theme. At times, it seems possible to detect the director’s own view in his comments to Steiner on the ‘very interesting and very unique’ idea of the Europa Plan, which was ‘to save all the Jews who could be saved … not to choose and select a sample of Jews, no?’91 But the benefit of Lanzmann’s leading questions of this kind, and the contrast that he explicitly draws with the ‘Noah’s Ark’ of the Hungarian rescue negotiations, is to prompt Steiner to elaborate further. Thus Steiner summarizes what he calls ‘Weissmandl’s formula’, which became that of the Working Group: ‘We cannot select, we cannot play God, and we speak about the communities.’92 The director follows with a question that sounds like a reference back to Kovner’s convictions: ‘Do you think [Weissmandl] would have preferred to have the whole community destroyed rather than save a small part?’93 Indeed, Steiner relates the

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wary nature of Weissmandl’s response to news of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, since such a course of armed action ‘meant death’. As he adds, ‘We really wanted to save lives – not to die as heroes.’94 Such a line of thought, congruent though it is with Hansi Brand’s similar denunciation of what she saw as fruitless heroics, leads the discussion to the painful subject of Weissmandl’s jumping from the deportation train in 1944. His decision to escape from the train was the result, in Steiner’s words, of a ‘Messianic mission so big that it made him leave his family, go back again and try to be as helpful as much as possible’, following the rescue campaign’s goal that ‘other people, unknown people, might be saved – not us and our families’.95 Yet the rabbi ‘considered himself the murderer of his family’, and his having escaped while they remained in the train reduced him to ‘a very disturbed state of mind’ in which he ‘cried constantly’.96 Indeed, Lanzmann’s habit of posing counter-arguments, including his questioning the very basis of the Nazis’ sincerity in relation to the Working Group’s bribery plan, since the SS had ample opportunities simply to steal money, suggests that a filmic polyphony of different viewpoints, juxtaposed in the form of a debate, would have been possible in any final edit of this footage. However, the very idea of such a debate, on the varied responses to the situation in which the Jews of Slovakia and elsewhere in occupied Europe found themselves, raises the distasteful notion of competition between retrospective viewpoints on responses to mass murder, and their being judged against each other. Steiner’s concluding comments suggest that, as long as rescue took place, following the religious premium placed on preserving life above all else, Weissmandl’s approach was eclectic, in Steiner’s phrasing: ‘The saving action in his mind was in the military way, the partisan way, the bribery way, the moral persuasion way – everything should be done to save Jewish lives.’97 Steiner’s interview concludes, as it began, with his establishing a line of continuity between his activities in the wartime Working Group and his present-day life as an American architect, this time through another slip of the tongue. He claims that his role in the ‘Rettungsaktion’ or rescue operation was ‘the greatest personal satisfaction of my life … here in Slovakia – I mean Atlanta’.98

Conclusion Siegmunt Forst likens Rabbi Weissmandl to a comet, which ‘shines, and in a second it gets burnt out’. The comet furnishes an analogy for Lanzmann’s efforts to create a film about an absent individual, who ‘enlightened everybody around him’, but was eventually no longer visible.99 As well as alluding to his early death,

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this image suggests a gulf between the rabbi’s wartime and his post-war standing and reputation. Forst claims that Weissmandl seemed like a revenant in the postwar era, one whose very survival gave him an unwelcome status: FORST:  They wanted to forget; he would not let them forget. LANZMANN:  He was a living reminder? FORST:  He was a living reminder.100

Lanzmann’s prompting Forst’s phraseology shows that such a status, even as other survivors were troubled by it, makes the rabbi a fitting cinematic subject for the director’s purposes. Weissmandl’s post-war presence meant that others could not forget the past, but so too does his absence. In the face of the high estimates of Weissmandl, whose religious convictions existed alongside and informed his political acumen, Lanzmann’s encounters draw attention to the irony of his absence not only from the interviews that centre on his rescue mission, but from the historical record – and indeed ultimately from the director’s own filmography. Some of the very reasons Lanzmann seems to have found Weissmandl such a significant filmic subject are those that underlie his having been largely forgotten. The rabbi’s orthodox beliefs make his role as a rescuer less easily approachable than, for instance, the enigmatic intentions of such a different figure of this kind as the worldly Oskar Schindler, despite, or indeed because of, the latter’s status as a non-Jewish Nazi-party member. Although Weissmandl has not faced the accusations of compliance to the extent that they have been directed at Kasztner, and some have concluded that negotiation with the SS was the only viable approach when neither resistance nor flight was possible, his faith in the ‘miracle’ of being able to stop the deportations has been criticized by others for its uncertain basis.101 Equally, the religious origin of Weissmandl’s pre-war anti-Zionist standpoint became exaggerated after the war in his laments over the failure of the Europa Plan. As Shmuel Tamir relates to Lanzmann, Weissmandl refused to attend the Kasztner trial in person as a witness, since it would have meant his visiting the Israeli state. Extreme views of this kind are voiced in the rabbi’s post-war correspondence and his memoir, compiled after his death by his yeshiva pupils, as well as in Lanzmann’s interview with Mr Becher as one of those pupils.102 In Yehuda Bauer’s words, such a view as Weissmandl’s, that ‘the Jews were responsible for their own murder’, is ‘explicable only in psychological terms’ as the product of ‘social trauma’.103 In a cinematic sense, the notion of an indirect testimony with such a figure as Rabbi Weissmandl would not generate a conventional biopic or ‘talking heads’

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documentary about a deceased person.104 Rather, Lanzmann’s assemblage of interview footage can be considered alongside other experimental efforts to represent absent individuals. For instance, in Clio Barnard’s 2010 film The Arbor, actors, ‘speaking at one remove’, give lip-synch renditions of individuals’ oral testimony in this portrait of the late playwright Andrea Dunbar.105 The Arbor was shot in part on the eponymous street in Bradford’s Buttershaw Estate, the setting for Dunbar’s life and writing. In the contrasting political context of wartime and post-war genocidal murder, both Romuald Karmakar and Milo Rau have directed films which involve the verbatim re-enactment by actors in the present of historical speeches. In the interview with André Steiner, Lanzmann asks him to repeat in German words heard over the telephone in Wisliceny’s office purportedly spoken by Himmler, while in Karmakar’s film The Himmler Project (2000), the actor Manfred Zapatka reads aloud the text of Himmler’s infamous ‘Posen speech’, delivered to SS generals on 4 October 1943 to justify the Nazis’ racially motivated crimes.106 Milo Rau’s Hate Radio (2011) is a filmed version of his play quoting speeches from the popular radio station RTLM (RadioTélévision Libre des Mille Collines) that goaded members of the Hutu majority in Rwanda to murder almost a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994.107 Lanzmann uses versions of these techniques for his documentary construction of indirect testimony, including the present-time recitation of textual material against carefully conceived backdrops. The settings for Lanzmann’s encounters are ones whose present-day relation to the interviewees possesses oblique or poetic visual relevance to the history about which they talk. However, the filmic methods Lanzmann uses, in terms of the locations and speaking subjects he chooses, establish a deterministic link between the absent past and the audible and visible present. Most significantly, those who speak for the late Weissmandl, either quoting him from documents or from memory, are not actors, nor by any means simply the ‘speaking tubes’108 that Peter Weiss envisaged for his 1965 verbatim play The Investigation. Rather, they are witnesses to the events they recount, and to the life of an absent witness. Forst, Landau and Steiner are thus in cinematic terms both metaphorical and metonymic stand-ins for the late rabbi. The interviewees’ roles enact the substitution characteristic of metaphor, in the sense that they speak in Weissmandl’s place in the present, yet these roles also arise from the metonymic contiguity of their past associations with him. They do not just impart information, but ‘hauntologically’ represent Weissmandl’s absent presence through image and sound.109

4

Ghetto rescue and resistance: Tadeusz Pankiewicz, Hersh Smolar and Leib Garfunkel

This chapter centres on Lanzmann’s interviews with eyewitnesses from three of the ghettos of occupied Europe, those of Kraków in Poland, Minsk in Belarus and Kovno in Lithuania. The encounters reveal very varied circumstances through a wide range of interview techniques, in their centring on notions of rescue, flight, hiding, sabotage and delay. Lanzmann poses questions in each case about such topics as the apparent resignation of the ghetto inmates, the making of choices between obedience and subversion in contexts without viable options, and the sentiments of the eyewitnesses in the present about their past actions. The first example is that of Tadeusz Pankiewicz, the non-Jewish proprietor of the Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, whose consistent vantage point on successive waves of round-ups and killings throughout the ghetto’s existence makes him a highly unusual witness. In occupied Minsk, Hersh Smolar was a leader of resistance activities, both within and outside the ghetto, by enabling people to escape to the surrounding forests and join partisan groups, while Leib Garfunkel was a member of the Kovno Ghetto’s Jewish Council, the so-called Ältestenrat, where the Council’s efforts were directed towards the stated goal of saving lives. The encounters with Pankiewicz, Smolar and Garfunkel are significant in relation both to Lanzmann’s concerns in Shoah and to those of rescue and resistance, as evident in the outtakes more broadly. Apart from those with Abba Kovner and Benjamin Murmelstein, the present three interviews stand out among all the director’s filmed encounters as centring on the effect of the sealed and sequestered nature of the wartime ghettos on their inhabitants’ responses. Although some ghettos were eventually transformed into concentration camps, or resembled them due to the prevalence of forced labour, starvation, disease and ‘selections’ for death, existence in these spaces differed from that in the camps since versions of community institutions and the pattern of families occupying domestic dwellings were still in place, by contrast to the wholly

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alien conditions experienced by the atomized prisoners of the concentrationary universe.1 This entailed different goals for active resistance in the ghettos, where it took the form of ‘armed protest’, versus that in the camps, where it aimed to destroy machinery and enable escape.2 Yet in both settings, ‘quieter’ kinds of response to the circumstances of ghetto or camp existence, such as the sharing of information or transfer of individuals into the forest, equally have the effect of acts of resistance.3 The present interviews suggest that life in the ghettos could be seen not only as a ‘prelude’ to the extermination camps which are the focus of Shoah, but as itself ‘a major experience’ of the Holocaust years in locations that were sites of mass killing.4 Smolar’s efforts in the Minsk Ghetto as a communist activist assisting escape, like Pankiewicz’s in Kraków of subversion and the saving of individuals, and Garfunkel’s to ‘buy time’ in order to save as many people as possible, constitute alternatives to internal armed revolt as that took place in the Warsaw Ghetto. While Smolar describes the enabling of flight in Minsk as paramount – in his phrasing, ‘we did not have an uprising, because with us it was rescue, rescue, rescue’ – resistance was incompatible with rescue in the context of insurrection in the Warsaw Ghetto.5 Even if the Warsaw resisters imagined that some of their number would be able to escape and continue fighting, neither rescue nor military success, nor even survival, were envisaged as possibilities. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is a model which has become, in Barbara Epstein’s phrase, the ‘gold standard’ of resistance in cultural memory, as well as a touchstone for Holocaust education and lessons about standing up to repression, while other modes of response have been less widely remembered or commemorated.6 In the case of each of Lanzmann’s interviews centring on these lesserknown ghettos, with their differing national and political contexts and absence of armed internal revolt, the look and mode of the encounter constitutes an unexpectedly apposite visual correlative to the dialogue. This takes the form of a uniting of location with utterance in Pankiewicz’s case, a struggle between interpretive attitudes on the part of interviewer and interviewee in that with Smolar, exaggerated by the latter’s speaking in Yiddish, and the use of an unprecedented format in Garfunkel’s, where his voice is represented through an interpreter’s reading aloud his published history of the Kovno Ghetto, set alongside his own utterances in the encounter’s present. Unlike the case with the Rabbi Weissmandl and War Refugee Board (WRB) interviews, it is hard to envisage the interleaving of these particular interviews, or indeed that with Abba Kovner on the fate of the Vilna Ghetto, despite their common focus. However,

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in the interview with Smolar, Lanzmann asks his interlocutor to compare the situation in the Minsk Ghetto with that in Warsaw and Vilna, implying a concern with the determinants of different resistance-related responses. The script for Garfunkel’s interview has been marked up for cutting, showing that, until a late stage, its inclusion in Shoah was still being considered. As the appearance in the final film of the former Warsaw Ghetto resistance fighters Yitzhak Zukerman and Simcha Rotem suggests, the ghettos’ crucial role in the Nazis’ perpetration of mass murder entails their centrality in Lanzmann’s project.

Tadeusz Pankiewicz: Topographical testimony Tadeusz Pankiewicz is the sole non-Jewish rescuer of individuals among Lanzmann’s interviewees, meaning that, apart from Jan Karski, he is also the only one to whom the title of Righteous Gentile was awarded after the war.7 Pankiewicz was born in Kraków in 1908, qualified in pharmacology at the Jagiellonian University and then worked in the Apteka Pod Orłem, in English ‘Under the Eagle’, the pharmacy established by his father Josef. During the Nazi occupation, the pharmacy’s location in Podgórze fell within the area designated as the Kraków Ghetto, from which all non-Jewish inhabitants were expelled in the spring of 1941. Although he tells Lanzmann that he obeyed a Nazi order originating with Hans Frank, the Governor-General of Poland, to stay on as a pharmacist in the ghetto, in his memoir Pankiewicz describes insisting that he should remain, in order to prevent the family pharmacy from falling into German hands and being ‘ruined’.8 Such an initially pragmatic decision, based on his conviction that the Germans would lose the war, became the opportunity for Pankiewicz to undertake remarkable acts of philanthropy and rescue during the years of the ghetto’s existence. The pharmacy was situated on the corner of Kraków’s Targowa Street and the square then known as Plac Zgody, meaning, as Lanzmann drily points out, ‘harmonie’ in French, or ‘peace’ in English, and which formed the boundary of the ghetto.9 Plac Zgody was the main square in what became the ghetto, where it functioned as respite for the inmates in their overcrowded quarters, and housed one of the meeting places of the Jewish resistance, in whose honour it was renamed in 1948 as Plac Bohaterów Getta, or Ghetto Fighters’ Square. Plac Zgody was also the site of Nazi atrocities, where ‘all the round-ups started and ended’, as Pankiewicz puts it to Lanzmann. Although Pankiewicz was the only non-Jew living in the ghetto, the pharmacy’s work-room doing double duty

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as his apartment, he was aided in the dispensary and its clandestine activities during the two years of the ghetto’s existence by the Polish assistants to whom he dedicates his memoir, Irena Droździkowska, Helena Krywaniuk and Aurelia Danek. They commuted daily into the ghetto, and, in Pankiewicz’s words, ‘for the entire duration’ of its existence, ‘risked their lives to bring aid to its inhabitants’.10 While Droździkowska was herself a qualified pharmacist, Krywaniuk and Danek were student apprentices.11 Although, like their employer, all three lived in Poland until their deaths in the mid-1990s, Lanzmann chose only to interview the better-known Pankiewicz. In his memoir, Pankiewicz describes the process, in which he was assisted by the three women, of turning the pharmacy into a place of refuge, solace, information exchange, hiding of individuals, forging of documents, storage of goods, including ghetto inmates’ valuables and Torah scrolls, and even the shelter of pet dogs left behind by deported families. The pharmacy’s situation in the ghetto afforded its proprietor the particular ‘post of observation’ through its ground-floor window, showing him to be well suited to Lanzmann’s interest in eyewitness to the process of deportation and murder.12 Such a vantage point suggests a topographical testimony, in which the details of location and proximity not only authenticate but form the substance of an act of witness. As well as being an onlooker at the expulsions from Kraków to the forced-labour camp of Płaszów, Pankiewicz witnessed deportations to the death-camp at Bełżec. He therefore shared the evolving comprehension of that camp’s workings and its genocidal function, as he says to Lanzmann, revealing his close identification with the ghetto inmates, ‘I knew everything that the Jews knew.’13 The interview with Pankiewicz took place in Kraków in the spring of 1979, almost exactly thirty-six years after the destruction of the ghetto, and is conducted in German, enabling the two men to speak directly to each other. It consists of two parts, the first a series of preliminary reels of Pankiewicz and Lanzmann talking out-of-doors in the area of the former ghetto, including a reel of silent footage of that location. The second part consists of an elaborately staged interview with Pankiewicz, dressed in a chemist’s white coat as he was in the past, in a reconstructed pharmacy. While the scene in the pharmacy is an attempt to draw testifier and spectator back into the world of the past, the first part set in the area of the former ghetto accomplishes such an effect more obliquely. The interview opens with a sequence filmed in the former Plac Zgody, Pankiewicz’s cutting a dapper figure, since he is dressed formally in a dark grey raincoat over a three-piece suit, sporting a mustard-yellow tie and a tweed trilby, contrasting with his wearing the white overall of a pharmacist in the later

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sequences. Lanzmann equally has a formal look, dressed in a beige raincoat and a tie. The two men walk down Targowa Street together away from the former pharmacy. At Lanzmann’s prompting, Pankiewicz gestures towards the ground-floor window of the pharmacy, obscured by present-day construction work, as a prelude to our later sight of his being filmed inside a replica of it (Figure 4.1). This sequence of two-shots, as interviewer and interviewee approach the camera side-by-side, implies a closeness of the kind conveyed by similar tracking shots of Lanzmann and Benjamin Murmelstein walking together along Rome’s Via Sacra in The Last of the Unjust (2013). However, in the present case such an impression is belied by the brevity of the encounter – it lasts for one hour, while that with Murmelstein is over eleven hours long – and the fact that we seldom see Lanzmann in shot again after the first few minutes. The two men then sit on a bench in the square, where close-ups on Pankiewicz’s face cut Lanzmann out of shot. Although the USHMM annotations identify this location as Plac Lwowska, which was situated on one of the streets bounding the ghetto, Lanzmann confirms the interview’s still taking place in the main square. As he asks of Pankiewicz, using the nomenclature of the past to describe their

Figure 4.1  Tadeusz Pankiewicz and Claude Lanzmann, pointing to the window of the former Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy.

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present location: ‘Can you describe exactly what you saw here in Plac Zgody, the big round-ups?’14 The backdrop to this section of the interview might seem unpromising, since the square is being renovated to the accompaniment of much noise and seeming confusion. Yet the devotion of an entire film-reel to recording Plac Zgody under the conditions of refurbishment suggests its possible role as the visual complement to Pankiewicz’s words. The square is bisected by barriers made of chicken-wire and covered by paving stones piled up on uneven, rocky wasteland ground amid piles of rubble, between which pedestrians navigate. This imagery of a transitional state makes the process of renovation look as if it could equally be one of destruction. The square is shown to be surrounded by blackened, windowless old buildings, as well as the towers of 1960s housing blocks. It is possible to imagine the footage of this present-day environment matched with Pankiewicz’s description of the area’s past, the images of the current rebuilding acting as symbols of the wartime construction undertaken in order to imprison: ‘the whole ghetto was fenced off … fenced off with brick walls and barbed wire’.15 Pankiewicz and Lanzmann discuss the very question of what remains to be seen of Kraków’s wartime surroundings, in a city which did not undergo the destruction suffered by Warsaw and its ghetto. This arises in relation to Pankiewicz’s description of the ghetto’s division in December 1942, into two parts, Ghetto A for those who were working, Ghetto B for those to be immediately ‘resettled’, which, as Lanzmann points out, ‘means death … liquidation’.16 The boundary between the two sections fell in the middle of Plac Zgody, so that the pharmacy was in Ghetto B: PANKIEWICZ:  Ghetto A and B. Here runs the barbed wire from the pharmacy to, to this little house. LANZMANN:  Yes, yes … PANKIEWICZ:  And here was Ghetto A and here was Ghetto B. And in these demolished houses, the Jews, who belonged to Ghetto B [lived], and they … LANZMANN:  … but all the houses are the same houses … PANKIEWICZ:  … yes, yes, they are the same houses. Except for the houses which were torn down, as you can see …17

Pankiewicz uses a present-tense narration to describe those elements, such as the barbed wire, which no longer exist, as well as those, like the houses of the former ghetto, which are still standing. His gesturing at what were the wartime locations of the two ghettos blurs the distinction between what is still visible and what is absent.

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The continued significance of the events of the past is emphasized further by a fleeting but resonant close-up on the stylized green metal shade of a street lamp bearing the square’s current designation as Plac Bohaterów Getta.18 The present-day name commemorates the acts of resistance which Pankiewicz mentions in passing in his memoir, and briefly to Lanzmann.19 Indeed, the pharmacist is at pains to emphasize the difficulty of conducting armed resistance in the Kraków Ghetto, by contrast with the topography of that in Warsaw. The lamp attests to the communist-era emphasis on anti-fascist resistance, albeit acknowledging the separate existence of the ghetto fighters, and acts as a flashforward to the establishment four years later in 1983 of a museum on the site of the pharmacy.20 Its presence casts an ironizing light on Lanzmann’s efforts to follow the sceptical-seeming trains of thought that he frequently voices in his outtake interviews, on the subjects of the Judenräte and an apparent absence of rebellion that the director’s own interviews serve to challenge. Despite the absence of what Pankiewicz calls in his memoir a ‘libertarian revolt’ in Kraków, he describes the occupants’ less dramatic forms of ‘sabotage’ through delay and acts of destruction, followed by their facing death ‘with dignity, honorably’.21 During the encounter with Lanzmann, this insistence on understanding rather than blame emerges when Pankiewicz describes the ‘death runs’ in which Jews being rounded up were shot at: LANZMANN:  And how were the Jews? Were they without hope? PANKIEWICZ:  They were so resigned, they were so resigned … LANZMANN:  … resigned. PANKIEWICZ:  … that they, I think that, that, they wished for an immediate end.22

Pankiewicz repeats here the notion of ‘resignation’, a term frequently used in his memoir, where it refers to a state of existential fatalism on the part of those for whom circumstances had been deliberately made ‘unbearable’, as he puts it to Lanzmann.23 Despite the caveat Pankiewicz gives during the interview, to the effect that ‘this atmosphere can’t be comprehended if you weren’t here and didn’t see and didn’t experience this with the Jews as I did’, Lanzmann returns to the possibility of blame: LANZMANN:  It was really impossible for the Jews to fight against these forced resettlements?24

So different is this notion from Pankiewicz’s recall of the situation in the ghetto that at first he takes the interviewer to be asking about armed insurrection.

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Lanzmann clarifies his question by repeating his interlocutor’s own terminology, but still with the implication of an unaccountable acquiescence: LANZMANN:  But the people who were being resettled, the people who went to Plac Zgody for the forced resettlement. How were these people? Completely resigned? PANKIEWICZ:  Yes, they were very resigned. They were very resigned. They … they knew exactly, what was coming … they couldn’t do anything. They … just wanted the end to come … they couldn’t bear it any more. The atmosphere in these round-ups was so harsh, so, so, so terrible, so much screaming, so much shooting, so many deaths, and so on, that they wanted, that they wanted … they were completely resigned and they wanted their lives to end, to end.25

Both the strengths and liabilities of Pankiewicz’s testimony are clear in this utterance. He is so eager to convey his sympathetic sense of events that his impressions emerge in a rushed and even jumbled manner that is reflected in his verbal repetitions. At the interview’s opening, Pankiewicz speaks stammeringly, although later, in the pharmacy sequence, where he is allowed to talk uninterrupted, this takes the form instead of a deliberate and emphatic repetition as we encounter it here. The reel of silent footage of the former Plac Zgody concludes with the camera lingering on the pharmacy’s first-floor window and its balcony, as if drawing our attention to the possibility of overseeing events taking place on the square below. It is tempting to envisage this image being matched by Pankiewicz’s words, uttered early in the interview, to the effect that ‘from the window of my pharmacy, I could see the worst things imaginable – the forced resettlements’.26 Pankiewicz’s fluent German allows the seamless integration into his discourse of the ‘Nazi-Deutsch’ phrases of the era, such as ‘Aussiedlung’ (‘resettlement’), used here in its sense of a euphemism for mass murder. This is highlighted in an instance where the interview’s English translation overlooks the effect of bringing different temporal periods together in this way. In the translated script, Pankiewicz’s words appear thus: PANKIEWICZ:  Yes, from the window of my pharmacy I saw all the action that took place.27

Yet in the original German, the phrase translated idiomatically into English as ‘all the action’ has a much more specific meaning: PANKIEWICZ:  Ja, aus dem Fenster meiner Apotheke hatte ich alle die Aktionen, welche stattfanden.28

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Pankiewicz uses the plural ‘die Aktionen’ here not to refer to events in general, as ‘all the action’ suggests, or to the term’s neutral meaning of ‘activities’, but in its specific Nazi usage as an ‘indispensable’ euphemism, in Victor Klemperer’s phrase, for violent and deadly round-ups.29 The descriptions Pankiewicz gives in his memoir of the Nazi brutality that he witnessed are both ‘shocking’, in Jan Gryta’s phrasing, and historically significant in enabling the reconstruction of round-ups in the ghetto.30 Although Pankiewicz and his assistants were themselves under the threat of death, for their clandestine actions or as ‘embarrassing witnesses’, only his particular non-Jewish viewpoint could offer such a consistent record over time, including the period after the final liquidation of the ghetto in March 1943.31 Yet in the present case, the very reasons for Pankiewicz’s success as a rescuer prevent their filmic instantiation. His embodiment of unassuming virtue might make his pharmacist’s coat seem rather to resemble the white garment of saintliness or innocence, but Lanzmann’s questions about personal risk attempt to prompt Pankiewicz’s return to the emotions of the past: LANZMANN:  Was it dangerous for you? PANKIEWICZ:  Well … it was dangerous, everything was dangerous, everything was dangerous, of course. It was during some forced resettlements that [the Jews came] into my pharmacy throughout the whole night.32

Pankiewicz moves quickly away here from acknowledging his own situation to that of the Jews fleeing the round-ups, his observation about the dangerous nature of ‘everything’ even accompanied by a self-deprecating laugh. Although the end of one film-reel interrupts these observations, Lanzmann returns at the opening of the next to his theme of living under the threat of death. In the place of emotional or traumatic flashback, we hear Pankiewicz’s striking statement of a personal ethics: LANZMANN:  But was this life, I mean your life, hard to bear? PANKIEWICZ:  You know, back then at that time, no … I share and shared the good and bad times with people. That was not a problem for me nor a question for me, if one is a Jew or non-Jew. Just good and bad people. And it will stay with me like that till death.33

Pankiewicz’s seeming not to live up to the director’s requirements is at its clearest in the second part of their encounter, which is filmed inside a replicated wartime pharmacy. It is an example of the restagings familiar from

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Shoah in the form of the reopened barber’s shop and Treblinka rail-track in Abraham Bomba’s and Henryk Gawkowski’s respective testimonies, designed to be the location for a return to the past. Yet, if Pankiewicz’s past demeanour is retrieved, it is of the same mild and self-effacing nature that we see in the present. The introduction to the pharmacy sequence is a long-shot in which Pankiewicz is a distant, bare-headed figure clad in a white coat, standing outside the entrance to the former chemist’s, while people go in and out of the building. The pharmacy itself had been transferred to a new location in 1967, so that in the present we see its replacement, the Nadwiślański Bar, whose rundown appearance is at odds with its scenic-sounding name, meaning ‘bar on the Vistula’.34 A gradual zoom suggests that Pankiewicz’s pose is one designed to echo a photograph from 1942 in which he stands in just such a position under the sign of the pharmacy. In the present, a passer-by, a woman in a green coat carrying a yellow shopping-bag, does a double-take on realizing that filming is taking place, first glancing at Pankiewicz in his white overall, then at the camera and finally back at the pharmacist. Such an exaggerated sense within the diegesis of a surprised gaze embodies the viewer’s awareness of the uncanny sight of Pankiewicz dressed once more as he was in the past. The camera’s slowly approaching the pharmacist and the glass door behind him, which bears the legend ‘Zapraszamy’, or ‘Welcome’, redoubles our sense of entering the domain of the past (Figure 4.2). A new reel opens with Pankiewicz standing inside the pharmacy, while varied shots emphasize different aspects of the mise-en-scène: his pensive face, the white pharmacist’s coat, the glass-fronted wooden cabinets and their contents. It is as if we are in the realm of Pankiewicz’s ‘memories’ of the pharmacy’s vanished history.35 The sense of a radical alteration in the pharmacy’s purpose during the years of the ghetto’s existence, since it became ‘the daily meeting place not of sick people who needed drugs, but of those eager for political news’,36 is apparent in the interview when Pankiewicz tells Lanzmann that, after the ghetto’s destruction, the establishment became an illicit ‘restaurant for the Jews’ from Płaszów: PANKIEWICZ:  They didn’t need any medication, for they wanted something to eat. I provided all that here. LANZMANN:  … yes, that’s very strange, isn’t it? PANKIEWICZ:  Yes, strange, yes.37

The pharmacy’s ‘strange’ role in providing a front for quite other activities is reprised in its present, clearly artificial, status as a backdrop.

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Figure 4.2  Tadeusz Pankiewicz outside the former Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy: ‘Zapraszamy/Welcome’.

During the sequence set in the pharmacy, the director attempts to make his interviewee’s humility into a feature of the encounter. A reel ends with the pharmacist’s observing that ‘I had no idea what to do, what I was doing. I didn’t reflect on it, I just acted’.38 The fact that this avowal of instinctively ethical behaviour might enhance our sense of Pankiewicz’s ‘righteousness’ is shown by Lanzmann’s continuing this topic into the next film-reel. It opens with the pharmacist’s clearest statement of his motivation, revealing that during the war he did ‘everything’ he could, even as he claims to see his actions as nothing remarkable: PANKIEWICZ:  There were a lot of Jews who built a legend around me …. But that … wasn’t true. I did only what a person should do for another, if he is in a tragic situation. Nothing more. I did everything. And since I never made a distinction between Jews and non-Jews, it was a completely natural thing for me.39

This declaration points to the liberal attitude that pre-existed Pankiewicz’s taking on the mantle of rescuer, exemplified by the ties he formed with Jewish schoolmates in the Podgórze Gymnasium and then at university during the prewar years, several of whom he met again in the ghetto.

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But this is not a legend of a filmic kind. Indeed, it is not for the sake of his ethical position as a rescuer that the encounter with Pankiewicz was sought. Emphasis on the status of ‘Righteous Gentile’, which was not in any case officially awarded until three years after the interview took place, might make it appear to be centred on the exceptional acts of an individual, in a way that jars with Lanzmann’s interest in Pankiewicz’s status, rather, as an unrivalled eyewitness to the fate of the Jews.40 Pankiewicz’s position as an onlooker who also intervened in events and was later their chronicler is made clear here through his recounting an ability to put himself in someone else’s place. His own precarious situation is phrased in a way that conveys the fine line between solidarity and identification, as shown in his hesitation between using the past or present tense as he starts the utterance: PANKIEWICZ:  I was, I was … I am so connected to [the Jews], that I had no way to think differently. I had, I had the feeling that I too could be shot every day, or forcibly resettled.41

Such a state of mind on Pankiewicz’s part, in which he repeats the phrase ‘ausgesiedlt’, ‘resettled’, about himself, helps to refine the image of the window that is frequently invoked during the exchange. Nonetheless, as Anna Pióro reminds us, by contrast to the Jews with whom he expressed solidarity, Pankiewicz ‘risked death because of the choices he was making, not because he existed’.42 Part of the reason for the contradiction between the encounter’s elaborate staging and its brevity lies in its communist-era setting of 1979 (Figure 4.3). The director was prompted to interview Pankiewicz by reason of his published writings and witness statements at war-crimes trials. However, the written record supersedes its oral version in Pankiewicz’s case. Although during their encounter Lanzmann mentions Pankiewicz’s memoir, which was published in Polish in 1947 as Apteka w Getcie Krakowskim [The Pharmacy in the Kraków Ghetto], it only appeared in its expanded translation in English and Hebrew in 1987, nearly a decade after the interview took place. Indeed, the last words of the interview include what seem to be Pankiewicz’s thoughts on the difference that would follow ‘of course, if my narrative, my memoirs [came out] in another language’.43 As Anna Pióro argues, the history of the pharmacy, from its establishment in the first decade of the twentieth century to its transformation into a museum in the early 1980s and its present-day status as a fixture in Holocaust education, constitutes a clear ‘reflection of the changing political system’ in Poland.44 Lanzmann’s encounter with the former pharmacist took place at a moment of incipient change, as the spectacle of building-work in the

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Figure 4.3  Tadeusz Pankiewicz in the reconstructed pharmacy.

square suggests, just before the museum’s opening. Indeed, in an essay on the real versus imagined city, Jonathan Webber claims that ‘Kraków is still a construction site for memory’, prompting us to view the digging and upheaval recorded in the former Plac Zgody by Lanzmann’s camera as a figure for the unearthing of wartime events.45 It was ‘towards the end of the 1970s’, at the very period of the interview’s occurrence, that efforts were made ‘to convince the municipal authorities’ to establish a memorial at the place that was ‘all-important for Poles and for Jews’.46 In 1981, just two years after the filming, the Nadwiślański Bar was closed down in preparation for the site’s transformation into a museum, and Krzysztof Miklaszewski’s television documentary Apteka Pod Orłem, including another interview with the former pharmacist, was broadcast.47 Lanzmann’s was the last to take place in the pre-memorial era. Pankiewicz’s status, as a non-Jewish eyewitness living alongside ghetto inmates, makes him unrivalled among Lanzmann’s Polish interviewees. Although Shoah includes notable moments of distress and guilt on their part, the film’s Polish protagonists are only ever witnesses, not agents, and Lanzmann has been criticized for what can seem like a manipulative exposure of unsympathetic views on their part.48 Pankiewicz does not exhibit survivor or bystander

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trauma or guilt on screen, as do the Treblinka villagers in Shoah, nor does he evidence the emotional effects of having suppressed the painful past, as does Jan Karski. Rather, his sharing of ‘the situation with the Jews, their joys, their sorrows’ in the ghetto establishes coherence between his pre-war life and the post-war period in which he remained in close touch with those he had known or rescued.49 This continuity is matched by that of the location, since the place where Pankiewicz spent the war was his home town, where he lived in the post1945 era and for the rest of his life. Such a matching of location to testimony is unusual in Lanzmann’s interviews in the case of anyone but bystanders. It is this continuity and Pankiewicz’s seeming resilience that gives the encounter its remarkable effects, but also renders it less suitable for Lanzmann’s wish to convey the high emotional cost of ghetto life. By the very focus on Pankiewicz’s remarkable deeds, as Gryta observes about the inclusion of information in the pharmacy museum on other efforts to provide rescue and aid, we are shown how ‘inadequate’ these attempts to help Jews could only ever be.50 The tension evident in all of Lanzmann’s rescue-related interviews between initiative and achievement is played out here, even more starkly in the case of a ‘Righteous among the Nations’.

Hersh Smolar: The languages of testimony Lanzmann’s almost two-hour encounter with Hersh Smolar is a notable contrast to that with Pankewicz. The differences between the two interviewees take various forms, in relation to their self-presentation and affect, their relationship to the interviewer and the encounters’ respective location and language. Smolar’s renown rests on his activities as a Jewish former commissar and partisan as well as a post-war historian of the Minsk Ghetto, ‘the only ghetto of Soviet Jews’, in distinction to Pankiewicz’s role as a clandestine civilian rescuer.51 Where the latter is modest and circumspect, Smolar is exuberant and talkative, placing himself at the centre of the remarkable events he recounts, his ever-mobile features showing exaggerated astonishment, fury or hilarity, evident in the close-ups that highlight his intense brown eyes and cloud of white hair. Smolar also gives bodily expression to the events he relates, sometimes banging on the table in front of him for emphasis, or gesturing to indicate the height of his attic hiding-place, the sprinkling of sand onto a mass grave, or the hanging of the Judenrat members. There is no equivalent in Smolar’s interview to the elaborate staging that we see in Pankiewicz’s, nor to the unusual coalescence of utterance

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and place in its Kraków setting. Indeed, there is no separately filmed footage of the locations that Smolar describes. Lanzmann and his crew did not venture into Soviet-era Belarus, although footage of its landscape taken two decades later features in Sobibór (2001). In a reprise of the situation with Pankiewicz, Smolar and Lanzmann address each other directly, but not in the same language. While the director poses questions in German, Smolar refuses to speak it and answers in Yiddish, or, in his phrasing, ‘mixed Yiddish with German’.52 Lanzmann equally incorporates elements of Smolar’s Yiddish vocabulary into his German discourse, making his utterance in turn German mixed with Yiddish. Smolar was born in Zambrów, near Bialystok in Poland, in 1905, where he became involved in communist politics. He studied at the Yiddish-language section of the Communist University of the Peoples of the West in Moscow, then undertook two Comintern missions to Poland, both of which led to his arrest. Smolar was in prison when the war broke out in 1939, and, after his release, spent the next two years in Soviet-occupied Białystok, as the editor of the Soviet Jewish daily newspaper the Bialystoker Stern [Bialystok Star].53 On the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Smolar did not join the many others who fled the city, because, as he tells Lanzmann, ‘I cannot leave my people’, a sense of communal solidarity that characterizes his observations throughout the interview.54 While his wife Walentyna Najdus-Smolar, who was also a journalist, and their infant son Alexander travelled by train to the interior of the Soviet Union, Smolar walked from Bialystok to Minsk, where he lived at first in the city’s ghetto, being ‘convinced’ that, as he says, ‘with it being the capital of White Russia, there must be a possibility to get out’.55 But this was an ‘illusion’, since everyone, including ‘the government … and the party leadership’ had fled, leaving a population, including 70,000 Jews, about whom ‘no one cared’.56 In the ghetto and outside it, Smolar was a leader of the resistance, and subsequently of a partisan detachment in the Belarusian forests. After the war, he returned to Poland until his dismissal from his journalist’s job on the Folks-shtime [People’s Voice] Yiddish-language newspaper led to what he calls his ‘illegal’ departure in 1970 for Israel via Paris.57 Smolar’s books are among the few eyewitness accounts of resistance in the Minsk Ghetto. Although Lanzmann does not mention them specifically, his frequently asking what Smolar saw with his own eyes of the ‘savage and unpredictable terror’ in Nazi-occupied Belarus is consistent with the director’s concern for direct witness.58 The interview took place in 1979 in Smolar’s apartment in Tel Aviv. He sits at a table facing Lanzmann, who is never seen, a cluttered bookcase behind the interviewee testifying to his career as a writer. A copy of Yuri Suhl’s early edited

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collection on resistance, They Fought Back of 1967, is both a visible reminder of the former partisan’s wartime activity and a signifier of its oral recounting, since its account of Minsk is based on interviews with Smolar, while the chapter on Minsk in Lucien Steinberg’s equally visible La Revolte des Justes: Les Juifs contre Hitler from 1970, draws on Smolar’s books and emphasizes the importance of collective resistance. The outtake material concludes with a separate reel of silent footage focused entirely on the director, allowing for the future editing-in of shots to show his attentively listening, relaxed-looking presence. The interview’s opening exchange reveals the distinctive nature of the rapport between Lanzmann and Smolar. Both are animated and affectionate, the invisible Lanzmann’s demeanour clear from his voice and interlocutor’s reactions: LANZMANN:  Ah, my son! You are my son. SMOLAR:  You are my son! LANZMANN:  No, you are my son. SMOLAR:  Soon there will be a fight. We will have to go to court! (Figure 4.4)59

This pre-established connection between the two men, who address each other informally as ‘du’, arises from Lanzmann’s customary practice of

Figure 4.4  Hersh Smolar, Tel Aviv, to Lanzmann: ‘You are my son!’

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preparatory meetings with his interlocutors, as André Habib reminds us, so that what we see is their being ‘interview[ed] … for the second time (but this time with a camera)’.60 With Smolar, Lanzmann’s seeking the repetition of ‘very precise details … that [the interviewee] had delivered to him on a previous occasion’,61 results here not in the ‘harassed looks’ on the interlocutor’s part that Habib describes, thinking perhaps of Michael Podchlebnik or Abraham Bomba in Shoah, but in further evidence of a vibrant and fond connection. ‘I want the anecdote of the glasses’, Lanzmann declares at the beginning of the interview as a way to ‘warm up’, prompting Smolar to recall losing his spectacles in an airraid and spending the rest of the war without them, to the wry amusement of both men.62 The notion of missing spectacles acts a figure for the importance of eyewitness, but also for Lanzmann’s challenges to his interlocutor. Indeed, the note of Oedipal rivalry in the good-humoured opening exchange is played out more overtly during the remainder of the interview. Lanzmann’s jocular declaration that he is Smolar’s father, despite being twenty years his junior, hints at a determination to establish his control over the narrative’s direction, while Smolar’s equally teasing reference to their having to ‘fight’ conveys his counterclaim of priority. Lanzmann uncharacteristically allows himself to comment on Smolar’s experiences as he recounts them, acting as a surrogate for the spectator in saying that particular details are ‘fantastic’, ‘horrifying’ or ‘terrible’. Indeed, the director’s familiarity with the interviewee emboldens him to speak sharply when Smolar does not at first describe in sufficient detail ‘the most terrible picture of the time’ he has in mind, that of the murder of the German Jews who had been deported to Minsk.63 Equally, in relation to Smolar’s account of a German Jew’s defence of Nazi adherence to orders in the ghetto, Lanzmann’s declaration that this is ‘unbelievable’ quickly turns into the much more definitive and sceptically voiced assertion, ‘I cannot believe it!’64 Most significantly, Lanzmann overcomes Smolar’s attempt to refrain until the interview’s end from giving the number of Jews saved through escape to the nearby Naliboki forest, in order to retain the sense of uncertainty that afflicted him at the time: LANZMANN:  But how many Jews? SMOLAR:  I will say this at the end. We didn’t know. We knew after the end of the war, when we arrived at the partisan parade in Minsk. We didn’t know exactly. But I will tell you. LANZMANN:  Yes, but approximately. SMOLAR:  Approximately? I have to say it already? We knew exactly. LANZMANN:  Why not? Yes … How many Jews were murdered in the ghetto, and how many did you save?65

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Lanzmann wins this ‘fight’ for control of the interview, persuading Smolar to recount for the camera at this moment what they both already know, that ‘after the pogrom [of late July 1942] which lasted for three days … there were 9000 Jews left in the ghetto’, out of the original 70,000.66 As we later also hear, the Minsk ghetto was liquidated in March 1943, leaving almost no one behind, while out of the 10,000 people who had fled to the forests or ‘Aryan’ city, just over half survived the war.67 This struggle over when to divulge facts seems unnecessary, given that the order of utterance could be changed post-production. It conveys Lanzmann’s wish to shape all aspects of the filmmaking, versus Smolar’s that the number of those saved will be a triumphal final revelation. Although the impression given by watching the outtake interview with Smolar is often one of a confusing jumping between topics, it does nonetheless adhere to the order of significant events, or what he calls ‘shocks’, in what Anika Walke characterizes as ‘a disturbing chronology of death’ in Belarus that unfolded with alarming speed.68 Both Smolar and Lanzmann speak of the periods ‘before’ and ‘after Purim’ to refer to the murder of 5,000 Jews on 2 March 1942, as part of a Europe-wide series of atrocities on that date. This ‘Aktion’, as Smolar says, brought ‘an end to the illusion … that there is still some hope for the ghetto’, prompting its inhabitants instead to redouble their efforts to acquire arms and leave for the forest.69 Such a system of dating acknowledges the Nazis’ cynical planning of atrocities to fall on Jewish holidays, or ‘yom tovim’, as Smolar puts it.70 The invocation of Purim imparts to the events something of the festival’s meaning in the Jewish calendar, given its origin in the biblical story of Esther and her uncle Mordechai defeating the genocidally inclined tyrant Haman, his name often used in Holocaust testimony as a synonym for Hitler’s.71 The same is true of the remarkable story related by Smolar of the Nazis being tricked into believing that he was dead, by means of a ruse on the part of Moshe Joffe, the Judenrat leader. Joffe ‘took and repeated the story of Joseph’ by presenting to the Gestapo a blood-stained ghetto pass bearing Smolar’s wartime alias of Yefim Stolarevitch and claiming that it had been found on the latter’s dead body.72 Like Pankiewicz’s, Smolar’s eyewitness status takes a topographical as well as a temporal form, in which his own life-threatening circumstances enable and frame his viewpoint. Smolar’s remarkable and repeated evasions of death, ‘against all the odds’, as Gennady Estraikh says, sometimes afforded him a vantage point on the kind of atrocity that otherwise destroyed its witnesses.73 By contrast to Pankiewicz’s perspective from the pharmacy’s ground floor, Smolar saw events in the ghetto from his ‘observation-post’ of a rooftop window.74 During the mass killings of 31 March 1942, when Smolar was wanted by the

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Gestapo, he was hidden by a ‘Jewish builder’, identified as Moyshe Boykin in his historical account:75 SMOLAR:  Do you know what ‘an attic’ is? He had it built … I was walled in between two walls, there was a brick that could be taken out, through which my food was given to me. But from that roof I could see everything that went on in the ghetto.76

For all its uncomfortable nature, the attic hiding-place gave Smolar an uninterrupted, panoramic view on such events as the mass murder of ‘nonworkers’ over several days in late July 1942, uniting his historian’s with his eyewitness perspective. Soon after this occasion, when he was being sheltered elsewhere in a flat belonging to the Belarusian underground leader Nazari Gerasimenko and his family,77 Smolar’s life was saved, although those who had sheltered him were killed, due to a corresponding inability to see from a rooftop perspective on the part of the Nazis who arrived to search for him. As Smolar says to Lanzmann: ‘The Gestapo were looking for me from one window and from the second, while I was lying there in-between [on the roof] in my underwear and they didn’t see me. From there I went back to the ghetto’.78 Smolar also witnessed the use of gas-vans, the so-called dushegubki, or soul-killers, from his attic window.79 Given Lanzmann’s concern in Shoah with the process of death by gassing, and the fact that the very origins of that murderous practice took place in Belarus, it is not surprising that he returns at the interview’s end to Smolar’s extremely unusual eyewitness perspective on these events. As Leonid Rein puts it of the evolution of the Nazis’ ‘mass annihilation’ in its turning from forced emigration to murder, ‘this change expressed itself to the fullest extent’ in Belarus.80 Smolar’s witnessing the gasvans’ operation is a viewpoint matched only by that of Podchlebnik in Shoah, who was made to empty the vans of corpses at Chełmno, and in the outtakes by the failed interview with the former gas-van driver Gustav Laabs, who never appears on camera, but whose trial deposition included his statement of witnessing the victims’ bodies in his rear-view mirror. Indeed, Lanzmann’s various filmed recordings of his reading aloud correspondence between Walter Rauff, August Becker and other Nazi functionaries about the gas-vans’ operation, for all its breathtaking matter-of-factness, stand in for this almost entirely absent witness. Smolar’s eyewitness status is enhanced in the viewer’s mind following the director’s question:

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LANZMANN:  But how was it possible for you to see? SMOLAR:  I was on the roof. I saw the whole area around from the attic window … And I saw how [the German Jews] were taken by the arm and helped in. The police helped them in. It was all in perfect order as if they were going on a trip, a regular trip.81

Part of the reason for Lanzmann’s excluding Smolar’s reportage from Shoah is that the director’s focus in the final film was on the use of gas-vans as a prelude to the larger-scale operation of extermination camps in occupied Poland, rather than their deployment alongside the mass shootings that were the practice in the occupied Soviet Union. More specifically, Smolar couches his description in the terms of the division constructed by the Nazis between those in the ghetto who had been deported from Germany and its local inhabitants, in a way that might seem a distraction from the atrocity itself. Smolar’s relating his rooftop viewpoint is, as his remark above about the attic shows, prefaced by his questioning Lanzmann’s understanding of Yiddish idiom. This could be viewed as a challenge, albeit one posed in the interviewee’s customarily good-humoured manner, to the directorial authority Lanzmann wishes to exert. The intermittent use of Yiddish on an interviewee’s part can constitute the irruption of the past, as it does in Shoah in the instance of Bomba’s sudden whispered words of that kind within his otherwise English-language interview.82 However, in the present case, since it is easier for Smolar to understand the director’s German than it is for the latter to understand his interlocutor’s Yiddish, a power imbalance is encoded in their language-use. Smolar’s choice here of his mother tongue is an expression of his lifelong experience as a Yiddish writer, evoking the language in which his books on the history of the Minsk Ghetto were originally written. It is also a political position, as he declares at the interview’s outset: ‘I will not speak German’, as his exaggerated look to camera on voicing the declaration makes plain.83 For Smolar’s appearance in the public realm, only Yiddish will do (Figure 4.5).84 The ensuing exchange between the two men on the question of language is a self-reflexive prelude to the viewer’s experience of their dialogue: LANZMANN:  I don’t understand a single word of Yiddish. SMOLAR:  You will understand every word that I will say in Yiddish. LANZMANN:  Good, I have understood this!85

The transcript of the encounter, consisting of Lanzmann’s German alongside Smolar’s Yiddish as transliterated from Hebrew into Roman characters, emphasizes the daytshmerish (i.e. close to German) form of Yiddish used by

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Figure 4.5  Hersh Smolar: ‘I will not speak German!’

the interviewee, as befits his vow to the director that the latter will understand ‘every word’.86 Although the original transcript is described as ‘Yiddish’ on the USHMM website, its written form is in German. Smolar’s Yiddish versions of the words for ‘German’, ‘daytsh’, and ‘Jews’, ‘yidden’, appear in the transcript in their standard form, ‘deutsch’ and ‘Juden’. Such a rendering cannot fully convey the performative irony of Smolar’s account of how the first Judenrat leader in Minsk, Eliahu Mushkin, was appointed, in which he voices the differences between German and Yiddish. A group of Jews rounded up for forced labour was brought to the German military commander, whose threat of death which eventually provoked Mushkin to respond is quoted by Smolar: SMOLAR:  ‘I say for the last time – or you will all be killed – who speaks German?’ So a Jew stepped forward … and said, ‘I understand a little German’. But he said it in Yiddish. So [the commander said], ‘You will be the Eldest of the Jews’.87

Smolar’s rendition of the different languages in this scene cannot be reproduced by this English translation. Within his Yiddish narration, Smolar acts out the quoted voices, pitting the military commander’s hectoring tone and standard German (in italics below) against Mushkin’s Yiddish response (in bold):

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SMOLAR: ‘Zum letzten mal sag ich. Es gehen alle kaputt. Wer spricht deutsch?’ Is aroysgekumen a yid, un hot gezogt, ‘A bisel farshtey ich daytsh’. Hot er gezogt, ‘Du wirst der Juden Älteste sein’.88

By this means, German is turned into a minority language that is quoted within the Yiddish of the narration. Although it portrays a version of the situation in which Lanzmann finds himself, where Yiddish supersedes the German that he is able to speak, the director’s appreciation of the scene’s irony and of its performance is signalled by his comment, ‘Fantastisch!’ [fantastic!], the term suggesting both unbelievability and wonderment.89 In the interview itself, Smolar’s use of Yiddish takes the form of word-choices constituting a layer of meaning that is missing from the English translation. This serves, as Hannah Pollin-Galay argues of instances of Yiddish ‘languageinsertions’ in video testimonies that are otherwise conducted in another language, to ‘dramatize’ aspects of Smolar’s account.90 His use of Yiddish words with Hebrew origins, such as struggle (milchomah, the word for ‘war’ in Yiddish), the end (sof ), east and west (mizrach un maariv), gives his account a biblical inflection in relation to both sound and narrative. Thus Smolar likens the episode of Moshe Joffe’s ruse of the bloodstained passport to ‘di geshikhte mechirat Joseph’, that is, the biblical story of the selling of Joseph, whose death was also faked.91 Indeed, Smolar’s pronunciation here, and in other instances during the interview, is inflected by the modern Hebrew of his present-day life in Israel.92 But it is the use of Yiddish to produce a mixed utterance at the level of both the discourse and its content that is most striking. For instance, Smolar’s description of the close relations between Jews and non-Jews in Minsk is voiced with a linguistic hybridity: ‘Es ist gewesen gemisht mishpoches’ [There were mixed families].93 The phrase ‘gemisht mishpoches’ is itself ‘mixed’, composed of words from two languages, here German and Yiddish respectively, that enact the coming-together of different cultures. This effect could perhaps only be conveyed in Yiddish, as a ‘fusion’ language like English, but one that, as Benjamin Harshav argues, was ‘much more directly aware of its composing languages, since it lived among them – among Hebrew texts and German and Slavic neighbors’.94 Yiddish is therefore the perfect medium in which to convey this insight into the relationships with ‘Slavic neighbors’ that were crucial to the resistance. In a specific instance concerning such a neighbour, Smolar describes an offer of ‘personal rescue’ from someone he calls ‘ein Russisher chaver’, a Russian friend, who invited him to live in hiding in the man’s village.95 The use of the Hebrew-derived term ‘chaver’ for ‘friend’ is an instance of a linguistically inflected transferred epithet. Yiddish, as the language of the Jews, can best

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convey the Russian man’s status as a would-be rescuer, even though Smolar turned the offer down. The use of Yiddish equally takes the embodied form of gestures which can only be understood in relation to Smolar’s linguistic choices. He frequently pauses to check with Lanzmann, or glances towards Corinna Coulmas, who is out of shot, to see whether she need translate for the director other such terms that are crucial to his narrative as ‘cowards’ (pachdanim), ‘attic’ (boidem) and ‘madman’ (meshugge).96 Although the difference in language used by interviewer and interviewee has the potential to exceed the ‘linguistic estrangement’ that Habib rightly claims is characteristic of Shoah with its variety of foregrounded translation methods, Lanzmann is only infrequently defeated by his interlocutor’s vocabulary. The most notable instance is his being unable to follow the detail in the interviewee’s account of the Nazis’ murder of children from the ghetto orphanage, during which, according to Smolar’s description, Wilhelm Kube, the Generalkommissar of occupied Belarus, threw sweets into their mass grave, in an act of cynical callousness. The words Smolar uses in the present interview for ‘sweets’, the Yiddish ‘tsukerkes’ and ‘konfetn’, defeat Lanzmann’s ability to understand his interlocutor’s description, making them symptomatic of the story’s radical failure to make sense.97 The resulting delayed comprehension draws extra attention to the unbelievable, or, as Lanzmann says, ‘unthinkable’ (undenkbar) nature of the children’s murder.98 None of the interview’s linguistic confusion need have survived a final edit, given the attentiveness to the soundtrack shown in Lanzmann’s changes to dialogue in the released versions of his interviews with Jan Karski or Filip Müller, and the wholesale editing-out of the figure of the translator from that with Hanna Marton in The Four Sisters.99 Yet in this case, the misunderstanding is central to the incident’s significance and how it is represented. However, Lanzmann is surprisingly reluctant to follow up in detail the remarkable nature of Smolar’s acts of witness. This is partly due to the difficulty of locating complementary testimony to Smolar’s on the subject of the Holocaust in the occupied Soviet Union, as Lanzmann also found in relation to the interviews on the Einsatzgruppen murders in Ukraine. Horrifying though the wartime events were in both Belarus and Ukraine, they occurred outside the extermination-camp universe of occupied Poland which came to form the heart of Shoah. Smolar’s communist convictions, his wartime faith in the Soviet system and his account of the distinctive ‘friendship and sympathy’ that existed between the Jewish and non-Jewish population in Belarus are all unusual features among Lanzmann’s interviews, which would threaten to qualify Shoah’s emphasis on

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Jewish isolation and abandonment during the Holocaust years.100 In the present interview, Smolar gives credit to the local support that is indeed an exceptional feature of the circumstances in Minsk, its location in Soviet- rather than Polishruled Belarus meaning that nationalist divisions were less developed and, as we have seen, close personal relationships between inhabitants widespread.101 It is due to alliances of this kind that, as Epstein argues, ‘Nowhere else in occupied Eastern Europe were such large numbers of Jews able to flee the ghettos and engage in resistance.’102 Nonetheless, Smolar relates in the interview, prompting Lanzmann to ask about the details, his detection of ‘antisemitic’ attitudes among the Belarusian partisans, which led to the formation of partisan detachments and a family group, the Zorin Brigade, consisting entirely of Jews. One of the director’s final questions brings to the surface his interviewee’s altered political priorities: ‘Do you still believe that communism is the answer to the Jewish question?’103 From the perspective of his present life in Tel Aviv, Smolar declares his allegiance to the project of ‘the national sovereign state’ where he now lives, as he elucidates: SMOLAR:  I wanted to be with my Jews, with whom I also joined the communist movement. Therefore I went to Israel … I cannot live without a Jewish surrounding.104

Once more, Smolar’s conviction is conveyed by his use of Yiddish, in this case the term for the all-important notion of ‘surrounding’: ‘Ich kann nisht leben ohne die yiddishe svive’ [I cannot live outside a Jewish environment]. In the face of Lanzmann’s incomprehension of ‘svive’ [surroundings] – he responds in puzzlement, ‘Ohne – ?’ – Smolar simply repeats the phrase, leaving us uncertain whether the interviewer has understood.105 In this way, Smolar argues for a continuity in the three significant phases of his life, that of his pre-war communist allegiance, since ‘I came to communism as a Jew’; the era of the ghetto, in which he wanted to be ‘together with my brothers’; and the final period in Israel.106 His avowal of having renounced his convictions might seem to make Smolar the personification of a particular trajectory of east European Jewish life in the twentieth century, in its movement from communist belief to Zionist life via the extreme disruption of the Holocaust and post-war antisemitism in Poland. As we have seen, most starkly in relation to Lanzmann’s interview with Hansi Brand, wartime resistance is often viewed in a way that repeats the divisions between the left- and right-wing groupings of pre-war Jewish life in Europe.107 Barbara Epstein ascribes the pre-eminence

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of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in post-war memory to its ‘extraordinarily dramatic and inspiring’ nature, but also to a ‘chain of associations’ between ‘Zionism, ghetto uprisings and Jewish resistance’.108 Yet, as Smolar’s testimony makes clear, the situation in Minsk was itself ‘dramatic and inspiring’ in its particular circumstances, which included confounding German efforts to pit Jews and non-Jews against each other. Unlike the relatively long-term, walled-in nature of the Warsaw Ghetto, that in Minsk was designed to be so temporary that it was bounded by a barbed-wire fence and not a wall, and guarded by patrols rather than sentries. These circumstances, and the presence of ‘plentiful forests and swamps’ ideal for partisan warfare, make the ghetto experience that Smolar recounts into an alternative pattern of flight and rescue as resistance.109 This ‘open’ ghetto structure, while it meant that the area was established as a temporary ‘holding pen’ for those awaiting mass killings,110 meant that the resistance slogans, ‘The ghetto is death! Leave the ghetto!’, repeated here by Smolar, had a significance they could not have possessed in closed ghettos like that in Warsaw. Smolar’s positive and emotive demeanour equally stands out as an exception among Lanzmann’s encounters. This contrasts with the melancholy bearing of Abba Kovner, and Pankiewicz’s low-key self-presentation, each of which is unfilmic in its own way. Like the encounter with Pankiewicz, that with Smolar is coloured by its Cold War setting. In Smolar’s case, this is the context for his activities, the history of Minsk and its resistance remaining relatively unknown. The final moments of the interview, and a whole separate film-reel, are devoted to a record of Smolar’s post-war medals, at Lanzmann’s explicit request. Amid gales of laughter, which give a strong impression of his embarrassed pride, supported by his declaration that these ‘toys’ will be passed on to his grandson, Smolar shows off an array of Russian and Polish military decorations, which, as he explains, give the bearer extra pension rights and guaranteed seats on trains.111 This is a version of the external recognition of Pankiewicz’s wartime past that characterized the pharmacist’s account of post-war honours, including those from the Polish state. Despite its appealing nature, Smolar’s joviality works against a notion of the difficulty and high cost of rescue and resistance. As part of his explanation of why the resistance in Minsk ‘never raised the question of an uprising’, Smolar claims to Lanzmann that instead, ‘We knew there were two things to do: rescue, and pushing out the Germans.’ As his medals testify, he is able to conclude that ‘we did these two things’.112 For Smolar, despite the terrible losses in Minsk during the war, the story he has to tell is one of achievement.

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Leib Garfunkel: A case study in editorial practice Lanzmann’s interview with Leib Garfunkel about his experience of the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania took place in March 1976, not long before the eighty-yearold interlocutor’s death on 7 September of that year.113 In this case, Lanzmann’s techniques, used to spare his venerable interviewee undue effort, promise an unusual filmic form. The transcript has been marked up for editing more thoroughly than others among the outtakes where underlining or annotation is present, such as that with Peter Bergson, suggesting that Lanzmann and his team were mindful of the interview’s dramatic potential up to a late stage of Shoah’s shaping. Its addressing the dilemma for Judenrat members about whether to sacrifice some lives to save others, to make or to avoid the act of choosing, makes it central to Lanzmann’s rescue and resistance interviews.114 The form of the encounter with Garfunkel consists of what could be called indirect utterance. This entails Lanzmann’s assistant Irena Steinfeldt-Levy translating into English as she reads aloud from Garfunkel’s 1959 Hebrew-language history of the Kovno Ghetto, The Destruction of Kovno’s Jewry, augmented by Garfunkel’s interjections and clarifications. Steinfeldt-Levy’s ‘unique talent for simultaneous interpreting’, as Lanzmann puts it, between the languages of French, Hebrew, German and English, was invaluable especially for the ‘exploratory’ stages of the director’s work for Shoah, and crucial to the present interview.115 By contrast to indirect testimony as it features in the case of Rabbi Weissmandl, which relied upon the testifiers’ personal acquaintance with and even resemblance to the deceased rabbi, in this instance of indirect utterance Garfunkel is present, so that he frequently corroborates his own words by looking at the director and nodding affirmatively, as they are ventriloquized by a young woman whose only metonymic connection to him is their shared Hebrew (Figure 4.6). Yet SteinfeldtLevy’s voice is heard more than any other during the encounter, and her distinctive interpretive choices, including what is sometimes unidiomatic English phrasing, are equally evident. This temporal and vocal displacement is an enhanced consequence of Lanzmann’s consistently taking inspiration from textual versions of eyewitness reports, including trial transcripts, letters, government records and memoirs. Not only is the document that has prompted the content of Lanzmann’s questions in this case visible in the mise-en-scene, but it is also present in audible form as Steinfeldt-Levy reads aloud. Garfunkel was born in Kovno in 1896, where he attended the city’s Russian secondary school and then studied law at the University of Petrograd, now St Petersburg. His roles in pre-war Kovno as a politician, lawyer and journalist

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Figure 4.6  Leib Garfunkel with Claude Lanzmann and Irena Steinfeldt-Levy, Tel Aviv.

gave him a public standing that led, after the German invasion of Lithuania in 1941, to his election onto the Kovno Ältestenrat, or Council of Elders, as the Judenrat was known, as its vice-chair.116 He was second in command to the socalled Oberjude, in the Nazis’ term, the highly respected, and, in Garfunkel’s words, ‘saintly’, Dr Elhanan Elkes.117 On the Ghetto’s liquidation in July 1944, Garfunkel was sent to Kaufering, a sub-camp of Dachau, and after his liberation from the camp lived in Rome, before emigrating to Israel in 1948. His history of the Kovno Ghetto, based on his diaries of the time, is still an influential account, while its nonetheless remaining untranslated from Hebrew is dramatized as part of the conduct of the present interview.118 The encounter takes place in Garfunkel’s apartment in Israel. He sits in an armchair facing the camera, with Lanzmann and Steinfeldt-Levy on either side of him. The mise-en-scène is muted in colour, due to the room’s pale décor, its net curtains drawn across the windows, and the protagonists’ clothing. Garfunkel’s pale face and white hair are set off by a dark grey jacket worn over a lighter grey roll-neck jumper, while Lanzmann and Steinfeldt-Levy are dressed in shades of light brown. Garfunkel is manifestly frail, so that at one point Lanzmann offers

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to interview him in bed, his voice is faint and he does not always respond quickly or directly to questions. The interview opens with Lanzmann introducing the method that has clearly already been agreed to take these factors into account, in which Steinfeldt-Levy reads aloud her translation of Garfunkel’s Hebrew text, copies of which she and the interviewee have in their hands, with interludes where the director asks Garfunkel for his comments. This is the interview’s first utterance: LANZMANN:  I would like Irène to read a part of your book. She will translate it directly into English … I would like [her] to start with the first time you were caught by the Gestapo.119

The annotations on the transcript, in a mixture of French and English, reveal that this prefatory material would be cut out. Rather, the putative edited version would open without preamble on Steinfeldt-Levy’s reading aloud Garfunkel’s account of the German order to form the Ghetto in mid-1941. By this means, the viewer is immediately brought into the world of the past. Steinfeldt-Levy’s reading aloud of the chosen passages allows the film to be divided thematically into ‘blocs’ or units of gradually increasing length to reflect four events, rather than the entirety of the Ghetto’s three-year-long history: moving into the Ghetto, the election of Elhanan Elkes as its leader, the distribution of work-certificates, and concluding with the ‘big Aktion’ of late October 1941. A final note suggests that a reading out of the letter Elkes wrote two years later, in October 1943, about events in the ghetto to his children in London would constitute the final 3.5 minutes of the film, from which Steinfeldt-Levy reads the extract quoted in Garfunkel’s book. By this means, the 2.2-hour long interview would be cut down to a running-time of just over 47 minutes, a similar length as the 49-minute The Karski Report of 2010. As the list of thematic sections shows, central occurrences in Kovno, including the murder of almost 10,000 people in October 1941, are set alongside eyewitness perspectives such as Elkes’s, and the manipulative Nazi device of what came to be referred to as the ‘Lebensscheine’, or ‘life-certificates’, as a means of ‘selecting’ which 5,000 out of the 30,000 people in the Ghetto would be left alive.120 Lanzmann mentions the deployment in other locations in Lithuania of limited numbers of certificates of this kind, authorising the bearer to work. The outtake material in the present instance concludes with a series of reels showing Lanzmann and Garfunkel looking through his family and wartime photographs, as well as close-ups on the Hebrew script of Garfunkel’s book as Steinfeldt-Levy holds it. The photographs constitute a memorial prompt for Garfunkel to talk

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further about the past, while the annotations to the script show that this footage was to be intercut with that of Steinfeldt-Levy’s reading aloud. This method of using visual material from the past was not followed in Shoah, apart from the fleeting appearance of a photograph of the Bełżec commandant Christian Wirth, although Lanzmann returned to using photographs in later releases, including The Last of the Unjust and The Four Sisters. In this case, the use of photographs embodies Garfunkel’s viewpoint, yet returns us to the notion of the printed text, in which they are included as illustrations. The methodology envisaged for presenting this mixture of spoken and visual material is clear in the opening section of the interview, which centres on the expulsion of the Jews into the area designated as the ghetto. As marked up for editing, the film would open dramatically on Steinfeldt-Levy’s reading aloud details about the Nazis’ tactic of presenting the ghetto’s formation as a protective measure. The square brackets below show what would have been removed from the dialogue in order to highlight the starkness of the message: STEINFELDT-LEVY:  The German general announced to the Jewish representatives in the tone of a military order that the Lithuanians refused now to live in the town with the Jews because the Jews are Communists [and the Soviet rule was terrible for Lithuania].121

Although some earlier details in the exchange, including the date of the ghetto’s establishment on 8 July 1941, were marked to be cut, the subsequent identification of this ‘German general’ as Franz Stahlecker, the commander of Einsatzgruppe A,122 is retained, as is Garfunkel’s avowal of his eyewitness status: LANZMANN:  But you were yourself present during this meeting? GARFUNKEL:  Of course!123

These words were to be accompanied by a close-up on the interviewee (the script is annotated ‘GP Garfunkel’, the abbreviation for ‘gros plan’, ‘close-up’ in French) and the careful matching of photographs to words. Thus the next lines of Steinfeldt-Levy’s recitation are accompanied by the note ‘photo’: STEINFELDT-LEVY:  The general said that it is impossible to continue the way things were in town in the last weeks. It was clear from his words that he meant the pogroms against the Jews … Therefore a ghetto would be established for the Jews of Kovno in the part of Slobodka.124

In this instance, the image that would accompany the word ‘pogrom’ is the first one shown in the footage of Lanzmann and Garfunkel sitting at his desk to look

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at photographs: the infamous image of local people murdering Jews at Kovno’s Lietukis garage in June 1941. As Lanzmann points out in the exchange with Garfunkel, the pogrom was ‘instigated by the Germans’, yet a ‘German soldier’ can be seen walking past at a distance while Lithuanian ‘police’ and others commit the murders.125 Subsequent sections of dialogue to be kept are marked ‘bon’ or sometimes ‘bon échange’ [‘good’, ‘good exchange’] and ‘sync’, signalling the need to ‘synchronize’ (‘synchroniser’) image and sound from different parts of the interview.126 On some occasions, plans were made to align sections of dialogue by splicing together parts of individual sentences, as is clear in the example below. The square brackets show what would be cut out: STEINFELDT-LEVY:  The Germans also announced that all [the Jews of Kovno had to wear a yellow badge on their clothes and that] the five representatives present are responsible personally to obey this order.127

Although Lanzmann later asks about the yellow stars when he and Garfunkel look at the photographs, on this occasion the detail is cut out in order to place the focus on a different ‘order,’ that concerning the formation of the ghetto. The streamlining of dialogue at the level of the smallest detail as evident here attests to the editing’s broader goal, which is to present the interview in discrete thematic sections. Other notes on the interview’s addressing moving into the ghetto include instructions for two- and three-shots to be intercut with close-ups on Garfunkel, marked to alternate between his left and right profile, which would act to retain our sense of the interviewer’s and translator’s presence, and his location in a particular space. Such annotations to the transcript often include a sketch in the margin of how the shot would look, as if in the form of miniature storyboards. The representation of Garfunkel’s words does not take an acousmatic form in which a disembodied voice issues from an off-screen space. Rather, a division is established between his words from the past, which are spoken by someone else, and his embodied utterance in the present. Indeed, Lanzmann’s invitations to the interviewee to comment on his account of wartime events sometimes conflict with Garfunkel’s eagerness for the recitation from his book to resume rather than to keep talking. Unusually for Lanzmann’s interviews, the formality of the written account is prioritized over present recall. Some of the close-ups are marked to show the interviewee ‘sans lunettes’, that is, without the spectacles he takes on and off during the encounter, revealing that the imagery of Garfunkel might be taken from any part of the filmed record.128 Garfunkel’s face without his half-rimmed reading glasses allows for a clear focus

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on his eyes, establishing a link to the younger man in the photographs of the wartime Ältestenrat that he and Lanzmann discuss, and to his acts of eyewitness (Figure 4.7). Where a ‘passage clair’ [clear passage] of Garfunkel’s utterance occurs, this is marked to be kept as a counterpoint to Steinfeldt-Levy’s readings, for instance at a moment when Garfunkel shows one of the book’s illustrations to accompany his description of the process of moving belongings into the ghetto on carts: ‘here is also a picture of the transports’.129 This is a hint at how the other photographs would be incorporated, as objects in the diegesis and elements of the interview rather than as documentary evidence. Thus they would be present in the form of their being handled and discussed by Lanzmann and Garfunkel. Despite his preference for listening, Garfunkel’s double perspective, as author and auditor of the words read aloud by Steinfeldt-Levy, is enlisted as an active part of the interview in the section titled ‘Certificates’ on the transcript. Lanzmann asks Garfunkel not only to confirm his account but also to reflect on it in the present. In this sequence, the irresolvable dilemmas whose infliction was itself an atrocity are made plain, following Lanzmann’s consistent interest in the impossibility of positive action within the confines of the ghetto world. As Steinfeldt-Levy’s opening recitation reveals, on 16 September 1941 the

Figure 4.7  Leib Garfunkel: close-up on the eyewitness.

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Ältestenrat were ordered to distribute 5,000 white certificates ‘among the artisans of the Ghetto and their families’, with the goal, as everyone soon realized, that ‘the people who got the certificates would live and the others would die’.130 Garfunkel’s account, as voiced by Steinfeldt-Levy, presents from the perspective of the Ältestenrat the discussion of ‘radical’ alternatives to distributing the certificates, of the kind that Abba Kovner, from his partisan’s perspective, felt impelled to embrace. The dilemma’s phrasing voices the very subject of Lanzmann’s investigation, in the form of an unanswerable question: ‘Who could be so clever to find the right way to decide who has a right to stay alive and who doesn’t have such a right?’131 The text is cut, as the notes on the transcript show, to highlight further these ‘terrible questions of conscience and terrible tragedy which could not be solved’.132 Steinfeldt-Levy voices the details of the ‘radical suggestion’ that ‘came up’ in ‘the circles of the Ältestenrat’ in relation to the certificates, named after Fritz Jordan, the SS officer in charge of Jewish affairs in Kovno, which were to: STEINFELDT-LEVY:  … return all the Jordan-Scheine – the Jordan certificates – to the Germans and announce to them that the Ältestenrat cannot see any way of distributing them. There were even those who went further and offered to burn all the white certificates … ‘If we all have to perish, we will perish together’, the people with those suggestions said.133

However, the ‘radical suggestion’ to send back or destroy the certificates was not enacted: STEINFELDT-LEVY:  … the Ältestenrat came to the decision that they did not have the moral right to condemn to death also the 5000 Jews who could survive, but at the same time the Ältestenrat decided to distribute the certificates not only to the artisans but also among the others and to assume full responsibility for this.134

In this way, the viewer would follow the steps in an argument that is presented not as a debate but as a polyphonic train of thought, of which Garfunkel acts as the surviving trace. Even if the Ältestenrat members were in a ‘deadlock’ about this matter at the time, as Samuel Kassow claims, the filmic structure envisaged would represent rather than imitate such a form.135 Much of the following historical account of the response by the ghetto inhabitants without certificates, who stormed the Ältestenrat premises on 17 September 1941, causing several of its members to fall unconscious, is cut down in order to conclude on the chilling observation, ‘In the meantime, the Aktion

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started’.136 The bald description of the Nazis’ operation beginning has the effect of rendering inconsequential the agonized detail preceding it, even though we learn that, as a so-called ‘experimental Aktion’, it was temporarily called off. As the wording of his account above shows, Garfunkel takes a historian’s rather than an individual perspective, endowing the Ältestenrat itself with the agency to make decisions, and does not identify who took which attitude. Lanzmann’s seeking confirmation of his interlocutor’s eyewitness perspective is marked to be retained: LANZMANN:  And you were in the discussion of the Ältestenrat? GARFUNKEL:  In the discussion? Of course! … LANZMANN:  But your opinion was: one has to save. GARFUNKEL:  My opinion: what is possible to save, we must save. LANZMANN:  But this was saving one Jew and killing other Jews. GARFUNKEL:  Of course!137

Garfunkel’s repeated exclamation, ‘Of course!’, in a tone suggesting astonishment that anyone could think otherwise, conveys what he judges to be the self-evident nature of his conclusions. The exchange above stands out amid a series of sweeping cuts to the dialogue. These edits serve to highlight Garfunkel’s view of the terrible choices before moving on to the concluding event of the edited footage, the ‘big Aktion’ of October 1941, for which the distribution of certificates a month earlier was a dry run. Garfunkel’s rhetorical question in conclusion, ‘What is the situation of a captain of a sinking ship?’, is marked to be retained.138 If Lanzmann had released a compendium film about ghetto eyewitness following the model of his final work, The Four Sisters, each section of which has a representative heading, this phrase could aptly be the title for Garfunkel’s. After ‘terrible torture of the soul’, in the words of Garfunkel’s account, the Ältestenrat decided ‘not to go by the way of open sabotage against the Germans’, in particular against the order from Helmut Rauca, the newly appointed director of Jewish affairs in the Ghetto, that ‘all the people of the ghetto’ must assemble on 28 October 1941.139 This was to take place in Demokratų Aikštė, or Democrats’ Square, the irony of its name in this context akin to that of Kraków’s Harmony Square. The decision was taken not to order the ghetto to ‘disregard Rauca’s order completely’ for fear that it could bring ‘terrible persecution against the whole ghetto and maybe its complete destruction’.140 This was bolstered by the halachic view of Avraham Shapiro, the Chief Rabbi of Lithuania, as sought by the Ältestenrat.141 Shapiro, an ‘old man’ who was so ‘frightened’ by the judgement he was asked to give that he fainted, consulted ‘holy books’ overnight before pronouncing that,

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STEINFELDT-LEVY:  … if the Ältestenrat hoped that by obeying Rauca’s order they will be able to save even a small part of the ghetto community, they have to have the courage to assume the responsibility to fulfil the order.142

The alienation effect of Steinfeldt-Levy’s role in reading aloud Garfunkel’s words is redoubled here with the rabbi’s embedded utterance. Lanzmann intervenes in Garfunkel’s account of the Ältestenrat deliberations, giving the impression that he is offering his own opinion. However, like other examples of the director’s seeming to voice Hilbergian and other controversial views about the Jews’ passivity or the Jewish Councils’ culpability, his utterances act as provocations to highlight the impossibility of effective responses. In the present instance, this is made clear by the cuts marked on the script. The square brackets below show that the details of Lanzmann’s riposte were to be edited out, leaving simply the difference of opinion and giving Garfunkel the last word on the priority of the Bible over its commentaries: LANZMANN:  Yes, but Rabbi Shapiro writes that he goes to the holy books, to the Torah, but Maimonides says completely the contrary. [He writes exactly that if the Gentiles – the enemy of the Jewish people – ask one Jew to be killed, and if the Jews don’t give this man to be killed, they are threatened to have the whole community destroyed, the community must perish. This is Maimonides.] GARFUNKEL:  … After all, Maimonides is not Moses.143

The director’s interjection takes its place alongside the views of the Ältestenrat and their consultation with Rabbi Shapiro, as part of a desperate dilemma, rather than soliciting a direct judgement from the viewer. A long passage of further detail on the round-up is marked to be cut, moving on instead to a section labelled ‘Optimism’ which opens dramatically with Lanzmann’s question, ‘What do you call the traditional Jewish hope?’144 Such a question has a mixed origin, lying both in the director’s engagement with orthodox Jewish tenets of belief and their role in rescue and resistance, but also in a secular and pragmatic scepticism about the role of self-deception in entertaining a faith in the supernatural that might entail inaction. He thus elicits from Garfunkel his definition of ‘optimism’ as, ‘the traditional Jewish hope that perhaps the Lord would have mercy, and that in the last moment a miracle would happen.’145 The transcript is very extensively edited at this point to emphasize a pair of utterances from Garfunkel in the present, as a prelude to the extended reading out of his description of the day of the ‘big action’. These utterances are ones that address the notion of salvation, edited to stand alone without the context of Lanzmann’s questions and the intervening discussion:

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GARFUNKEL:  I think it is mostly a Jewish behaviour – to save what it is possible to save … I was elected in order to save people – of course in the frame of possibility.146

However, the placing of these statements just before Steinfeldt-Levy’s reading aloud the extended description of the mass round-up, on which the interview concludes, implies ironic judgement by means of the editing itself, since the discourse about ‘saving’ is contradicted by the detail of preparations for genocidal murder that follow. This shaping of the narrative bears out Kassow’s observation that, because of the insuperable nature of the circumstances in the Kovno Ghetto, the Ältestenrat’s strategy of attempting to preserve the lives of as many people as possible by buying time ‘exacted a heavy price’.147 Elsewhere among the outtakes, Lanzmann’s interviews centring on Jewish Councils have a more clearly questioning stance. This emerges for instance in his encounter with the Dutch-born Israeli politician Ya’akov Arnon, who cut off all contact with his once-revered uncle, Abraham Asscher, after the war due to the latter’s role as one of the Joodse Raad or Judenrat leaders in occupied Amsterdam. None of the kinds of negative view of the Kovno Ghetto leaders recorded by Kassow, including critics taking the Ältestenrat’s consulting Rabbi Shapiro as evidence of inappropriate leadership, is explicitly acknowledged in the present encounter.148 Such critiques are made without, as Kassow notes, suggesting ‘what else the council could have done’, and alternative courses of action are indeed hard to identify.149 The policy of fleeing to the forests as promulgated by Hersh Smolar in Minsk was only a possibility in Kovno after late 1943 when local partisan groups were established. Yet, the often fraternal relations that existed with non-Jewish Belarusians did not have an equivalent in Kovno. Rather, local people had turned on their former neighbours with acts of ‘ugly, spontaneous, random violence’ in a scenario interpreted by them as one in which Germans were liberating Lithuania from Jewish-sponsored Soviet rule.150 The interview exposes the ‘no-win position’, as Kassow baldly describes it, that faced Garfunkel and his fellow Ältestenrat members.151 Such an impasse is evident in Garfunkel’s description of the day of the round-up, which opens with a mixture of factual and metaphorical discourse: STEINFELDT-LEVY:  28th October was a cold and cloudy day of autumn. The sun was hiding, as if it was ashamed to appear and its rays did not look out of the clouds. Heavens did not ask for mercy for the poor ghetto Jews, and the heavens were quiet. The ground was covered with melting snow and dirty with mud.152

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Garfunkel’s description of the weather tallies with details recorded elsewhere.153 However, a critical view such as that of the ghetto survivor Lazar Goldstein, who ‘bitterly criticized’ the Ältestenrat’s ‘decision to call on the ghetto population to assemble in Demokratu Square in October 1941’, might see it as a way of presenting the ‘big Aktion’ as a natural disaster that could only have been averted by divine intervention.154 Equally important for the edited version of the interview, and for Lanzmann’s encounters with former ghetto inhabitants as a whole, is the retention of Garfunkel’s distinguishing the present atrocity from the persecution of the past, in which death might have been the result of a refusal to convert to Christianity: STEINFELDT-LEVY:  But the people of the enlightened twentieth century, the people of the Swastika, did not give the ghetto Jews an alternative, a choice between life and death. The only thing they could do was resist emptyhanded against the Germans – to choose one way of dying from the other. But they did not do it, because after all they still hoped for a miracle of the last moment.155

Rather than suggesting blame for inaction, this passage is a central moment of self-reflexivity in Lanzmann’s plans for a film on responses in the ghettos of occupied Europe to the threat of mass murder.

Conclusion The three testifiers to the experience of the wartime ghettos in this chapter share elements that prompted their being chosen by Lanzmann. Each is an eyewitness historian, and none was involved in armed insurrection, but in other kinds of efforts at rescue or resistance. It might seem that the Kovno Ältestenrat’s policy was to save, rather than to rescue or resist, although its members did support the sending of Jews out of the ghetto once partisan detachments were established.156 While ‘rescue’ implies active effort to release someone from a pre-existing dangerous situation, ‘saving’ suggests a more passive but forward-looking and preventative measure. However, the definition of ‘rescue’ in the Holocaust years according to Lucien Steinberg includes all attempts ‘whose objective was to ensure the physical survival of Jews’.157 Steinberg’s carefully chosen phrasing, ‘of Jews’ rather than ‘of all the Jews’, acknowledges the impossibility of ‘rescuing all the Jews’ in a given location, as he puts it of his analysis of France and Belgium: ‘There simply were no such

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practical possibilities.’158 Following Steinberg’s definition, even the selective efforts in the Kovno Ghetto at saving some lives, while knowing that others would be lost, could qualify as ‘rescue’, however ambivalent reaching such a verdict might feel. Yet there remain significant differences between the kinds of experience recounted in each of these three encounters. At the end of his interview, Hersh Smolar describes attending a parade of Belarusian partisans in Minsk immediately after the liberation, which he says is ‘one of the most wonderful experiences of my life’.159 According to Smolar’s account, in ‘one of the first detachments to march by’, that of ‘the Jews of the Minsk Ghetto’, he saw ‘at its head’ his former confrere Chaim Alexandrowicz, and, despite having ‘next to me all the generals’, could not ‘restrain’ himself and shouted out, ‘Chaim!’ This highly cinematic moment, in which the voice of a survivor shouts aloud a name originating in the Hebrew word ‘chai’, meaning ‘life’, across a delegation of White Russian generals, all of whom ‘turned round to look’, is acted out in the interview’s present.160 This scenario sums up Smolar’s idiosyncratically positive view of his wartime history, and points to a telling difference between the detail of his experience in Minsk and that of Pankiewicz in Kraków or Garfunkel in Kovno, one that equally sheds light on the priority given to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in cultural memory. While the Uprising has become enlisted ‘to a version of Jewish history in which antisemitism is pervasive’ and the only answer is emigration to Israel, for Smolar, at the moment of the partisans’ parade, the celebration was a political one shared by Jewish and non-Jewish Belarusians.161 Unlike Belarus, in Kovno and Kraków there was ‘no substantial, organized assistance from outside the ghetto’.162 Indeed, the Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy museum’s exhibition, designed to unite the ‘wounded’ memory of both Poles and Jews, risks minimizing what Pióro calls ‘the collective memory of Polish antisemitism’ by focusing solely on the case of a rescuer.163 Had Elhanan Elkes’s letter of 1943 been read in full at the conclusion to Garfunkel’s interview, its even starker words about local lack of sympathy would have emerged clearly. Elkes’s agonized declaration that ‘the soil of Lithuania is soaked with our blood, killed at the hands of the Lithuanians themselves’, leads to his concluding exhortation to his children, ‘never have anything to do with them’.164 In the Minsk Ghetto, as in Vilna, the question of armed insurrection versus flight to the forest was debated internally, and, as we have seen, arguments of this kind are the subjects of representation, while the form of a debate is avoided. This is most pressingly the case for Garfunkel, whose vantage point

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on events is not that of an individual looking through a window, as is the case with Pankiewicz and Smolar, but one from the institutional perspective of the Ältestenrat. Garfunkel’s account of the heavens remaining ‘quiet’ as the ‘big Aktion’ took place in Kovno’s Democrats’ Square in October 1941 implies a connection between Lanzmann’s interviews on the ghettos and those centring on the War Refugee Board – named thus, to Peter Bergson’s chagrin, in preference to the War Rescue Board – and their theme of an analogous quietude and inaction. In this sense, it is possible to imagine Lanzmann’s thematically linked series of interviews, focused on the ghettos, the WRB, efforts at bribery in Slovakia or rescue in Hungary, each placed in dialogue or conflict with the other. These series of interviews are about varied forms of rescue, but in terms of those initiatives’ overall failure. It is undoubtedly the case that, as Steinberg argues, ‘Even the degree of success [of a rescue strategy] cannot be used as a criterion’ of its value, since it is ‘not an indication whether the response was correct, just as failure is not proof that the evaluation which predicated the action was mistaken.’165 However, such a dialogue between, as well as within, Lanzmann’s several series of rescue-related interviews would reveal the extremely diverse facets of a situation in which the mass murder of civilians was accomplished in barely impeded fashion.

5

Communal testimony and the War Refugee Board: Peter Bergson, Roswell McClelland, John Pehle and Robert Reams

Lanzmann’s interest in the War Refugee Board (WRB), established in the United States in January 1944 to assist the civilian victims of Nazism, is unusual in its focus on the bureaucratic nature of organizations. The nature of this footage might lead the viewer to speculate that the director considered a new mode of presenting it in any final form. Rather than each interviewee speaking in an extended way on their own account, the four witnesses’ words could be used to testify to different facets of the WRB’s genesis and operations in a crosscut, composite format. An edited version of the footage would reveal the discordant variety of perspectives and attitudes on the question of rescue, as much as the personalities involved, by a filmic interleaving of the material. Lanzmann’s choice of interviewee itself suggests that a form of communal testimony could have resulted from the editing of this footage, since the encounters take place with individuals from as divergent a range of positions as possible. The director’s putting to each of his interlocutors a set of the same questions and provocations, often drawing on contemporary documents from which they read, emphasizes the fact that a communal testimony of this kind would be characterized by conflicting rather than complementary voices, and that opposed utterances on the same subjects could be matched up. These interviewees include the Irgun representative Peter Bergson, the WRB director John Pehle, the agency’s representative in Switzerland, Roswell McClelland, and the former State Department official Robert Borden Reams. Their voices would represent the WRB, its embattled history and the belated moment of its foundation, as an embodiment of Allied attitudes towards rescue. Lanzmann lays the foundations of a shared testimony by addressing a series of events that concerned all his interviewees, including the establishment of the WRB in 1944, the question of negotiating with the Nazis in the final months of the

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war and the possible bombing of Auschwitz. As well as these specific concerns, the dialogue in each case turns on tensions between legalistic and humanitarian processes and the nature of religious versus secular Jewish responses, while the question of the difference between the conduct of the war and the rescue of the Jews is addressed from varied perspectives. Despite the impression these encounters might give of a focus on individuals or on political developments, Lanzmann continues rather to construct a philosophical sense of how genocide was viewed, in this case from the external perspective of the United States. The necessity of disrupting the status quo has a particular significance in the American context, as Bergson puts it, ‘the whole task was to break the routine of daily life’ and ‘to convey the sense of urgency’.1 The director has claimed that the conclusion to Jan Karski’s interview in Shoah, where the former Polish envoy simply says of the account of mass killing which he brought to the White House, ‘And I delivered my report’, is ‘very strong’ in narrative terms because of the viewer’s knowledge that the Jews were not saved.2 Such a sense of dramatic fatalism equally affects the present encounters with rescue officials and campaigners. The more the interviewees describe their actions and the obstacles they faced in practical and epistemological terms, the larger looms the spectator’s sense of what might have been, versus what actually took place. This means that the present interviews are characterized by a different temporal logic to that of reincarnation, and one perhaps less suited to Lanzmann’s interests as these appear in Shoah, in the form of a defensive, regretful, or, in Bergson’s case harshly judgemental, hindsight.

Peter Bergson: A ‘nuisance diplomat’ Among all those interviewed by Lanzmann on the topic of Allied rescue initiatives and the WRB, Peter Bergson stands out as a figure we might expect to be of particular note on account of his outsider position, or, as he puts it, that of a ‘foreigner’, and his charismatic screen presence (Figure 5.1).3 Indeed, Bergson’s single-minded pursuit of a rescue agenda has made him the narrative centre in other representations of the WRB’s history, including two documentaries, Laurence Jarvik’s Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die? of 1981, and Pierre Sauvage’s 2019 Not Idly By: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust, as well as Bernard Weinraub’s 2007 play The Accomplices. Bergson led high-profile publicity campaigns in the United States to provoke the American government to engage in ‘action, not pity’, as his campaign slogan had it, over the fate of the European Jews (Figure 5.2).4 Tactics of this kind were often deployed in a way that placed

Communal Testimony and the War Refugee Board

Figure 5.1  Peter Bergson, NYC.

Figure 5.2  Peter Bergson and newspaper headlines: ‘Action Not Pity’.

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Bergson, and the other ten activists of the so-called Bergson Group, at odds with established American Jewish organizations. Indeed, during the encounter with Lanzmann the campaigner sardonically repeats the words of the president of the American Jewish Congress, Rabbi Stephen Wise: ‘Bergson is worse than Hitler, because Hitler brought antisemitism to Europe, and Bergson is bringing it to America.’5 Bergson’s blunt explanation for the enmity his campaign provoked is that, despite American Jews’ freedom from persecution and their being treated instead with ‘dignity and equality’, they were ‘petrified’ and ‘couldn’t rise to the new occasion’.6 His response to the ‘metaphysical question … What is the meaning of Treblinka or Auschwitz seen from New York or Washington?’, repeated throughout Lanzmann’s American interviews, is to invoke rescue: ‘The instinct was to save as many people as possible.’7 Bergson was born as Hillel Kook in Lithuania in 1915, emigrating with his family to Palestine in 1924. He took an ‘Americanized pseudonym’, in Mark Raider’s phrase, on arrival in the United States, in part to avoid political embarrassment for his family, a celebrated religious dynasty which included his father Rabbi Dov Kook and his uncle Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the Chief Rabbi of Mandate Palestine.8 Despite his orthodox background, Bergson became an activist in pre-war Palestine as a member of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s secular right-wing Revisionist Zionist group, working to subvert British immigration restrictions. Bergson first arrived in the United States in 1940, as an Irgun emissary campaigning to raise funds for illegal entry into Mandate Palestine. Such a connection to the militant, anti-British Irgun, a predecessor of Israel’s Likud Party, was in itself sufficient to prompt suspicion among the existing American groups, most notably the American Jewish Congress as headed by Stephen Wise. The Bergson Group’s method of advocating rescue was to embark on an extensive range of mass-media campaigns and events to ‘dramatize’ the cause, including placing more than 100 eye-catching advertisements in national newspapers.9 The advertisements take a prominent role in the interview’s miseen-scène, where over thirty magnified versions are visible hanging on a wall. The Group organized a protest march to the White House of over 400 rabbis, and staged a pageant, We Shall Never Die, which was scripted by the writer Ben Hecht and played to sold-out capacity in major cities.10 The Group’s ‘most crucial move’, according to David Wyman, was the campaign in late 1943 to press for the passage of resolutions in Congress to set up a governmental rescue committee, in the face of opposition from the State Department as well as established Jewish groups.11 Although the Group’s role in its foundation is debated, in the context

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of Roosevelt’s election-year anxieties in 1944, and with an impending scandal arising from the State Department’s ‘sabotage’, as Bergson puts it, in covering up the news of genocide and exaggerating numbers of refugees admitted to the United States, the WRB was established in January 1944 by the president’s executive order.12 The WRB’s role was threefold: to provide the physical evacuation of individuals, to exert psychological pressure on Nazi forces and their satellites to desist from maltreatment and murder and to establish relief programmes.13 Lanzmann’s interview took place in New York in late 1978 with both Bergson and Samuel Merlin, suggesting the idea of a communal representation of the Bergson Group itself. Merlin was its public relations director, responsible for the Group’s newspaper advertising campaign, while Bergson concentrated on the lobbying of individuals. The suitability of this division of labour becomes apparent during the course of the encounter. The two men sit at a large paperstrewn table, facing Lanzmann, who is invisible for most of the interview apart from such usual signs of his presence as clouds of cigarette smoke and his gesturing hand. Behind the interviewees is a wall-to-wall bookcase in which are visible the titles of the era’s canonical studies, including Nora Levin’s The Holocaust (1973) and Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s account of the creation of the state of Israel, O Jerusalem (1972). The spine of Rita Thalmann and Emmanuel Feinermann’s 1974 book Crystal Night seems to come into legible focus just as Bergson describes the belated soul-searching in Germany on the fortieth anniversary of Kristallnacht ‘last week’, dating the interview to midNovember 1978.14 Thalmann and Feinermann’s book concludes its history of the pogrom of 10 November 1938 by noting the failure of the free world to take in refugees in response. This acts in consonance with Bergson’s theme throughout the encounter that ‘there was no reaction while the murder went on, and there is no reaction afterwards’.15 It is as if the historical background to the interview is also its visual backdrop. Although the camera focuses solely on Bergson or Merlin when either of them speaks, only rarely showing them together, it is the ‘forceful and charismatic’ Bergson who occupies the majority of the screen-time.16 The relative marginalization of Merlin enables Pierre Sauvage’s 2019 documentary Not Idly By, which is centred on Bergson’s rescue efforts and incorporates footage from a range of his filmed interviews, to use material from Lanzmann’s outtakes by cutting out not only Merlin, but also the voice of the director himself. The encounter opens without preamble on the event that provoked the rescue campaign. This took the form of a revelation that ‘exploded one day’, as Bergson

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puts it, of his reading a report in the Washington Post in November 1942, ‘on an inside page, about the tenth page’, on the death toll in Europe: BERGSON:  It simply said, ‘Rabbi Wise says two million Jews slain’. I read it again and again, you know, I didn’t believe what I was reading.17

Along with the numbers killed came the revelation of a sustained campaign of murder, ‘a war of extinction’, in Bergson’s phrase, displacing the idea that the atrocities were random acts of violence.18 Bergson’s mention of Rabbi Stephen Wise, to whom he refers as ‘the pooh-bah, the King of the Jews’, introduces one of what he considers as the obstacles to the rescue campaign, which Lanzmann paraphrases as ‘the passivity of organized American Jewry’.19 The other obstacle, that of the American government’s differently motivated reluctance to act, is dramatized by Bergson’s account of his seeking an audience with Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle immediately on reading the news report, to whose protestation that nothing could be done he retorted, BERGSON:  Surely you don’t mean that the government of the United States is going to do nothing? I am an individual here, a foreigner, but I know I am going to do something. What good it will do, I don’t know, but I know I am going to do it.20

Yet Bergson’s response, that action must be taken in the face of mass killings, was not ‘universal’, as he expected, but shared only by the other Group members: ‘We discovered, to our horror, that life went on without much change.’21 Like the case of Rabbi Weissmandl, the present encounter includes a revoicing of the chorus of dissent among different Jewish institutions as well as Bergson’s repeating his own utterances of the time. While Weissmandl in wartime Slovakia took issue with what he viewed as the rule-bound obstruction of figures such as the ‘bürgerlich’ Saly Mayer in Switzerland,22 in this instance Bergson outlines what he saw as culpable inaction on the part of American Jewish groups. Merlin dismisses accounts of American Jewry’s wartime behaviour which describe them as ‘afraid and divided’, claiming that they were, rather, ‘united’, but by ‘a certain indifference’.23 Other commentators have suggested that a preference for ‘quiet diplomacy’, as well as a loyalty to Roosevelt and fear of ‘stimulating domestic antisemitism’, lay behind Wise’s apparent obstructiveness to the Bergson Group plans, as well as his resentment of their success outside the Jewish mainstream that he represented.24 Wise’s Zionist convictions were an obstacle to his acceding to Bergson’s initiatives, since he was reluctant to endorse any campaign for rescue that was not based on the demand for Jews to be admitted to Palestine.

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Indeed, as Sarah Peck argues, for Wise, ‘The goals of Zionism and of rescue were inseparable.’25 For his part, Bergson insisted on avoiding any mention of Palestine in his campaigns. As he says to Lanzmann, the Group members were bent on ‘ignoring the fact of the political argument with the British over Palestine’, thus ‘separating’ the question of rescue from that of a Jewish state.26 The unexpected nature of this impasse with American Zionist groups led to such disillusion on Bergson’s part that, as he recounts, in 1943 he ‘ceased to be a Zionist’.27 He claims that this change was, for someone like him who had been ‘born a Zionist’, as unexpected and ‘traumatic’ as ‘the Pope being converted to Judaism’.28 Such controlled exasperation on Bergson’s part is emphasized by the camera’s close-ups on his face and bright blue eyes, while his habit of rapid blinking, in its hint at tears restrained, signals the high level of his emotional investment over thirty years on. It is also a present-time enactment of the eloquence and ‘charm’ on which Bergson’s lobbying depended, supported by the ‘English accent’ he had acquired before the war from language lessons at the London School of Economics.29 His crucial ability to dramatize complex situations, and mastery of what Eran Kaplan calls ‘the representational as an agent of political change’, is enacted in the interview as Bergson recounts his reaction to Wise’s assertion at a meeting that ‘we had to say, “Open the gates of Palestine”’.30 Bergson’s riposte to the rabbi’s demand satirizes the latter’s Zionist thinking by likening the insistence on Palestine to one on a landmark New York hotel, as a desirable but limited space. He repeats to Lanzmann the words he put to Wise: BERGSON:  If there was a fire in this building, and I managed to run outside for you, would you want me to scream, ‘Rabbi Wise is burning inside, save him!’, or ‘Rabbi Wise is burning, save him to the Waldorf Astoria!’31

Such rhetoric highlights Bergson’s grasp of local social detail, as well as his turning the tables on Wise by imagining him to be the one who is being burnt. As Bergson drily tells Lanzmann, in the absence of a response to his rhetorical question on the part of his antagonist, who died in 1949, ‘It’s hard to send you to ask Rabbi Wise.’32 Bergson voices a characteristically forthright view of the Allies’ failure to take any special measures on the Jews’ behalf. They did not follow in any sustained way his proposals, all of which rested on demanding that, since the extermination of the Jews was a Nazi war-aim, their rescue therefore should be part of the Allied war effort. These proposals ranged from threatening the use of poison gas against Germany if they would not halt their use of it to kill Jews,

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the establishment of free ports or Allied-run camps in Turkey to house refugees, payments of ransom and support for the idea to bomb the tracks to Auschwitz. Several of these initiatives form the subject of the sharply worded newspaper advertisements. At the beginning of a reel half-way through the interview, the camera follows Bergson as he leaves his seat at the table to gesture at the copies on the wall, uniting his testimony with these objects from the past as he declares, ‘You see here some of the ads.’33 Thus we read a headline from the New York Times of 16 February 1943 about the Romanian government’s offer to release Jews in Transnistria into Allied hands for monetary payment: ‘For Sale to Humanity: 70,000 Jews. Guaranteed Human Beings at $50 a piece’.34 This phrasing parodies the very advertising discourse on which it relies. Bergson’s reading out a section from one of Ben Hecht’s verse advertisements, the ‘Ballad of the Doomed Jews of Europe’, stands in for the polarized reception following this and the writer’s other compositions. The ballad’s reference to the likely vanishing of the Jews ‘by Christmas’ was in response to a speech by Goebbels in 1942, in which he declared that Germany and Austria would be free of all Jews by that date: BERGSON:  It says, ‘the world is busy with other news all the time, be quiet Jews’, and so forth, then it says, Oh World be patient – it will take Some time before the murder crews Are done. By Christmas you can make Your Peace on Earth without the Jews.35

In Bergson’s account that follows, the Jewish establishment leaders, including the president of the American Jewish Committee, Justice Joseph Proskauer, who objected to the advertisement on the grounds that its mention of Christmas might ‘arouse antisemitism’, were concerned only to have it shelved rather than to take any other action in its place. This sequence of Bergson’s talking through the advertisement campaign offers an insight into Lanzmann’s predilection for the reading out of documents by those who wrote or were by addressed by them. Such moments constitute what we might describe as scripted stagings of the return of the past, crucial to the cinematic representation of Bergson’s convictions in 1942. The encounter with Bergson and Merlin concludes in the usual way for the outtake interviews, with a sequence of silent footage of the interviewees’ faces. To this is added in the present case a series of close-ups and panning shots across the advertisements, emphasizing their legibility in the present.

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Bergson describes official rejection of the Group’s demands, since they were told that ‘the only thing to do is win the war’, as a ‘cynical escape’ on the part of the White House and ‘Jewish leaders’ alike.36 His vehement retrieval of the debates of the past reminds us of their continuing live status, and the vociferous advocacy on both sides, as is apparent in the polarized views even in twenty-first-century studies of the WRB. The accusatory thesis of Rafael Medoff ’s 2017 edited volume Too Little, and Almost Too Late, is clear from its title.37 By contrast, works by Marouf Hasian and Rebecca Erbelding seek to redress what they consider the mistaken received wisdom about American wartime indifference and delay.38 In the interview with Lanzmann, Bergson’s conviction about ‘criminal’ inaction is voiced with rhetorical flair: BERGSON:  We said, ‘If you are not going to fight this war and the extermination separately, there will be no Jews to save when the war is over’, which is more or less what happened.39

Bergson’s quoting the voices of the past, as he does here, retains their persuasive orientation, which is now directed at the spectator in the present. His account of the effort to persuade the 400 rabbis who eventually marched on the White House includes the strategic use of a quotation from the Hebrew Bible. He weaves a verse from Leviticus into the description of the march which Lanzmann asks him to give: BERGSON:  We thought if we asked [the rabbis] they would say no, but if you do it, how could they not march? It says, ‘You shall not stand idly by with the blood of your brother’. A sacred commandment, you know.40

Although Bergson’s citation seems to conform to what Mikhail Bakhtin calls ‘a reverent use of a sacred word’, in his act of quoting, the ‘sacred commandment’ is, rather, repurposed for what he calls the thoroughly ‘humanist’ goal of rescue.41 The commendatory focus on an individual historical agent in Sauvage’s film, Not Idly By, is glossed by the subtitle, Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust. By contrast to its use by Sauvage as a positive verdict on Bergson, as emerges in the outtake interview with Lanzmann, the Bergson Group’s citation of the commandment represents an ability to draw on the ‘voices of the day’ for their campaigns.42 Kaplan quotes one of the Group’s members, Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s son Eri, remarking that urgent political arguments were presented in the way in which ‘you would advertise Chevrolet motor cars or Players cigarettes’.43 The audacity, or ‘chutzpah’, as Bergson puts it, of seeming to deflate God’s first person commandment by treating it as an advertising slogan is matched only by the ambition of its aim, not to sell commodities but to save (or even to buy) human lives.44

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Bergson says he hopes that the work of the Bergson Group and WRB had ‘something to do’ with the fact that ‘several hundred thousand Jews’ did manage to survive until the war’s end, concluding that ‘if there had been any real pressure, there could have been many, many more Jews saved’, that is, the ‘real pressure’ of a unified effort on the part of all the American Jewish organizations.45 As Bergson phrases it to Lanzmann in his critique of the established Jewish groups, ‘Not only … they didn’t [rally round], but they hampered us.’46 Like Rabbi Weissmandl’s post-war view of the bribery campaign, Bergson remains convinced that, since he judges the pressure-group tactics that did take place to have been successful, only their wider application was needed for even greater salvific effect. However, as commentators have argued, in the circumstances of Allied decisions, ‘It is doubtful that Jewish unity would have significantly altered the outcome of the Holocaust.’47 As in the case of Weissmandl, Lanzmann’s interview reveals the bleak irony of the contrast between Bergson’s remarkable efforts and the insuperability of the obstacles to rescue.

John Pehle: ‘A good guy, but a bureaucrat’ Peter Bergson reports to Lanzmann his version of an exchange between Stephen Wise, who declared that the WRB should ignore the Bergson Group, and John Pehle, the Board’s director, who retorted, ‘“How can I? If it weren’t for them, maybe I wouldn’t be sitting here and there would be no War Refugee Board”’.48 These words imply a perspective on rescue unexpectedly shared by Bergson, the ‘maverick’ campaigner, and Pehle, a tax lawyer for the US government’s Treasury Department in the foreign funds control unit during the war. He was one of the authors of the memorandum to Roosevelt composed by Treasury employees in early 1944 to expose the State Department’s concealing information about genocide and obstructing immigration. This led directly to the WRB’s establishment, of which he became the first director. In that role, according to Michael Mashberg, Pehle ‘established the programs and policies which saved and protected thousands of Jews from Nazi extermination’.49 Pehle’s demeanour in the encounter with Lanzmann endorses Bergson’s implication that he was sympathetic to state-sponsored rescue, and that he was, in his own words, ‘shocked’ on learning about events in occupied Europe.50 However, Pehle’s utterances are spare and judicious on such topics as the question of bombing Auschwitz and the conduct of the war, acting as a counterpart to Bergson’s impassioned and uncompromising statements.

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The encounter with Pehle took place in Washington in November 1978, during Lanzmann’s period of filming in the United States. The fact that the interview’s first three reels are entirely devoted to showing Pehle in the woods surrounding his house, walking among the trees, holding out his hand to test for rain and gathering twigs, as well as energetically raking up fallen leaves, points to a symbolic dimension. These actions, filmed in an unmistakably North American setting, stand in for Pehle’s efforts to sweep away malpractice and injustice in the United States during the war (Figure 5.3). This prefatory footage, which resembles a series of metaphorical establishing shots, could thus be accompanied by Pehle’s voiceover recounting just such past actions. The interview proper starts in the living room we have already seen from the outside, showing Pehle sitting in a cane rocking-chair opposite Lanzmann, who is only intermittently visible. A table between them is covered in the documents the interviewee later reads from or consults. The mise-en-scène’s colour and composition have a striking look, given that Pehle wears a scarlet cardigan over a blue shirt, in contrast to the pale colours of the room, while sculptural bare treebranches are visible through the window (Figure 5.4). In response to Lanzmann’s opening question about explaining the significance of the WRB, Pehle says that

Figure 5.3  John Pehle, Washington, sweeping leaves.

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Figure 5.4  John Pehle with backdrop of trees.

‘the most important thing’ was that it ‘changed US policy overnight’. Before its establishment, as he puts it, implicitly invoking State Department actions: PEHLE:  the policy – to the extent that there was any policy – was to ignore what was going on in Europe, to interfere in the transmission of stories about what was going on to the Jewish agencies in the US, to deny licenses to people who wanted to transmit funds to rescue people, and generally not to take any affirmative action.51

These words evoke the situations at the centre of other outtake interviews, such as the money-starved plight of the Bratislava Working Group, and the delayed release of the news of genocide against which Peter Bergson protests. With the establishment of the WRB, US policy became one of doing, in Pehle’s words, ‘Whatever could be done, consistent with the war effort, to help people escape, to help private agencies who were operating in the area, to facilitate the transmission of funds to such areas as Switzerland, … to assist refugees coming over the border from France into Spain.’52 The caveat about consistency ‘with the war effort’ is significant in this list of activities for Lanzmann’s rescue interviews, not least since it prompts his exploring a change of heart on Pehle’s part regarding the bombing of Auschwitz.

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In relation to the notion of a communal testimony, Bergson’s publicity campaign could be considered in parallel with the slow progress of the governmental process as it emerges in Pehle’s interview, especially in those instances where the same events are discussed. This is clear in relation to Lanzmann’s questions to Pehle about the Romanian offer in early 1943 to release Jewish deportees for a cash payment, brought to the latter’s attention at the foreign funds unit. Pehle gives a governmental perspective on this incident which also prompted one of the Bergson Group’s newspaper campaigns. As the camera during the interview with Bergson and Merlin pauses on the New York Times of 16 February 1943, we see that the advertisement continues: ‘The great Roumanian bargain is for this month only! It is an unprecedented offer!’53 The urgent sense that ‘time races death’, as one of the Group’s headlines from December 1943 has it, is opposed by a sense of long-drawn-out negotiation that arises from the encounter with Pehle. Any juxtaposition between the two would emphasize the irony that it was nonetheless the Treasury Department’s action in exposing malpractice which led to the WRB’s establishment, rather than Bergson’s pressure-group activities. In relation to the Romanian Jews’ plight in 1943, Lanzmann spends the best part of two eleven-minute reels asking Pehle to anatomize the steps needed to grant a license to transmit foreign funds for their sake, in a process that began with the World Jewish Congress alerting the State Department to the situation in March. The temporal cost in the instance quoted below is emphasized not only as part of the dialogue but by means of its pauses and gaps: LANZMANN:  This means from March to July … PEHLE:  That’s right. LANZMANN:  There is already a lot of time which passed. PEHLE:  The Treasury indicated in July we would do it and it was in December that the license was issued … and of course, then it was too late. LANZMANN:  Yes, it was too late for the Jews of Romania whatsoever.54

Lanzmann asks Pehle to read aloud from several different wartime documents to support this sense of a last-minute attempt to rectify the effects of slow responses such as this. Three of these recitations by means of the voices of the time act as a way of charting the journey towards establishing the WRB, while a fourth, written by Pehle himself, concerns the bombing of Auschwitz. Each of these instances constructs Pehle as one of those who acted to rid the Capitol of inertia and delay, as implied by his leaf-sweeping actions in the opening reels. Since only one of these documents was originally written by him, Pehle is presented as the spokesperson for those colleagues with whom he undertook

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efforts to expose the obstructions by other government departments. His readings are not instances of the indirectly conveyed testimony of an individual, in the manner of Hermann Landau’s reading out Rabbi Weissmandl’s letters and cables. Rather, they are a voicing of shared positions, adding to the sense of a communal utterance. The readings also have the effect of offsetting Pehle’s unwillingness to give speculative responses to the interviewer’s questions. On no less than three occasions, Pehle blocks Lanzmann’s invitation to expand on his remarks by claiming that he cannot comment on what he calls ‘motive’, nor is he capable of reading people’s minds. In this way, Pehle seems to be in accord with Samuel Merlin’s contention that, since memory is unreliable, the past can most effectively be accessed through its constituent documents.55 The sequences of Pehle’s recitations were carefully planned, with the documents’ relevant sections already underlined, alongside clear evidence of Lanzmann’s coaching his interviewee between reels on how to introduce the subjects about which he is reading. The first such reading is from protests in Congress about delays in establishing a rescue commission. Pehle ventriloquizes the distinctive phrases that Lanzmann has chosen, giving a governmental version of just such laments about bureaucracy and inaction as those uttered by Weissmandl and Bergson. The fact that Pehle voices a chorus of utterances from different dates in December 1943 emphasizes that Lanzmann’s project is not one concerned only to set forth historical facts. Rather, it highlights the epistemological question, ‘What is Treblinka when one is in New York?’, that is, the East viewed from the West, as the director phrases his customary question here.56 Thus we hear Pehle’s rendition of protests by members of Congress, most notably Emanuel Celler’s ‘very strong statement’, in Lanzmann’s phrase, about the visa application process as one that ‘has been glacial in its slowness and coldbloodedness. It takes months and months to grant the visas, and then it usually applies to a corpse’.57 Pehle’s reading aloud of the debates and documents of the past, using phrases like Celler’s which are clearly not his own, gives him the status not only of the spokesperson for a group, but as one dedicated specifically to voicing silenced truths. The State Department’s granting the license to transmit foreign currency to Romania for the sake of the Jews in Transnistria in December 1943 came about as a result of a voicing of this kind, and forms the subject of Pehle’s second act of communal ventriloquism. In this instance, Pehle reads aloud the detail of a cable, now known as the Riegner Telegram, sent from the US legation in Bern to the State Department and its Acting Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, in January 1943. The cable brought specific news of the ‘horrible situation concerning the

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plight of the Jews in Europe’, including ‘mass executions of Jews in Poland’.58 In this instance, it is not only the detail of the mass murders themselves that is significant, but the State Department’s subsequent reply to Leland Harrison, the legate in Bern. The response was aimed to prevent any further such bulletins being sent, and this ‘repression of information’ was in turn illicitly suppressed.59 Pehle’s bringing these multiple suppressions to light includes his reading out the wording of the State Department’s seemingly ‘innocuous’ reply – ‘we suggest that you do not accept reports submitted to you to be transmitted to private persons in the US’ – followed by his decoding its implicit message: ‘The State Department were saying, “don’t send any more messages over about what’s happening to the Jews”’.60 The copy of this reply, as requested by the Treasury, had all reference to the original cable and its contents removed. The resulting memorandum of complaint, from Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, on the department’s behalf, to Roosevelt forms the third and final instalment of Pehle’s recitative journey. It takes the form of a blunt outline of the situation, invoking the government’s stated ‘policy’ to ‘work out programmes to save those Jews and other persecuted minorities who could be saved’: PEHLE:  One of the greatest crimes in history, the slaughter of the Jewish people in Europe, is continuing unabated … You are probably not as familiar as I with the utter failure of certain individuals in our State Department … to take any effective action to prevent the extermination of the Jews in German-occupied Europe. [These] officials have failed to take any positive steps … to save these people … In fact, nothing has been accomplished.61

This address to the president has the strongest sense of direct confrontation with the facts of mass murder of all Pehle’s readings. These details of governmental process and its being delayed or covered up might seem confusing and dry, yet are horrifying for the very reason that such considerations took precedence over people’s lives. Lanzmann phrases the role of bureaucracy in slowing down preventative action in temporal terms: ‘what is so … striking is the complete discrepancy between the emergency actions which were needed and … the very slow and bureaucratic red tape’.62 Hearing the extended readings conducted by Pehle gives the viewer of the outtakes a correlative for such a ‘discrepancy’. The founding of the WRB is presented as the culmination of the enormities voiced by him: the failed proposal to evacuate Jews from Romania, and the suppression of facts in the incident of the cable from Switzerland.

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Lanzmann sets the scene for the question of bombing the rail-tracks to Auschwitz by recounting the fact of Allied knowledge about what the deportation of the Hungarian Jews meant in May 1944, and that Germany was by then clearly losing the war. He implicitly invokes other interviews, not only that with Weissmandl and Brand in their demands for bombing and bribery, but with Rudolf Vrba, whose report on Auschwitz as one of its few escapees meant that a detailed map of the camp was compiled.63 Pehle’s observing that the WRB staff were ‘very sceptical’ about any plan of bombing the tracks or crematoria in June 1944 is followed by his claim that, by November of that year, ‘the time came where we felt the situation was so desperate that we should ask the war department to do it, and we did’.64 Pehle frames his account with phrases suggesting ambivalence about looking back in this way, saying variously during the interview, ‘I can’t reconstruct that’, ‘we didn’t know that at the time’, ‘maybe from now looking back we shouldn’t have been [hesitant]’.65 Pehle continues this assertion of a division between his past and present selves in his reading aloud his letter of November 1944, sent to John McCloy, the Assistant Secretary of War, to urge the action of bombing: PEHLE:  I say, ‘ … if the elaborate murder installations of Birkenau were destroyed, it seems clear that the Germans could not reconstruct them for some time … I am convinced that the point has now been reached where such action is justifiable’.66

Implicit in Pehle’s letter are his consternation at learning of the industrial nature of the killing, and conviction, now in consonance with Bergson’s, that such action would not detract from the Allied war effort but constitute a part of it. However, McCloy’s refusal to engage in bombing, spelt out in his reply to this letter which Pehle also reads aloud, meant that once more death was the consequence of cautious delay. Lanzmann notes that the urging of action was again too late, given the ‘tragic irony’ that by the time the WRB recommended the bombing in November 1944, ‘The gassing didn’t take place any more in Auschwitz, it was almost finished.’67 Despite the interviewee’s physical resemblance to his near-contemporary, the filmstar James Stewart, and his even seeming to share what David Thomson calls the actor’s habitual role as ‘the decent American everyman’,68 Pehle’s legal training is evident in his reticence and formality. He often avoids eye-contact with his interviewer and instead scrutinizes the documents, seems reluctant to respond, does not look up when reading aloud, or, if he does, his eyes are cast into shadow by his horn-rimmed spectacles. At times, the sound of rustling

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papers as he looks through them even drowns out the dialogue. This image of Pehle’s being engaged by documents rather than by Lanzmann or the camera gives the impression that his priority, in the past as in the interview, lay in paperwork.

Roswell McClelland: The view from Europe Roswell McClelland’s bluff and expansive manner, and his American perspective on rescue from a vantage point as the WRB representative in Switzerland, both contrast with Pehle. He addresses Lanzmann as ‘Claude’ and engages directly with the interviewer, reflecting explicitly upon the events of the past in relation to what he claims to be the pressing needs of the present. The encounter took place in Washington in November 1978, and the two men sit at a table covered in papers in an elegant nineteenth-century-style living room in the Chevy Chase home of McClelland’s Foreign Service colleague, James MacGregor Byrne (Figure 5.5).

Figure 5.5  Claude Lanzmann and Roswell McClelland, Washington, DC.

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McClelland was a witness on the spot to the fate of the Jews in Nazioccupied France and then neutral Switzerland during the war. He and his wife Marjorie had moved to Rome in 1940 so that he could take up a Quaker-sponsored fellowship in international reconciliation, which involved his working for a refugee relief organization. This was in place of an earlier plan, since he was a comparative literature PhD student, to spend time at the University of Geneva working on Voltaire’s papers, which became impossible on the outbreak of war.69 McClelland’s interest in Voltaire’s arguments against intolerance in eighteenth-century-France, and his sympathy with the Quakers, of whom his wife was one, on the grounds of their preference for what he calls ‘action rather than going to church’, sets the scene for his portrayal of wartime relief and rescue work.70 In August 1942 McClelland and his wife moved to Geneva, and in April 1944 he was appointed as the WRB representative in Switzerland, a job he later described as ‘challenging [and] harrowing’.71 During this time, McClelland acted to pass on the report by the Auschwitz escapees Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler to the US government, and, as he describes, ensured the rendering of its maps into English to assist with possible bombing plans. Despite his disinclination to enter into wartime bribery or ransom, McClelland took part in what Yehuda Bauer describes as the ‘quite amazing’ negotiations ‘in contravention of official US policy’ with Kurt Becher, the head of the SS economic department in Hungary, alongside the Swiss representative of the American Joint Distribution Committee, Saly Mayer.72 The dialogue on the subject of these activities is of value to Lanzmann in relation to the constellation of WRB-related interviews, yet the encounter with McClelland addresses in more sustained fashion other such topics as the reasons for the delay in the Board’s establishment, and the scepticism on the part of WRB representatives in their dealings with orthodox Jewish rescuers. In relation to these concerns, McClelland’s testimony often stands on the border between reportage and re-enactment. McClelland’s is the only one among all the director’s interviews to include eyewitness testimony on the subject of occupied France, in relation to the year he spent there from mid-1941 until the summer of 1942. A chance meeting with the prominent politician Pierre Laval turned out not to be the occasion to present any ‘plea’ on behalf of the prisoners of the camp of Les Milles near Marseille, as McClelland had hoped, but that of an antisemitic ‘tirade’ on the Vichy minister’s part in justifying the deportations.73 McClelland recounts Laval’s response to the argument he put forward, recorded in a report of the time which we see him consult, about his conviction that the deportees were to be ‘exterminated’:

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McCLELLAND:  Laval waved this aside as pure fiction … and he then continued … in an interrogatory tone, that if the government of the US was so pro-semitic, why hadn’t we taken these people in, instead of criticizing the French for not treating them properly? … LANZMANN:  If you like so much the Jews, why don’t you take them?74

As his paraphrasing of Laval’s rhetorical question suggests, Lanzmann’s conceptual concerns once more overtake those of any straightforward historical record. The almost-complete failure of any country to offer sanctuary to refugees, exposed at the conferences of Evian in 1938 and Bermuda in 1943, and the extreme vulnerability of people rendered stateless, takes a typically specific form in Lanzmann’s remarks. This is exemplified by his quoting, in all of the WRB-related interviews but that with Reams, another rhetorical question, one from Lord Moyne, who was the wartime British minister of state in the Middle East. Thus Lanzmann reports to McClelland of Joel Brand’s 1944 mission in attempting to redeem Jewish lives by bartering with the Nazis: LANZMANN:  Joel Brand … came to [Lord Moyne] and said, ‘We can save one million Jews’, and Lord Moyne answered, ‘What will I do with one million Jews?’75

The effect of these quoted utterances by Laval and Moyne is to construct a verbal portrait of the multifaceted nature of the failure to rescue, adding to our sense of the great range of factors, from the mundane to the military, which made it the case. As Lanzmann puts it to McClelland of Lord Moyne’s words, despite their seemingly egregious nature, ‘This was the general case.’76 The notion of a disparity between apparently trivial cause and atrocious effect is continued by McClelland in his attempting to answer Lanzmann’s questions on the belatedness of the WRB’s foundation. McClelland cites such factors for the delay as ‘bureaucratic inertia’, the ‘marginal’ status of refugees in the government’s thinking, its officials’ ‘limited horizon’, the ‘tremendous’ gap between the information possessed by politicians and ‘their norms of living standards’.77 As Pehle likewise notes about the cable outlining the mass murders, its suppression was motivated by the fact that ‘this information necessarily would cause greater pressure to be brought on the State Department to do something’.78 The disinclination to act and the difficulty of its accomplishment motivated the suppression of the very knowledge that would have necessitated it. McClelland concludes his list of factors tending to inaction with an observation that moves the interview’s focus away from the failure to understand the atrocity to one of being unable to understand its victims. A close-up on McClelland

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Figure 5.6  Close-up on Roswell McClelland.

allows his face to fill the screen as he assesses the State Department’s view: ‘Jews, in the opinion of many of them, I’m sure, were people who pushed carts with second-hand clothing in them’, suggesting that it was hard to muster efforts to rescue individuals who seemed so different from the White House norm (Figure 5.6).79 At the beginning of a new reel addressing the same question of the belatedness of American rescue efforts, seemingly arising from an intervening conversation between him and Lanzmann, McClelland suggests that a French phrase conveying a state of mind in which one’s job ‘deforms’ independent judgement might sum up the situation: McCLELLAND:  You have a very good term in French about déformation professionelle. I think we might call it déformation sociale. These [government] people were the products of certain cultural and educational groups into whose sphere of experience the problem of Jews did not exist really.80

Although the director does not ask McClelland to elaborate on his newly coined version of the French phrase, the significance of what the interviewee calls déformation sociale – meaning that one has allowed one’s social environment to

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determine the limits of humane or ethical responses – is of central relevance to all Lanzmann’s rescue and resistance interviews. Lanzmann’s opening question in the present encounter’s third reel addresses McClelland’s experience of Jewish rescue initiatives in Switzerland after he moved there in September 1942. The interviewer mentions in particular the Va’ad Ha’atzalah rescue movement led by Recha and Isaac Sternbuch, which prompts the interviewee to become not just the mouthpiece for such ‘social deformation’ on the part of others, but seem to voice it on his own account. In response to Lanzmann’s asking what his ‘recollection’ is of the Sternbuchs, McClelland does not address their activities or views, but the appearance and bearing of Isaac Sternbuch: McCLELLAND:  Well, I suppose it is the stereotypical recollection of the sort of medieval rabbi out of a Polish ghetto, a little busy man with a wild little beard … who was always in a hurry, who was always harassed, who was taking things terribly hard.81

Even as he describes them, McClelland acts out Sternbuch’s ‘busy’ actions with a quick shoulder-shrugging motion, while a slow zoom in the act of his speaking reaches the closest point to his face as he concludes, in relation to the Swiss Jewish Distribution Committee representative, ‘in comparison to Saly Mayer – night and day’.82 The interviewee defines himself, and by implication the ‘social’ context that has formed his thinking, in two different ways during this part of the interview, first as a ‘rational white Protestant American’ and then as a ‘practical Scotsman’.83 This choice of cultural labels emphasizes the fact that McClelland views his position as the diametric opposite to what he calls ‘eastern Jewry’, so that even his own immigrant ancestry is of a kind to be set against theirs. Such a view disposed the interviewee, as he claims, to prefer dealings with Saly Mayer, who was his contact in Geneva. The ‘rational and businesslike’ Mayer’s appearance and lifestyle were more ‘congenial’ to McClelland than Sternbuch’s: McCLELLAND:  [Mayer] in every sense of the word was a solid citizen, not to say almost a ponderous man in some ways, always dressed in severe black suits, wore a black Homburg – a lace and embroidery manufacturer of the commercial city of St Gallen.84

As Lanzmann did in response to Pehle’s similar attitude towards Rabbi Kalmanowitz in New York, whom that interviewee describes as ‘a very emotional man, with a long beard, who would come to my office and pull his beard and cry’, in a way the WRB director found ‘very hard to take’, he poses counter-questions to McClelland that show the significance for his project of indicative views of this

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kind.85 Just as the director asks Pehle why he refers to Kalmanowitz’s suggestions for rescue as ‘unreal’, implying that they might have been the opposite, so he prompts McClelland to acknowledge the justice of Isaac Sternbuch’s demeanour: McCLELLAND:  An old Jewish friend said to me, ‘You be careful, McClelland, because you’re going to be the wailing wall, and people are going to come to you and tear their hair out and beat their poor heads against the wall and the world is coming to an end’ … LANZMANN:  Yes, but the statement of your friend was quite true, because the world really was going to end.86

Lanzmann opens the eighth reel of the interview with a comparison aiming to extend his implication that the orthodox Jewish stance was not only ‘very active’ but also one that was itself rational in the exceptional circumstances. The perception of orthodox emotionalism and extreme or vague demands is not only part of what the director later calls ‘a credibility gap’, but also its telling symbol.87 The obstacle that such estimates of orthodox rescue-campaigners constituted is evident, as we have seen, in relation to Rabbi Weissmandl.88 Indeed, it is Weissmandl’s correspondence, familiar from the interview with Hermann Landau, that Lanzmann places before McClelland. The director points out the ‘astonishing parallel’ between McClelland’s own statement in a wartime report that money ‘was one of the main tools of the WRB’, and the late rabbi’s assertion in a letter: LANZMANN:  You say money is the main tool, and he writes this: ‘We beg of you with tears running from our eyes, you have but one obligation: to raise money, money and money, in large quantities, and leave the suggestions and advice to us’ … That means you agreed completely, as a matter of fact, with these religious rabbinical Jews.89

It is Lanzmann in this instance who reads aloud from Weissmandl’s letter which he had elsewhere persuaded Landau to recite. In the present case, Lanzmann’s reading, interspersed with his comments and emphatic finger-waving gestures while voicing Weissmandl’s repetition of ‘money’, is directed at McClelland for polemical purposes. As the director claims, in the face of McClelland’s statement of his ‘wariness’ at engaging in bribery or ransom, ‘their way of asking was not yours’, implying the extreme consequences of small differences.90 McClelland himself was subject to polarized thinking from colleagues at the American Embassy in Switzerland, who, as he relates to Lanzmann, nicknamed him ‘Mr MacIsrael’ because of his dealings with ‘all those wild Jews and their problems’.91 Even the nature of the nickname, one bestowed, as he says, ‘in fun’, rests on the apparent opposition between Jewish and Celtic attributes of the

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kind he has already invoked. This prompts Lanzmann’s conclusion, as a verdict on McClelland’s WRB record as it comes across in the interview in general: ‘For the American bureaucracy you were mad, and for the rabbinical Jews you were not mad enough.’92 The culmination of this important section of the interview is a fragmentary interchange, characterized by incomplete sentences and mishearings which sum up the attitudes towards orthodox rescue that Lanzmann aims to tease out. The more McClelland tries to explain the position which seemed to him self-evident in relation to the emotional and biblical rhetoric of orthodoxy, the more its reliance on what he twice calls ‘stereotypical’ thinking emerges: McCLELLAND:  a completely open-ended and kind of hysterical plea for unlimited amounts of money to save unlimited amounts of people was just too – too imprecise, too emotional. LANZMANN:  Why do you say ‘hysterical’? McCLELLAND:  Why do I – ? LANZMANN:  Why do you say ‘hysterical’? McCLELLAND:  Well, hysterical in comparison to practical proposals. LANZMANN:  Yes, but – McCLELLAND:  I mean proposals in practical terms, said in a quiet voice, in simple language.93

The encounter with McClelland equally provides Lanzmann with more material on two of the central questions of his rescue-related interviews: that of selective rescue, and of the bombing of Auschwitz. McClelland describes his inclination to support rescue on behalf of ‘the group’ rather than individuals, who might be chosen for arbitrary reasons: ‘because he is a nice man and he is a violinist or a scientist, you know’.94 He follows this remark, which Lanzmann claims to rate more highly than the ‘Noah’s Ark’ ethos of rescue in Hungary, with an anecdote that clearly lingers in his mind, about the equal difficulty of taking the opposite approach of thinking only in terms of the group. We hear that McClelland turned down the suggestion by the SS at Les Milles to take a seventy-year-old Polish man off a transport bound for Drancy because he had a US passport, albeit one thirty years old. McClelland was confronted in this instance with what he calls a ‘terrible choice’.95 Since the release of the old man in this case would have meant that someone else would have to go in his place to fill a ‘quota’, McClelland did not have him removed. In the present, McClelland wonders, ‘was it my right to make any such decision?’, and whether a ‘hundred per cent Quaker’, for whom all people were ‘children of God’ and had to be treated equally, would have refused to do so.96

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McClelland himself introduces the question of bombing the tracks to Auschwitz, following a conversation that appears to have taken place between reels. By contrast to Pehle’s cautious approach to this idea during his interview, McClelland is outspoken in his advocacy of it in the present. He describes being ‘horrified’ to learn after the war that such an action, which he recommended ‘on three or four occasions’, would have been ‘perfectly feasible’, since reconnaissance flights of the Auschwitz area and bombing raids on the satellite factories regularly occurred.97 He roundly dismisses John McCloy’s reasons for not agreeing to bomb the railway or the camp as ‘absolute nonsense’.98 The interview concludes with McClelland’s similarly forthright commentary on his motivation for deciding after all to take part in Lanzmann’s film project, which he had declined at an earlier meeting with the director in the summer of 1978. Indeed, the interviewee’s relaxed demeanour no doubt arises in part from his greater intimacy with Lanzmann due to that very refusal, since the director reminds him, ‘I begged you to participate … in my heart, I begged you.’99 As he must have considered was the case of his activities during the war, McClelland describes taking part in Lanzmann’s project as his ‘duty’, prompted by childhood memories of the Armenian genocide during the First World War. As McClelland concludes, ‘It’s a question of eternal vigilance, of having a very clear and specific record, which I think is one of your purposes in making this film.’100 The interview with McClelland includes contradictory elements, between his thoughtful persona, and the disruptive nature of some of his utterances, particularly those on orthodox rescuers. However, it is just the paradoxes of this kind that make his testimony important for Lanzmann’s purposes in representing the pressures to rescue alongside the reasons for inertia. McClelland himself was clearly not so affected by the factors he cites which might tend towards delay, given his active role in aiding refugees. Indeed, historical estimates of his legacy are almost entirely laudatory, so that Rebecca Erbelding singles him out for the highest praise among all the WRB officials she considers, although David Krantzler’s is a dissenting voice.101 That McClelland was convinced of the need for assistance even as he is sceptical of some of its manifestations sums up the importance of his role for Lanzmann’s purposes.

Robert Reams: A reluctant interviewee Lanzmann’s inclusion of Robert Borden Reams in his constellation of interviews on the subject of American rescue offers a perspective of a crucially contrasting kind to that of both McClelland and Pehle, not to mention Bergson, since Reams

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had worked during the war alongside Assistant Secretary Breckinridge Long in the US State Department’s European Division. Long is a figure identified by the other WRB interviewees as the source of misinformation and delay, while the American historian Henry Feingold reads aloud during his interview with Lanzmann a memorandum from Long outlining his policy to ‘stop … the number of immigrants into the United States’, to ‘postpone and postpone and postpone’.102 Reams had particular responsibility for refugees, and was Long’s proxy at the Bermuda Conference in 1943. Lanzmann’s eventually being able to address the subject of the Bermuda Conference with his interviewee takes the form of his asking Reams a question about temporal contiguity, and whether he was aware that the first day of the conference, 19 April 1943, was also that of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This is a version of Lanzmann’s repeated point about what he phrases here as the great difference between being ‘in charge of important problems’ in ‘quiet, peaceful, political cities’ such as Geneva and Washington, by contrast to what was happening in occupied Europe ‘in 1942 or 1943’.103 Lanzmann clearly wanted the interview to centre on Reams’s wartime perspective on rescue and refugees, as a member of the obstructive State Department, and Reams’s estimate of such a stance in the present. As the director tells Reams, in his efforts to persuade the interviewee to talk freely, since all the other wartime State Department officials had died, ‘you are a historical figure … and the only survivor’.104 However, despite Reams’s declaration that he is ‘extremely fond’ of the director, and that he ‘loves’ Lanzmann’s entire filmcrew, he cannot be persuaded to give any detailed commentary during the 1.7hour encounter, for reasons outlined to Lanzmann in an unfilmed conversation from the previous day.105 This makes Reams’s agreeing to be interviewed, yet in conditions of his continuing reticence, an intriguing record. The enactment of his refusal to discuss the WRB was itself openly filmed. The encounter takes place in Florida’s Bay Point, near Panama City, a community of which Reams and his wife Dotty, who is also present throughout, had been one of the ‘founding families’ four years earlier in 1975.106 Dotty Reams was herself a former State Department employee, and met her future husband in that setting. Although she was one of four secretaries working in Breckinridge Long’s office, and reveals her first-hand knowledge of his diarykeeping and temperament, Lanzmann’s interest lies solely in the public role of her husband. Over the course of a day, Lanzmann participates in the couple’s pastimes of fishing and golfing. This is followed by an evening conversation at the Reamses’ home, some of which tentatively addresses the past. The outdoor activities are a challenge not only for the director, but also for the film-crew.

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We see the sound-recordist Bernard Aubuoy testing the roving microphone on several occasions, while the clapperboard is not used, nor any announcement of location made, apart from Lanzmann’s comments within the diegesis. As well as giving a sense of the lengths to which the director had to go in order to persuade people to speak for the camera, these activities yield visual and aural material with unexpected symbolic potential. The interview begins with several reels showing Reams fishing at the marina in Bay Point. The silence required by that activity suits the former ambassador and he continues in that vein for most of the day. Reams is shown either in closeup, casting off, baiting and reeling in his line, or from a high angle, where he is a distant but eye-catching figure in a tweed trilby hat and scarlet waterproof jacket. Lanzmann enters the scene briefly, so that we see a series of two-shots of interviewer and interviewee, strikingly so in these unusual circumstances, as we do again in the golfing scenes. In his autobiography, the director describes his ‘fondness’ for ‘fishing, for waiting, for imminence’.107 However, in the present case, Lanzmann allows Reams to show him how to use the tackle, as if he has never taken part in such an activity before. Lanzmann’s catching a fish (Figure 5.7) while his instructor does not lends visual substance to an allusive exchange about a hoped-for ‘imminence’ of revelation: LANZMANN:  Well, I’m very happy to fish with you, Mr Reams … REAMS:  I’m happy. I’m sorry we’re not getting anything big … LANZMANN:  But we will.108

Figure 5.7  Claude Lanzmann and Robert Reams at the water’s edge: ‘It’s a very good fish’.

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At the opening to one of the several film-reels at the water’s edge, Lanzmann gives a commentary in French on the remarkable nature of his encountering the former State Department official in such a setting, part of which he repeats in English: ‘If someone would have told me, my dear Ambassador, that I would be once fishing with you on the Mexican Gulf in Panama City, I would have been very, very surprised.’109 However, the director does not translate for his interlocutor the very last of his comments in French, on the ironically fitting nature of the present scenario: LANZMANN:  Mais c’est plus difficile de l’attraper que d’attraper un poisson. [But he’s harder to catch than a fish].110

These moments of dialogue might seem only obliquely related to Lanzmann’s purpose, yet it is possible to imagine them as part of a sound-montage alongside Reams’s remarks about the wartime era, and his efforts to evade communication, as we encounter them later the same day. This scenario resembles the very different circumstances of Lanzmann’s wish to film the former Sonderkommando member Dov Paisikovitch, whose extreme taciturnity meant that the director envisaged footage of them both taking part in the interviewee’s pastime of angling. The imagery of the two men fishing ‘together in silence’ would be accompanied by a soundtrack consisting of Lanzmann telling Paisikovitch’s story ‘in voiceover’.111 The director never filmed this encounter, but the scene he hoped would substitute for and embody his interlocutor’s traumatized silence has its contrasting equivalent in the mise-en-scène for Reams’s refusal to speak. The fishing sequence is followed by reels showing Lanzmann and Reams at the latter’s local golf course, in which, although the evocative dialogue from the earlier scene is absent, the director maintains an ironic tone. Lanzmann is tutored in golf techniques by his interlocutor even as his adulatory words seem designed to draw him out: LANZMANN:  But you were – you are the best in golf and you were the best in bridge too. REAMS:  I’m afraid I hit your ball in the sand-trap … Now, you hit the ball with this. LANZMANN:  Tell me what I do. You are my master.112 (See Figure 5.8.)

It is not Lanzmann but rather Reams himself who invokes the potential relationship of the game of golf to the events of the war. Just as the interviewee seemed glad to retreat behind the silence and immobility required of fishing

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Figure 5.8  Robert Reams instructs Lanzmann on the golf course.

to avoid reminiscence, so too Reams invokes golf in the evening portion of the interview to shut down any idea of a return to the past. Indeed, since accounts of Breckinridge Long’s concerns during the period of the State Department’s obstruction of rescue include the verdict that he was ‘more interested in golf putts than human lives’, the game functions as a signifier of mistaken priorities.113 Lanzmann angles for some self-reflection or retrospective regret on the interviewee’s part: LANZMANN:  You said yesterday that you felt that you had faults. REAMS:  Everyone has faults … I tend to slice on the golf course and I shouldn’t.114

This detail casts light on Lanzmann’s suggestion to John Pehle that he too be filmed on a golf course. The director was prompted by Pehle’s story from the post-war era, about seeking out a golf club that would accept him along with some Jewish friends as members, to ask if he could film his interviewee playing what he refers to as ‘Jewish golf, a Jewish club!’115 Pehle turns this suggestion down, meaning that Lanzmann has no footage of a different kind of links to contrast with that of Reams at the Bay Point Golf Club. The comment about golf on Reams’s part takes place during the evening of his encounter with Lanzmann, in his home at Marlin Circle. The former ambassador and his wife appear in a two-shot as they sit side-by-side, filmed straight-on, while Lanzmann is occasionally visible in an armchair to the

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Figure 5.9  Robert and Dotty Reams at home.

side of the room. The room is wood-panelled and cabin-like, furnished with strikingly scarlet walls and carpet, and its décor forms part of the discussion. As in the fishing sequence, an oblique visual comment on the events of the past is established, in its implication that a particular North American mindset might have militated against wartime rescue. In this way, Lanzmann attempts to ask his interviewee whether his avowed ‘patriotism’ meant that he had been an ‘isolationist’ during the war, using a term that the historian Henry Feingold, in an exchange with the director about Charles Lindbergh, describes as ‘legitimiz[ing]’ an ‘antisemitic message’.116 The word is symptomatically hard for Reams to catch: LANZMANN:  Would it be right to say that you were an isolationist or not? REAMS:  I was a – ? LANZMANN: Isolationist. REAMS: Idealist?117

The interlocutor eventually claims ‘never’ to have been an isolationist, although he is more expansive in rejecting the notion of idealism in the realm of foreign policy. In the context of these apparently abstract exchanges, which are nonetheless emblematic of the stances taken in the past, Reams is alert to Lanzmann’s efforts to try and draw him into further disclosure. This is the case in relation to the director’s remarks about their conversation of the evening before:

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LANZMANN:  The policy of the United States, of the State Department, the Bermuda Conference – we didn’t talk about this … REAMS:  Nope. And we’re not going to, either. LANZMANN:  I know. But you should tell me why not … REAMS:  If I told you why not, I’d be talking to you.

Nonetheless, Lanzmann elicits from his interlocutor some comments which offer a more specific contrast to the other American interviewees than his simply being unwilling to talk. Of Breckinridge Long, Reams says that he was ‘honest’ and ‘gentle’, while his adding that ‘I felt that I could trust him absolutely – if he told me something I believed it’, has a pointed resonance in the context of the State Department’s suppression of cables and falsified figures.118 Reams distances himself from any suggestion of regret, about his wartime actions or the fate of the Jews, by implying that it was he who was the real victim of US policy, since ‘the refugee thing was simply added on’ to his usual workload, even as he registers awareness of Lanzmann’s ploy to draw him out: LANZMANN:  It was frightening to have the refugee problem added to your tasks, which were already considerable. REAMS:  You know, you can’t really get around me. It was a job that nobody else wanted. And all my career, I took jobs that people didn’t want … That means they were sane and I wasn’t. No, I took it out of a sense of duty.119

Lanzmann’s encounter with Reams shows us a resistant witness. Reams seems to direct his gaze anywhere but at the camera, by contrast to his wife, who looks and smiles directly at it. He rarely volunteers any information, answers questions laconically and denies knowledge or recall of such factors as Long’s wartime diary or when he learnt about the existence of Auschwitz. That such utterance emerges at all is credit to Lanzmann’s in turn enacting a role, that of an agreeable and guileless conversation partner and good sport. The inaction, reticence and obfuscation on the part of the wartime State Department is the subject of critique and lament by the three other interviewees, and, during the encounter with Reams, we experience these features again in the present time of the interview.

Conclusion The interviews conducted for what we can envisage as a composite testimony about the War Refugee Board are distant from Lanzmann’s usual interest in eyewitness accounts of events in Nazi-occupied Europe. This is not a return to

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the suffering of affronts, as is the case in Lanzmann’s interviews with survivors, but to the interviewees’ own, perhaps now discredited, wartime views and decisions. This means that the practice of editing in the present case would be crucial, in order to avoid an impression like that given in Bernard Weinraub’s play The Accomplices. Of this multiply voiced drama, which centres on the unsympathetic reception of Peter Bergson’s campaign to provoke rescue action in wartime United States, one critic claims that it ‘has more polemical substance than documentary style’, an impression that is exaggerated rather than defused by its pattern of ‘shifting interactions’ between the dramatis personae.120 The play’s title itself implies that those represented as Bergson’s antagonists in the play, including not only Stephen Wise and Breckinridge Long but also Roosevelt himself, were facilitators, albeit unintentionally, of Nazi genocide. Lanzmann’s film would have aspired to exploration, by contrast to Weinraub’s mode of polemical exposé. The positions called for in a cinematic dialogue of this kind precede and even dictate the choice of interviewee. Bergson, Pehle, McClelland and Reams as individuals are subordinate to their respective roles as independent activist, bureaucrat, humanist and obstructionist. Lanzmann’s interest in the banal, cynical or Realpolitik reasons which meant that only a relatively small number benefited from the WRB’s actions is not aimed at establishing an ‘understanding’ of the mass murder or responses to it. Nor does the director aim to demonstrate that Allied rescue was an eminently realistic prospect that was wilfully squandered. Yehuda Bauer argues against the thesis of wartime ‘abandonment’, an ‘emotive’ term which he says implies a pre-existing claim or ‘bond’ that does not apply in the case of the United States and the Jews of Europe, who were simply not rescued.121 However, Lanzmann’s final remark to McClelland on the notion of the bombing of Auschwitz accords with that of Bauer in relation to what would have been that act’s ‘moral’ rather than military significance. As the director puts it, the absence of any such action meant that ‘the Jews had … a feeling of absolute loneliness, of being completely abandoned by the whole world’.122 Although Lanzmann’s concern throughout the WRB interviews lies in the ways in which conceptual and geographical distance affected Allied understanding and policy, such an effect of distancing runs the risk of being repeated in the very act of watching. It is only by reconceptualizing what we might expect of Lanzmann’s filmmaking that the cinematic significance of these WRB encounters can be envisaged, as parts of a polyphonic whole that would give communal voice to the history of an institution at a time of genocide.

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6

Leadership, responsibility and resistance: Yehuda Bauer, Richard Rubenstein, Ya’akov Arnon

This chapter explores Lanzmann’s interviews addressing Jewish leadership during the Holocaust era, and on the wider questions raised by that topic, about responsibility for the fate of the Jews.1 Two of the interviewees, the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer and the American theologian Richard Rubenstein, speak from a standpoint outside the events. While Bauer argues for the wide variety of responses found among the Judenräte’s leadership, ranging from what he calls acceptance or compliance to outright resistance, Rubenstein takes more of a bird’s-eye perspective in detailing the cultural trends that he considers underlay the commission of genocide, making his arguments appear at times to prefigure those of thinkers such as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. In this way, the outtake interviews with Bauer and Rubenstein bring to mind Lanzmann’s encounter with the historian Raul Hilberg as it appears in Shoah, and which has been seen as influencing the film’s final ethos and form. What was discarded to enable such an impression is clear in these instances. While Bauer’s views on Jewish responses to the Nazi occupation explicitly challenge Hilberg’s, Rubenstein acknowledges the influence of the latter on his work but centres his critique on outside agencies and not the Jews themselves. The Dutch-born Israeli politician Ya’akov Arnon, the third interviewee considered here, was an eyewitness to the events of the war in the occupied Netherlands.2 He was sought out by Lanzmann for the sake of his perspective on the Joodse Raad, or Jewish Council, established by the Nazis in wartime Amsterdam, one of whose leaders was Arnon’s uncle Abraham Asscher. It seems likely that Lanzmann was drawn to the topic of one of the few Jewish Councils in occupied western Europe, and the controversy over its leaders’ policies that obtained at the time and after the war, as an instance of exactly the kind of ‘grey zone’ of ‘Jewish councils and Jewish police’ that David Cesarani claims in an essay on Shoah were of ‘little interest’

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to the director.3 These three outtake interviews show that, on the contrary, such topics were of great concern to Lanzmann in relation to rescue and resistance.

Yehuda Bauer: A spectrum of responses The Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer has been described as a ‘consultant’ or ‘historical adviser’ for Shoah, and Lanzmann thanks him for assuming that role.4 Bauer was involved at the outset of what became Shoah in the early 1970s, after its commission by Alouph Hareven, the director of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Lanzmann describes giving a ‘progress report’ to the historian as chair of ‘a scientific committee’ in Israel set up to monitor the undertaking.5 It was Bauer who suggested that Lanzmann should interview two of the central figures in Shoah, Rudolf Vrba and Filip Müller, acting in agreement with the director’s conviction that his film would focus on the Czech and Slovak members of the camps’ Sonderkommando who had ‘worked at the final stage of the destruction process’.6 Yet, despite this close engagement with the process of filming, none of the interview between Bauer and Lanzmann, in which they debate Jewish responses to the events of the Holocaust years, appears in the final film nor in any subsequent release. Bauer’s own background forms the substance of the outtake interview’s first minutes, making clear his status as a refugee historian. Bauer was born in Prague in 1927, and fled by train with his family across the Polish border on the day of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, arriving in Mandate Palestine before war broke out.7 Like the director, who describes himself as ‘absolutely contemporary’ with the events of the genocide, Bauer says that he ‘could have been involved in the Holocaust’, but instead spent a ‘very calm and quiet childhood’ in Palestine.8 The almost-2.5-hour interview with Bauer addresses the conceptual matters and controversies in relation to rescue and resistance, as well as the individuals involved. Thus Bauer and Lanzmann debate the role of the Judenräte, the institutions’ relationship to ghetto resistance movements in different contexts, as well as responses to the genocide on the part of the Yishuv, that is, the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine. We witness their considering the cases of Rezső Kasztner, Hersh Smolar and Rabbi Michael Weissmandl, along with extended discussion of figures about whom there is little other mention in Lanzmann’s interviews, including the very different legacies of the Judenrat leaders Chaim Rumkowski of Łódź, Jacob Gens of Vilna and Efraim Barasz of Białystok. In this way, the exchange with Bauer is something of an index to Lanzmann’s rescue and resistance-related filming.

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The interview with Bauer took place in Israel in 1979. Like that with Abba Kovner, the present encounter was filmed in the grounds of the kibbutz that became the interlocutor’s home, in this case Kibbutz Shoval in the northern Negev desert. Bauer sits in a green-and-white striped folding chair, its colours in harmony with the backdrop of lawns, trees and sand-coloured buildings in the distance (Figures 6.1 and 6.2). The interview continues into late evening, the eventual complete darkness allowing for a contrast between Bauer’s face and

Figure 6.1  Yehuda Bauer with children and dog in the background, Israel.

Figure 6.2  Yehuda Bauer at night.

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Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

white shirt lit up by arc-lamps, and the blending of his dark hair and cardigan into the backdrop of the pitch-black night. The interview’s outdoor setting contrasts with those other occasions on which Lanzmann’s interlocutors are filmed in their own book-lined homes, giving the mise-en-scène in this case an expansive and pastoral look at odds with the constriction and bleakness of the subjects discussed. Like Kovner, Bauer holds documents from which he eventually reads, giving Holocaust history a location in the Israeli context whose relationship to those events is itself considered during the encounter. If Bauer’s is the historiographical perspective that characterizes the outtakes, one missing from the finished film, it contrasts with that of Raul Hilberg, which is often taken to embody Shoah’s conceptual approach. Hilberg was also a refugee historian. He was born in Vienna in 1926 and left Austria with his family in April 1939, eventually arriving in the United States on 1 September. In his posthumous appreciation of the historian, Lanzmann writes in glowing terms of his first encountering Hilberg’s ‘groundbreaking’ early study, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), in Jerusalem in 1974, describing the first edition of that text as ‘forever princeps in my heart’.9 In his autobiography, Lanzmann calls Hilberg’s book ‘unrelentingly dry’, although such down-to-earth wording equally has the force of a compliment.10 The phrasing Lanzmann uses of Hilberg, once more including the approving epithet ‘dry’, equally applies to his own practice: the two share a ‘dryness, the absence of pathos, the refusal of all idealism, the tireless confrontation of the sole question of the how of the destruction, the refusal to ask the question why’.11 Lanzmann subtitles his appreciation of Hilberg ‘Actor in Shoah’, to highlight the role of this historian who appears on three occasions in the released film. It might seem when watching the present interview that Hilberg’s inclusion is directly at Bauer’s expense. Although Bauer and Hilberg were colleagues, their estimates of such wartime institutions as the Judenräte and the nature of Jewish resistance are at odds. As Bauer’s commentary during the interview suggests, Hilberg’s tripartite division of those in the Holocaust world into victims, perpetrators and bystanders, the ‘monolithic categories’ around which, as David Cesarani argues, Shoah was constructed, has been superseded.12 Hilberg’s views on Jewish resistance in particular have been challenged, by historians among whom Bauer is one of the most notable, in his calling Hilberg’s perspective ‘insufficient’ for its judging events solely in terms of their ‘outcomes’.13 Rather than an exclusively retrospective view of this kind, by means of which the fact of murder trumps every effort made against it, Bauer argues instead for posing such questions about community and Judenrat leaders as ‘whether in a totally

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immoral world they tried to maintain elementary morality, whether their strategies were designed for the common good, and not whether their actions were successful’.14 In his study, Hilberg claims that, for groups such as the Jews of occupied Europe when ‘faced by force’, there are five possible ways to respond: ‘by resistance, by an attempt to alleviate or nullify the threat (the undoing reaction), by evasion, by paralysis, or by compliance’.15 His conclusion about ‘the whole Jewish reaction pattern’ during the Holocaust era is the unforgiving one that, following what he describes as a two-thousand-year history of ‘an almost complete lack of resistance’, there is evident only ‘an attempt to avert action and, failing that, automatic compliance with orders’.16 However, even such a factor as the extent of Lanzmann’s resistance-related outtake interviews belies this assertion, particularly of any ‘automatic’ compliance, since, as we have seen in relation to the interviews with Garfunkel, Kovner and others, a course of action was only reached through a process of long and painful debate. The arguments put forward by Bauer and other historians who have followed suit support such a conclusion. For Bauer, by contrast to Hilberg, there exists an entire ‘gamut’ of responses among the Judenräte and a ‘stereotype’ of this kind cannot be identified, leading him to argue that, although armed resistance in particular was all but impossible in practical terms, instances of ‘non-violent and occasionally violent defiance’ took place nonetheless.17 In his study Rethinking the Holocaust, Bauer sums up his approach in that book as well as the viewpoint he presents to the director: Once it began to dawn on the Jewish populations of Europe that the Germans had decided to murder them, the reaction was flight, hiding, armed resistance on the part of a small minority who were able to obtain weapons, attempts to seek employment that would be essential to the Germans, and a despairing but often dignified acceptance of inevitable death.18

This account, of reactions, which Bauer says were no different from those of other captive groups, goes some way towards summarizing Lanzmann’s findings in the rescue and resistance-related outtakes. However, the director’s concerns extend beyond what Bauer lists. Not only do these include assistance or its absence from the Allies, but also efforts that were more communal and long drawn-out on the part of the Jews themselves. Among these are attempted negotiation or ransom payments to the Nazis, as well as decisions about whether or not to choose whom to save, and if or when to rebel. Even if these matters are implicit in Bauer’s statement, and are addressed by him in other works, for Lanzmann they emerge as central to the question of ‘how’ the mass murder took place.

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Apart from Hilberg, all the other historians who appear in Shoah, including Gertrude Steiner and Jan Karski, are also eyewitnesses. Yet, as Adam Brown argues, the very absence of a ‘counterpoint’ to Hilberg’s views as a result of his singular status in the released film as a refugee rather than an eyewitness historian gives them an uncontested ‘considerable weight’.19 Even in Shoah as it stands, Brown detects in those sections where Hilberg appears, in his role of introducing wartime material, including a Nazi deportation train-timetable and the diary of the Warsaw Ghetto leader Adam Czerniaków, an editorial practice that casts doubt on Lanzmann’s apparent accord with the historian.20 The impression of a confluence of perspectives between director and historian, in particular that of a conviction about Jewish submission and of what Hilberg calls the ‘illusionary behavior’ of mounting cultural activities in the ghetto, is a filmic effect as much as a substantively argued position.21 Nonetheless, we can only conclude, as Noah Shenker does, that ‘Lanzmann saw something in Hilberg that differentiated him from other historians’.22 This takes the form of Hilberg’s on-screen presence as well as his interpretations, evident in Lanzmann’s praising the historian’s ‘metallic and warm’ voice and the ‘way he carried his body … his body itself spoke’.23 Indeed, the director claims that ‘I knew immediately that he would figure in the film I wanted to make’.24 In distinction to what Lanzmann says of Hilberg, Bauer offers his insights with animation and ‘transmits’ them with urbanity and insouciance. The Judenrat leader, Jacob Gens, from whose writings Bauer reads, is not resurrected, as Lanzmann says is the case when Hilberg reads from Czerniaków’s diary, but kept at a distance. Bauer’s verdicts are not as often at odds with Lanzmann’s as the director’s affinity with Hilberg might suggest, although significant moments of overt dissent emerge. As with all of his interlocutors, the interviewer’s apparent agreement sometimes appears simply as a facilitating gesture. However, Bauer answers back to the director in a way that, although invariably good-humoured, often remains unresolved, as we see in relation to their failure to agree on the ethical standing of Kasztner’s rescue operation, which Lanzmann criticizes: BAUER:  I am not sure you are right. LANZMANN:  I am not sure you are right either.25

In turn, at times Bauer appears more eager to read out historical material than listen to Lanzmann, and on one occasion falls silent, asking the interviewer to ‘feed me another question’.26 None of these moments of friction or failure need have remained in a final version of this interview, but they suggest an absence of easy filmic rapport between director and historian. Despite this, and

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following Brown’s argument that Hilberg is Lanzmann’s doppelganger, the same could be said, perhaps to an even greater extent, of Bauer.27 However, other than his fleetingly visible gesturing hand and the sound of his cigarette-lighter, the outtakes include no imagery of Lanzmann, not even in the form of a separate reel of footage, as if in acknowledgement of distance. The central topic of the exchange between Bauer and Lanzmann is that of the Judenräte of occupied Europe and their leaders, as a consequence of which they discuss communal efforts at rescue more generally. Lanzmann’s question about a ‘policy of rescue through work’, by which community leaders sought to make people indispensable to the Germans through their labour, prompts Bauer to contrast the case of Rumkowski in Łódź with that of Barasz in Białystok.28 He does so in order to put forward in this context the same non-consequentialist argument as was made by the historian Lucien Steinberg about rescue efforts, that what is significant is ‘not the outcome’ of events but ‘the intention’ behind them.29 Indeed, as Bauer adds, during the war in general for Jewish leaders and Judenräte, the ‘possibilities of action were very limited’, while ‘the outcome’, that of murder, ‘was the same everywhere’.30 Rumkowski, in Bauer’s phrasing, was an ‘old dictator’ who ‘wanted to save the Jews of Łódź by making them the slaves of the Germans’, a policy of rescue through work that seemed ‘logical’, but could not succeed in the face of Nazi policies that prioritized racial ideology.31 Nonetheless, as Bauer claims, had the Łódź Ghetto been liberated by Russian troops in July 1944, rather than January 1945, there would have remained 69,000 Jews alive. If these ‘unrealized possibilities’ had actually occurred,32 Rumkowski would have been judged differently, as Bauer puts it in the contexts of the present interview and his book: Perhaps you and I would have thought then that Rumkowski was a great hero … a saviour! Maybe there would be a statue to him somewhere. (To Lanzmann) [W]ould we have erected a statue in his memory, as a hero of the Jewish people? (Rethinking the Holocaust)33

While Bauer does not make a conclusive statement to Lanzmann, other than declaring that Rumkowski ‘was a murderer, there is no doubt about that’, in his book the historian concludes, ‘Frankly, I would vote for the gallows, not the statue.’34 Although this seems to fly in the face of Bauer’s commitment to ‘attitude, not result’, his verdict is based on the fact that 69,000 Jews remaining alive as late as the spring of 1944 was itself due to Rumkowski’s questionable actions.35 These included principally ‘the murder of the children’ whom Rumkowski ‘delivered into the hands of the Germans’ despite knowing ‘where they were going’ – that

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is, to the extermination camp of Treblinka.36 A viewer of the outtakes might recall the sound of children’s voices which is clearly audible on the interview’s soundtrack at the outset of this discussion of Rumkowski, while the fifth reel opens on a long-shot of children and dogs playing on the kibbutz lawn before panning back to the interviewee. Although it is hard to imagine that such an effect would have been retained, since it is one that would skirt close to the very ‘pathos’ whose absence Lanzmann praised on Hilberg’s part, this visual and auditory irony persists in the outtakes-viewer’s memory. In the interview, citing a detail that does not appear in his published work, Bauer concludes his account not with a call for the gallows, but with a description that Lanzmann finds it hard to credit about Rumkowski’s own deportation to the extermination camp: BAUER:  And when he was shipped to Auschwitz, a Jewish figure from the underground in Łódź whom he had sent personally to Auschwitz got hold of him and threw him alive into the fire. LANZMANN:  Are you sure of this? … there are several … BAUER:  … several versions, but I think that is the true version.37

As if in support of Bauer’s wish for this to be the ‘true version’ of Rumkowski’s death, by reason of the symbolic truth of his perfidy that it conveys, the outtake script has substituted ‘underworld’ for ‘underground’, transferring the events from the material reality of resistance to a mythical realm of retributive punishment.38 Despite this focus on the ‘extreme case’ of the Łódź Ghetto and the notoriety of Rumkowski’s speeches, it is not the latter but Jacob Gens, the leader of the Vilna Judenrat, whose words are read out by Bauer during the course of the encounter with Lanzmann.39 If Hilberg succeeds in ‘tak[ing] the place of a dead man’ through his readings in Shoah from Czerniaków’s diary, Bauer accomplishes the rather different effect of a critical distance in his ventriloquizing.40 That this was Lanzmann’s goal is clear from his request to Bauer: LANZMANN:  I am thinking of the case of Gens … the beautiful speech he gave to the intellectuals of Vilna, when he said, ‘I am the one with the dirty hands. You will get out of this very cleanly’. Could you talk about this?41

Lanzmann’s use of the adjective ‘beautiful’ is not simply ironic, even in the face of a speech that, as Bauer puts it, was ‘justifying the action of the Jewish Police in the ghetto of Osmiany’, who had ‘helped the Germans to select the old people and handed them over to be killed’.42 Rather, such a description acknowledges the extremity of rhetoric required in these almost unimaginable circumstances.

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Bauer quotes Gens’s rationale, speaking as if from his subject-position: ‘If I hadn’t done that, they would have taken women and children.’43 The speech that Bauer reads, as originally delivered at a gathering of Vilna Ghetto writers and artists, emphasizes the gulf between the historian in the present and Gens in October 1942 by means of the latter’s insistent rhetorical use of the first person: BAUER:  Many Jews regard me as a traitor … and many of you wonder why I am showing myself at this literary gathering. I, Gens, led you to death, and I, Gens, want to rescue Jews from death. I, Gens, order the uncovering of malinas … and I, Gens, try to get more food and more work and more certificates for the ghetto. I cast my account with Jewish blood, and not with Jewish respect.44

Bauer’s meta-commentary, for instance his interrupting the reading to explain that ‘malinas’ were ‘the hiding places’, increases the impression of distance even as he repeats Gens’s words. Gens’s conclusion, as read aloud by Bauer, reveals an intention to save, but with the effect of making him seem, like Rumkowski, a ‘murderer’: ‘In order to save even a small part of the Jewish people, I alone had to lead others to their deaths’.45 Gens acted in the opposite way to the stringent Talmudic judgement that ‘one cannot actively cause a person to die even if it will save many more’, concluding that, in such circumstances, it is better to keep one’s hands clean and do nothing.46 Gens’s ‘fantastic declaration’, as Lanzmann calls it, is followed by Bauer’s cautioning that emphasis on Gens and Rumkowski’s ‘messianic’ convictions would give the wrong impression, since, as the historian puts it, ‘I insist that this is not the general picture.’47 A discussion follows between Lanzmann and Bauer of the very different cases of Slovakia, where there was no ghetto, and Minsk, where the Judenrat supported the resistance. It is possible to imagine either a policy of editing this footage to centre on the notion of ‘dirty hands’ action as highlighted by Lanzmann, that of transgressing moral norms for the sake of what is seen as the greater good, or one that attempts, in Primo Levi’s phrase, a suspension of judgement.48 Indeed, Gens’s description of his own complicity is even more extreme than that of a ‘dirty hands’ position, as we learn from Bauer’s reading aloud, in the form of one that engulfs his entire body with even more polluting substances: ‘I, Jacob Gens, if I survive, I will go out covered with filth and blood. Blood will run from my hands.’49 Although it goes unmentioned here, Gens’s invocation of women and children being spared in exchange for the elderly and sick was not a speculative comment or rhetorical device, but based on a deal he had struck with the Germans that also meant reducing the number of individuals to be killed. Such a policy entailed

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choosing who was to die in an effort to save others, however temporarily, by contrast to that voiced in the interview with Abba Kovner, whose realization, as Bauer puts it here, that there was ‘no way out’, led instead to resistance on the part of the Jewish partisans, ‘although they knew perfectly well that everybody would be killed’. ‘Themselves too’, as Lanzmann adds.50 Lanzmann’s preoccupation with the ethos of the Kasztner Train rescue initiative in Hungary seems to emerge from this consideration of Gens’s response to the unwinnable dilemma in which he found himself. Bauer sets the scene for an exchange on this topic by declaring at the outset his view of the notion that Kasztner failed to warn the Hungarian Jews of their impending fate in order to secure the safety of his friends and family: BAUER:  I think this whole issue is put the wrong way round. Hungarian Jewry, including the Jews of Cluj, did not have to be told about the mass murders. … They saw it happening in front of their eyes.51

Bauer’s declaration that ‘it is not a matter of the Jews of Hungary not knowing; it is a matter of their not wanting to know’, leads to the encounter’s most sustained and unresolved disagreement, summed up by Lanzmann’s insistence that ‘you don’t convince me absolutely’.52 The nature of their differences is apparent in Bauer’s qualifying Lanzmann’s implication that wealthy individuals were given places on the train: BAUER:  He took into that train people representing all the sections of Hungarian Jewry, and he argued – LANZMANN:  And many rich too, who could pay. BAUER:  And rich people who could pay for the rest.53

Where Lanzmann’s remark suggests class privilege, Bauer’s is more pragmatic in recognizing the need for money to expedite the rescue initiative. The historian consistently opposes the director’s view of Kasztner, one perhaps influenced by his interviewee Rudolf Vrba, in particular Lanzmann’s notion of selective rescue conducted on unjust grounds: BAUER:  Kasztner decided … that the only chance to save Jews was by negotiation … LANZMANN:  But you said, ‘the only chance to save Jews’; you should say, ‘the only chance to save some Jews’, because as a matter of fact he thought already that the others were doomed and he was going to save a handful. BAUER:  No, that is not true. LANZMANN:  I think it is.54

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Lanzmann’s taking particular exception to Kasztner’s characterization of the ‘handful’ he could rescue – ‘he himself wrote in his report that he wanted to save a kind of Noah’s Ark’, as the director claims – is refuted by Bauer, who argues in turn, while maintaining an almost condescendingly good-humoured demeanour, ‘It was not only that. What he wanted to do was break the precedent – he wanted to create a precedent of saving Jews with German agreement.’55 Lanzmann did not abandon his conception of the ambivalent origins of the Kasztner Train. Almost forty years after his encounter with Bauer, the director subtitled the interview in The Four Sisters with Hanna Marton, one of the train’s passengers, ‘Noah’s Ark’. Yet in the present case, Bauer concludes, ‘I would plunge for the positive explanation in the case of Kasztner,’ judging that ‘the group he saved was for him a steppingstone to save others, more people and as many as he could’.56 The encounter concludes with a symptomatic sense of unresolved threads of argument.

Richard Rubenstein: Cultural complicity Lanzmann’s interview with Richard Rubenstein does not centre on this academic and one-time rabbi’s writings on post-Holocaust theology, such as his After Auschwitz of 1966, in which the argument for a rejection of the traditional, personified God of history has made it his best-known work.57 Rather, the exchange focuses on Rubenstein’s political writings, which also respond to what he calls the ‘watershed’ events of the war. Although its title is not mentioned, it is clear that Rubenstein’s The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future of 1975 is at stake here.58 In The Cunning of History, Rubenstein argues that the Nazi genocide cannot be divorced from the Western ‘modernity’ that produced it, as a ‘secularized culture’ that ‘substituted calculating rationality’ for what he calls ‘traditional norms’.59 Rubenstein contends that ‘the Holocaust was an expression of some of the most significant political, moral, religious and demographic tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century’.60 His habit of making broad cultural claims of this kind is equally evident in the encounter with Lanzmann, and characterizes Rubenstein’s rhetorical style as well as the burden of his argument. Although his book centres on the events of the war, Rubenstein claims that, as its subtitle suggests, his intention was to write about contemporary American politics, ‘in the aftermath of Watergate and the Nixon presidency’.61 In this way, as Michael Morgan says, Rubenstein’s discussion of the camp world is framed through the use of an ostensibly ‘social-psychological’ rather than an overtly ‘moral or theological’ perspective.62

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The interview with Rubenstein took place in Florida in late 1978.63 Its setting is the strikingly unusual one of a boat plying the waters of Wakulla Springs on a cloudlessly sunny day, in an area of fresh water in a national park near Tallahassee. Lanzmann and Rubenstein sit side-by-side in the boat’s prow facing the camera and with their backs to the direction of travel, while the scenery is visible in the form of water-borne travelling shots. The remarkable wildlife of Wakulla Springs visible throughout includes such birds as limpkins, herons, egrets and moorhens, as well as alligators seen basking motionlessly in the sun on logs and islets. Rubenstein’s beige mohair jumper worn over a white shirt matches the muted colours of the water and the ancient, mossy cypress trees standing in swamps.64 For all its winter setting, Lanzmann’s costume of a blue shirt and dark glasses reminds us of the region’s tropical climate. The dark hair and heavy-rimmed glasses of these two men of similar age – Rubenstein was born in New York in 1924, a year before Lanzmann in Paris – suggests a visual doubling, yet, as in Bauer’s case, the shot construction challenges this impression. Although they are seated in a way that would naturally lend itself to a sequence of two-shots or reverse-shots, Rubenstein’s habit of issuing long addresses to the middle distance and looking down or away from the interviewer means that, when Lanzmann is off-screen, his presence is not conveyed even by the direction of the interviewee’s gaze (Figure 6.3). Indeed, at the end of the sixth reel, the director instructs Rubenstein to ‘look in the camera’, resulting in a close-up with an eyeline-match that draws attention to the rarity of looks of this kind.65

Figure 6.3  ‘No open space’: Richard Rubenstein with backdrop of Wakulla Springs.

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In the present interview, the suitability of the setting is self-reflexively alluded to by the discussants. Even Rubenstein’s very first words to the director, ‘I should start?’, emphasize that the opening dialogue is strategic and not simply an unplanned exchange: RUBENSTEIN:  This is Wakulla Springs, wildlife sanctuary, and it is one of the most beautiful spots in the US. It is the way Florida … was before it became as settled as it is now. … LANZMANN:  Yes, and do you think it fits to talk about the Holocaust in this place? RUBENSTEIN:  Well, if one wants to talk about polar opposites … what we have here is the dialectic opposite extreme of this, because what we have here is an area in which nature has been completely unchanged, and what the Holocaust represents is … the most extreme form of the city of man and its radical destructiveness. … So why not talk about it here?66

The ‘unchanged’ and, even more significantly, apparently ‘untouched’ nature of the interview’s setting in its late-1970s state does, as Rubenstein says, offer a visual contrast to what he goes on to claim about the role of urban modernity in entailing and enabling genocide. His words about the Wakulla Springs fauna suggest the aptness of the animals’ and birds’ visible presence as another ‘polar opposite’ to the dialogue: RUBENSTEIN:  The wildlife here is something quite different from anyplace else in the US … There is no hunting here. So that they feel a certain security … The alligators are less vicious here … This is probably as close to Eden as you can get.67

The USHMM annotation to the interview, usually simply a factual summary, draws out the symbolic significance of Rubenstein’s words in observing that he ‘implies the [contrast] of the sanctuary in which the bird and alligator species live to the plight of the Holocaust survivors’.68 Indeed, the interview is succeeded by several silent film-reels of Wakulla Springs and its wildlife taken from the boat, as well as close-ups of interviewer and interviewee, suggesting that some of this footage could be used as the counterpoint to the interlocutors’ voices. This is particularly the case for the interview’s final segments, which consist only of a soundtrack. Although the scenery and animals are visible throughout the encounter, the silent footage includes such close-up imagery as an alligator’s head with its toothy jaw and bulbous eyes, silhouettes of ibises in the tree-tops, and a black gallinule with wings outstretched as it dries itself in the sun.

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A more oblique connection between the topic under discussion and the setting is implied by Lanzmann’s first question to Rubenstein, about the plight of stateless people in the modern world whose status meant that they were in effect ‘doomed to death’.69 The consistent spectacle of the springs and its inhabitants suggests a mode of existence outside the impasse Rubenstein identifies, that, in the twentieth century, ‘there are no such things as human rights apart from political rights’.70 Indeed, the discussion turning to broad social trends in which people are as commodified and vulnerable as animals lends a sense of precariousness to the idyllic backdrop. As Rubenstein puts it, for stateless people, ‘the normal protections of the law, the normal protections of due process in your community, are no longer available’.71 Such pre-war manipulation of statelessness, Rubenstein adds, was ‘a prelude to a situation in which mass murder is possible without it being a crime’.72 Like Bauer, Rubenstein voices ideas, sometimes in almost verbatim form, from his published work, and his intellectual debt to Hannah Arendt and Raul Hilberg is thus made clear. In the interview, he cites Arendt approvingly, while The Cunning of History includes an encomium to Hilberg’s ‘indispensable and magisterial’ work The Destruction of the European Jews, which ‘contributed more to making this book possible than the work of any other scholar’.73 The influence of these thinkers on Rubenstein is evident in his ideas about the modernity of the Nazis’ crimes, meaning that genocide, as he puts it to Lanzmann, is a product of civilization, ‘not its opposite’.74 In the sound-only section of the interview, we hear Rubenstein argue that the danger of relying on ‘bureaucracy and technology’ for ‘maximum efficiency’ is that ‘the greatest degree of impersonality’ is introduced.75 The interview’s location offers an apparently salutary contrast to Rubenstein’s observations about the ease with which people can be stripped of rights. Yet it also emphasizes the fragility of the natural balance, particularly so when this national park is viewed from the perspective of twenty-first-century climate change: RUBENSTEIN:  In an essentially closed world, where there is no open space, in which you either have your card of identity or your passport or you’re absolutely nobody, you really have no human status, the very civilization of mankind has condemned millions … of people to the potential loss of all the rights of humanity.76

Indeed, in this setting of ‘open space’, Lanzmann phrases his question about the threat of ‘urbanization’ in a way that likens the plight of subjugated peoples to the lives of animals: ‘But could you elaborate more on your idea of surplus

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livestock, surplus people?’77 This ‘livestock’ metaphor relies on animals having ‘no rights whatsoever’, in Rubenstein’s words about stateless people. Lanzmann’s phrasing arises from his reading of The Cunning of History, in which Rubenstein claims, ‘when one has surplus livestock that are a drain on resources, one gets rid of them’, and the theologian adds that, from the wartime era onwards, it has been ‘possible to exterminate surplus people the way a farmer might kill off surplus cattle’.78 Rubenstein’s discourse on this topic reveals a debt to Arendt’s conclusion to The Origins of Totalitarianism, but with the effect on Rubenstein’s part that it has become, in Michael Morgan’s phrasing, ‘literalised’.79 While Arendt sees anonymity and superfluity as one of the intended effects of the concentrationary universe, Rubenstein often seems to argue the opposite, that it was, rather, over-population or redundancy that led to the genocide. Rubenstein uses the term ‘surplus’ to refer to ‘population growth and urbanisation’, unwanted minorities or refugees.80 His implication that a lack of jobs and resources provoked mass slaughter makes the genocide seem, as Morgan argues, an economic and political rather than an ideological project.81 In one of the fortuitous moments in the outtakes where a visual correlative for the dialogue appears unexpectedly on-screen, Rubenstein’s answer to Lanzmann’s question about ‘surplus livestock’ is accompanied by the sounds of geese, while a stork and other birds are visible in the distance behind his head (Figure 6.4). At the time of utterance in the late 1970s, this image of birds in flight is a contrast to Rubenstein’s words in

Figure 6.4  Claude Lanzmann and Richard Rubenstein, looking in different directions.

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its embodying natural plenitude and diversity as distinct from superfluity. With hindsight, such imagery has a bleaker irony, given the greatly reduced number of birds now living on Wakulla Springs due to the pollution of the water, as first noted in a report of 1998, just two decades after the interview took place.82 The political counterpart to Rubenstein’s argument about the cultural developments that enabled genocide is his assertion of the ‘profound complicity’ of other nations in the Jews’ murder.83 He argues that, for instance, what he considers to be a Polish wish for the Jews’ ‘elimination’ found its realization in the German plan for ‘extermination’, agreement over the ends entailing complicity in the means. For good measure, Rubenstein construes the ‘symbiosis’ of interests that resulted in mass murder through the psychic terms of ‘Polish emotion coming together with German rationality’.84 Roosevelt does not escape such a bird’s-eye conception of universal malignity. While exonerating the president of active hostility to the Jews, Rubenstein argues that his ‘imperatives’ were not moral but political, those which would ‘guide and preserve the destinies of his country’: RUBENSTEIN:  And if that meant five or ten or twenty million people were going to die, then those people were going to die.85

He adds that Goebbels was therefore correct to observe during the war that the ‘democracies regarded what the Germans were doing as a benefit’.86 In this sense, however ‘brash’ and ‘overstated’, as Morgan describes Rubenstein’s rhetoric, his verdict is that bureaucracy is to be feared over fanaticism.87 In such a vein, interviewer and interviewee agree that the restricted numbers allowed by the British government to enter Palestine after the White Paper of 1939 ‘was the real death sentence’, prompting Rubenstein to conclude that ‘from the British point of view, every Jew that was killed in Europe was a Jew that would not create a problem for them in Palestine’.88 Summing up a thread of his thought in relation to pre-war refugee policy throughout, Lanzmann adds that, in a more general sense, ‘to oppose Hitlerian policy towards the Jews there was only one way: it was to open the gates’.89 While Bauer also concludes in what sounds like a similar way about the wartime Allies, his view tends more to a judgement of hypocrisy and indifference than Rubenstein’s that genocide was an outcome which was positively desired, as Bauer puts it in words published the same time as his meeting with Lanzmann: ‘Given the context in which the leaders of the West operated, no such rescue was possible. This demonstrates how cheaply human life is valued in civilizations confident of their humanism.’90 Rubenstein addresses many of Lanzmann’s concerns as they emerge in relation to rescue, including the Evian and Bermuda refugee conferences at

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which the delegates ‘did not want to succeed’, the absence of safe havens for those fleeing occupied Europe, the decision not to bomb the tracks or installations at Auschwitz, and the military and Realpolitik priorities that made rescue impossible.91 In Rubenstein’s one explicit reference to the notion of resistance, he seems to view it as impossible for these reasons of complicitous attitudes among local people in occupied countries as well as the Allied nations. These sobering topics are aired in a generalizing manner that might have suited some of Lanzmann’s purposes, perhaps taking the form of a prelude to the more detailed eyewitness or historicist perspectives that he elicits from other interviewees. Yet such a mode equally suggests the grounds on which this encounter might have been judged unsuitable. Although several of the reasons are voiced which underlie Lanzmann’s conviction that the Jews could not have been saved, as he claims in relation to The Karski Report, they take an extreme and tendentious yet also indefinite form in the interview with Rubenstein.92

Ya’akov Arnon: ‘It is much worse in hindsight’ The encounter with Ya’akov Arnon provides Lanzmann with the voice of an individual who mounted a critique of ‘compliant’, or, in Bauer’s term, ‘negative’ Jewish Council actions, not only with post-war hindsight but also at the time the events were taking place.93 The closeness of the interviewee to those events is redoubled by the fact that one of the leaders of the Dutch Jewish Council to whose policies Arnon objected was his own uncle, Abraham Asscher.94 Asscher, the director of a diamond factory which still exists under his surname in the Netherlands, and David Cohen, a professor of ancient history at the University of Amsterdam, were appointed as the joint leaders of the Jewish Council on its formation in February 1941, until their deportation in September 1943, although both survived the war. The painful and problematic nature of the Council’s policy of compliance with Nazi orders is always clear in Arnon’s demeanour and delivery as he attempts to address the occurrences of over thirty years earlier. Indeed, Arnon struggles with a complex temporality, in which he tries to return for Lanzmann’s camera to the time at which the genocide was taking place, or cautions against not doing so, and to present a version of his uncle’s perspective as well as his own. Ya’akov Arnon was born as Jaap van Amerongen in Amsterdam in 1913, where he was a leader in the Zionist-oriented Jewish Youth Federation. Although he was, according to an obituary, not at first a convinced political Zionist,95 during the

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interview he claims that after the Nazi invasion this newly adopted perspective informed his awareness that ‘the Jewish problem exists everywhere, and that will never go away. And [the Zionists] were as a result … more aware of the very bad results which could happen’.96 He argues that, for others, the ‘settled’ nature of Jewish life in the Netherlands, in a place that was felt to be a ‘good country for the Jews’, meant that they ‘couldn’t imagine that things will end so badly as they did’: that is, with the murder of over three-quarters of the country’s Jewish population.97 Arnon’s adding that, in this context of successful acculturation in which Jewish people ‘felt Dutch’, the traditional response in dangerous times, one of trying to ‘get away’, was ‘very weak’.98 Such an observation raises the unasked question, equal to that implicit in Lanzmann’s disagreement with Bauer about whether the Hungarian Jews were warned to escape, about what the destination of such flight could have been. After the ‘real panic’, including the toll of 300 suicides in a single night, that followed the Nazi takeover in May 1940, Arnon argues that people were ‘never so afraid again’.99 Yet the return to a normality that was necessarily illusory is the very basis of his critique of the Jewish Council policy that fostered it. The phrasing of Arnon’s observation quoted above, ‘they couldn’t imagine that things will end so badly’, tellingly uses the simple future tense of ‘will’ rather than the more idiomatic conditional ‘would’, making the inevitability of events sound predetermined. It also hints at the customary pitfall of backshadowing as it affects Holocaust narrative, by means of which events are seen with hindsight always to have been inevitable, and their victims at fault for not having recognized them as such.100 This is a paradox, especially in such distressing circumstances, about which Arnon tries to maintain full awareness, as he tries to acknowledge of the leaders Asscher and Cohen: ‘I am not saying in hindsight they were wrong.’101 As Arnon outlines to Lanzmann, he worked in his uncle Abraham Asscher’s diamond factory until 1938, and subsequently as a teacher at the Joodse Lyceum, or Jewish high school, which the Jewish Council had established. As Joel Fishman describes, Arnon and his wife Loes went into hiding on the ‘eve of the Jewish New Year, 29 September 1943’, with the aid of the Westerweel resistance group which provided them with non-Jewish identity cards.102 After the war, in 1948, Arnon and his wife emigrated to Israel and he adopted the Hebrew name by which he is now known, entering politics in the Ministry of Finance and as a member of the peace movement. Very little of Arnon’s personal wartime experience, apart from its relation to his uncle’s role in the Jewish Council, is recounted to Lanzmann, emphasizing his position as an eyewitness rather than a biographical subject. Given that surviving underground was a topic of

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contention in the arguments with his uncle, Arnon’s own experience of this kind is a notable omission, particularly since, according to Fishman, ‘at that time and later, Van Amerongen [Arnon] maintained that going into hiding, onderduiken, was a means of passive resistance’.103 In the present interview, Arnon is filmed sitting in a wicker chair on the balcony of his home in Jerusalem, surrounded by foliage and eye-catchingly scarlet geraniums (Figure 6.5). The passage of time between reels, in this interview so concerned with questions of temporality, is charted by the sun’s movement over the plants in a dramatically changing pattern of light and shadow. Arnon has a clay pipe in his hand for much of the interview, but his only lighting it once towards the encounter’s end, as if forgetful of its existence, acts to convey his immersion in the world of the past. Lanzmann is only fleetingly visible, his presence signalled instead by wafts of smoke, a sheaf of notes, packet of Gitanes and an ashtray on the table between him and Arnon. Although a final reel is devoted to silent footage of the director’s intently listening face, in the interview as it stands, his unseen presence and critical questions about the Jewish Council lend to his voice a doom-laden acousmatic form. Arnon’s conflicted feelings about the topic of the

Figure 6.5  Ya’akov Arnon, Jerusalem.

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interview are clear from the outset, revealing the difficulty of trying to separate intentions from outcomes. Thus Arnon argues in part from results, in declaring that ‘if [Asscher and Cohen] would have been talking nicely to the Germans and it would have succeeded, I would … even defend them’.104 In the context of the Amsterdam Judenrat, the historian Jacob Presser invokes the image of a statue, as Bauer did with Rumkowski, to suggest it is the discord between hindsight and contingency that makes it hard to distinguish in these cases between traitor and hero, arguing that ‘had the war in fact ended in 1942 [as Asscher predicted], the Jewish community would have built a monument to Asscher and Cohen, as the brave and resourceful leaders by whose hands Dutch Jewry was saved’.105 Given that Asscher and Cohen’s attitude of compliance and procrastination did not succeed, Arnon turns to their moral outlook in claiming that ‘just to prevent any misunderstanding, they were in principle good people’.106 This caveat equally registers a preliminary defence against what seems to be Lanzmann’s provocative attitude towards the Judenrat and the behaviour of Asscher and Cohen as its leaders. Although Arnon’s demeanour is calm and reflective, he is prompted into visible animation and expressions of regret as the encounter wears on. His characterization of Asscher is one of an adored uncle who loved his nephew in turn and was in general a ‘charming’ and ‘very lovable man’, popular even among the workers in his diamond factory.107 Arnon concludes that his uncle was therefore ‘a good man for quiet times’, his words almost drowned out by the off-screen sound of a car loudly revving its engine, as if in support of the interviewee’s conclusion about Asscher that ‘he wasn’t able to stand in difficult times’ (Figure 6.6).108 Arnon conveys the gradual descent, ‘step after step’, into cooperation that followed Asscher and Cohen being cast by the Nazis as ‘survival brokers’.109 In the interview, he claims that this process began with the general strike of February 1941 in Amsterdam, called by non-Jewish workers in protest at a raid in which 425 young Jewish men were seized in the street and deported to their deaths in Mauthausen. As leaders of the Jewish Council, Asscher and Cohen were ‘used’, in Arnon’s words, to break the strike, and they ‘went under’.110 Arnon’s account reveals that the actions of ‘going under’ into compliance or ‘diving under’ into hiding became polarized alternatives in the arguments with his uncle. The threats of reprisals and hostage-taking against the Jewish community, as well as violence and executions carried out against the strikers, that forced Asscher and Cohen to ask the protesters to return to work are voiced by Lanzmann. Appearing in this way to comply, as Arnon concludes, ‘made a very big impression on the Germans’ – not in relation to their decision to murder the Jews, a goal that was taken for granted, but how to go about it in the Dutch context.111

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Figure 6.6  Ya’akov Arnon, holding a pipe: ‘A good man for quiet times’.

Arnon’s frequent use of the term ‘hindsight’, a concept that colours the entire encounter, is highlighted by his idiosyncratically pronouncing the first syllable to rhyme with ‘pinned’ rather than ‘pined’. In this instance, he acknowledges the difficulty of judging such a situation in observing that ‘today, in hindsight, it was clear they should never have started it’: that is, Asscher and Cohen should not have agreed to be members of the Jewish Council, given its role from the outset of mediating German orders and separating ‘Dutchmen who were Jews’ from their compatriots.112 They should rather have followed the minority position of others who refused to do so. Yet Arnon acknowledges that ‘at the time, they had some reason to think that they were preventing much stronger measures’ (my emphasis).113 This difficulty of reconciling reactions to what was unknown as the events occurred with later retrospection is not simply a temporal or consequentialist conundrum. It has the more material significance of symbolizing the effect of Nazi policy, one that, in Zygmunt Bauman’s phrasing, ‘solicit[ed] the cooperation of the victims’.114 In response to such a strategy, the Jewish Council’s only option, once it was established, was to ‘make the best of two bad choices’,115 between cooperation and refusal.

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The existence of a third option is suggested by Arnon’s advice to his uncle, during the two confrontations between them on the subject in the summer of 1942, to admit that ‘the case is lost’.116 Following such a realization, Asscher should, according to his nephew, ‘announce that [he and Cohen] can’t take any responsibility any more for what will happen to the Jewish community’, at least by deciding to let the underground help him to ‘disappear’ into hiding or flight to Britain.117 Such an action would be ‘a sign for the Jews that everything is lost’.118 Indeed, Arnon’s heartfelt narration of his efforts to persuade his uncle, which includes his noting that ‘it was not fear for his personal physical well-being which made it impossible for him to go that way’, prompts Lanzmann’s verdict on his testimonial performance, audible in the very last seconds of the seventh reel when only the soundtrack remains: LANZMANN:  Don’t forget. It’s very good. You are … at the moment very good.119

The notion of opting out of the trap of ‘two bad choices’ altogether as advocated here by Arnon was perhaps even more difficult to contemplate than other responses, involving as it did such instances as Adam Czerniaków’s suicide in Warsaw and Abba Kovner’s refusal to choose which Jews to save in Vilna. In Czerniaków’s case, the personal act of ultimate withdrawal in suicide did not halt the deportations, although it marked his refusal to take part in the process. Following the present interview’s charting of a descent, Arnon introduces the ‘dramatical change’, as both men phrase it, occurring with the deportations to the east that began in July 1942.120 It was these events that provoked what Arnon calls ‘the worst thing of all’: not just the action of deciding whom to save, but of ensuring that such individuals were those the Council leaders considered to be an ‘important remnant’.121 Lanzmann’s summary, that, for the Jewish Council, ‘it was not a question of quantity, it was a question of quality’, cynically uses the language of commerce to suggest this was an exchange that was, likewise cynically, considered acceptable.122 Having started out, as Arnon says, ‘with the best intentions … for the whole Jewish community’, the increasing demands from the Germans meant that the Council came, in Bauman’s phrasing, to ‘facilitate their task’.123 They ‘were not willing or not able to … to think about the whole thing again’, as Arnon concludes.124 His metaphor of the ‘circle’ of those who were chosen equally continues the metaphor of a downward spiral: ARNON:  The circle was diminished. The kind of Jews they wanted to save were a small … smaller … and were their own … it was their own circle …125

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The reason for the difficulty Arnon clearly has in articulating this distressing truth is hinted at in Fishman’s account of his experiences, which draws on that historian’s English-language interview recorded with Arnon in 1974. In keeping with the focus on the Jewish Council rather than his own fate, Lanzmann’s question about the precise nature of Asscher’s relationship to the interviewee establishes that he was the brother of Arnon’s mother, Rosette van AmerongenAsscher, but she is not named and mentioned only once. Yet Rosette has a significant role, albeit one that remains implicit in the present interview, in relation to the difference of opinion between her son and brother. Arnon does not describe to Lanzmann, as he does to Fishman, that he also had an argument with his mother about her brother’s actions, and that Rosette let slip in the summer of 1943 that she had been given a ‘good’ number by the Council on the paperwork designed to protect her from deportation.126 As Arnon relates to Fishman, this discovery revealed that, despite their claiming the contrary, the Jewish Council knew of the impending deportation of the whole community, apart from a protected minority consisting of what he describes to Lanzmann as 100 ‘very close friends and family’.127 Arnon’s outrage at such ‘unbelievable’ behaviour, an adjective he uses frequently to both Fishman and Lanzmann, is only increased by the fact that it concerned his mother. Rather than voicing relief that she was meant to be saved in this way, the closeness of their relationship served instead to bring home to Arnon the injustice of differential treatment. Although Rosette died in 1945 of natural causes, in the hospital to which her son’s rescuers had her admitted, ‘that last promise’ of protecting the remaining 100 Jews, including the Jewish Council members themselves, was one ‘the Germans didn’t keep’, as Arnon puts it.128 The only concession, as Arnon bitterly observes, was that Asscher was sent to Bergen-Belsen, Cohen to Terezín, rather than to the extermination camp of Sobibór that was the destination of the majority of Dutch Jews.129 It was the events surrounding the deportations of July and August 1942 that provoked Arnon’s two personal confrontations with his uncle, in one of which they ended up by shouting angrily at each other, the other a calmer meeting, yet consisting of ‘a kind of talk’, Arnon says, that ‘I have never had afterwards with anybody in the world’.130 Arnon’s conviction about the Jewish Council members that at this time ‘it should have been clear to them that their task was finished … although I’m convinced up until today that they didn’t know about [the] death chambers’, is followed by Lanzmann’s verdict: ‘But they had already chosen the way of compliance.’131 This exchange seems to establish the respective positions of interviewer and interviewee, using the question of knowledge, as well as belief

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in that knowledge, as a way to view the past. Arnon grapples with contradictory evidence, some of it based on his assessment of his uncle’s temperament, including his observation that Asscher was ‘an unbelievable optimist’: ‘If he could find one reason to see some light in a very dark situation, he would … do it.’ By contrast, Lanzmann presents more definitively the view that the initial acceptance of appointment to the Jewish Council, with ‘no hesitation at all’, as he adds, entailed what followed.132 However, as Arnon insists, against Lanzmann’s reading aloud the ‘fantastic stories’ from the Jewish Council’s internal bulletin greatly misrepresenting the conditions in Terezín, that none of the Jews was responsible for what happened: ARNON:  I told you before, and I am saying it again, they didn’t know about the gas chambers … I know that today it is unbelievable that there would be a man who would publish such things in an internal information [bulletin].133

As suggested by Lanzmann’s words of praise for Arnon’s delivery quoted above, many of the director’s leading questions or comments seem aimed to provoke utterance of a reincarnatory kind from his interviewee, as well as voicing the director’s own opinion. In this way, we can imagine such a dialogue as the following, which takes place in the interview’s first reel, being used to various effects. Lanzmann cites the numbers of the pre-war Jewish population of the Netherlands: LANZMANN:  Let’s say, immediately, what was the result of these 140,000 Dutch Jews. How many were killed? ARNON:  Well, I think that figures say more than many other things. 107,000 were deported, and less than 5000 came back. … LANZMANN:  This means more than two thirds. ARNON:  80%. 80% of the Jews the Germans were after … I think it is the worst percentage in West Europe.134

Given the tenor of the dialogue that follows, in which Arnon’s critique is framed by his careful distinctions, while Lanzmann introduces extra evidence of compliance, it might seem that Arnon’s phrase, ‘figures say more than many other things’, could be used to ascribe responsibility to the Jewish Council for the eventual death toll.135 However, although neither interviewer nor interviewee mentions the possible reasons for such a high death rate, which Hilberg ascribes to external factors including the ‘degree of German control’, neither do they impute to the Dutch Jewish Council the kind of blame that Hannah Arendt notoriously ascribes

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to the Judenräte en masse.136 In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt claims that ‘in Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and their property’, adding for good measure that ‘in the Nazi-inspired, but not Nazi-dictated, manifestoes they issued, we can sense how they enjoyed their new power’.137 Lanzmann puts to Arnon a challenge that closely resembles Arendt’s assertion, but his provocative claim of this kind that ‘they were the first [Council] to ask for compulsory power against the Jewish population’, is not met by Arnon’s corroboration beyond his observing that they wanted to be seen as ‘the government of the Jewish community’.138 Indeed, Arnon takes the opportunity to observe, ‘I am against … accusing them of things for which we know in hindsight.’139 While, as Bauer would say, by no means all Judenräte undertook actions or entertained the attitudes as described by Arendt and asserted here by Lanzmann, it emerges in the present interview that the Dutch Jewish Council made ‘the most fatal decision’, in Arnon’s words, to do just that, in complying.140 The Council members’ mediation of German commands included typing out deportation lists and choosing who should be sent to the east – even though they did not, as Arnon emphasizes, know at the time what that entailed. In this way, what was known about the forced-labour camp of Mauthausen was considered, in Arnon’s words, ‘the worst thing that should happen to anybody’.141 Arnon’s conclusion about Asscher and Cohen, ‘my main complaint is that they helped’, is uttered in the context of his awareness of how this verdict might sound: ARNON:  I have to make clear every time: the Holocaust was made by the Germans, not the Jews. and the Jews never wanted it. Even if I say they helped them, they didn’t want to help them. But they helped them, factually they helped them …142

The painful paradoxes and repetitions in Arnon’s utterance make it sound like a precursor of Bauman’s observation that the dilemma for Jewish leaders in occupied Europe was irresolvable, since ‘everything the Jews did to further their own interest brought the Nazi objective somewhat nearer to full success’.143 It is ‘helping’ by taking part in the act of selection that lies at the heart of Arnon’s judgement that ‘no Jewish leader can be in a position that he will make the decision of who is going to live and who is going to die’, as we hear in the account of the argument posed to his uncle: ARNON:  I remember up till today the words I said to him: I said, you know, if you are going on, you will be a murderer of the Jews.144

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This phrasing might remind the viewer of the outtakes of Bauer’s equally bitter verdict on Rumkowski and his reading aloud on behalf of Gens. The long and fragmented form of Arnon’s discourse throughout reveals the intractable nature of looking back at the Jewish Council’s behaviour. The same is true of Arnon’s wish to avoid accusations in hindsight by acknowledging the ‘framework’ of the time, within which the leaders were convinced that ‘what they were doing was the right thing to do’, or ‘they never would have done the work’.145 Such a judgement serves both to qualify criticism of Asscher and Cohen, on the basis of their good intentions, yet simultaneously to expose what Arnon calls an ‘illusion de grandeur’, meaning that they ‘fell into the trap the Germans put for them’.146 It is as if the voicing of each position always provokes its opposite evaluation. Arnon’s words about the case of Asscher seem to be an indirect characterstudy of someone who failed in his task, that of protecting those for whom he was responsible. However, the interview also constitutes the revelation of a terrible structural impasse established by malign others, through the narrative about an individual caught up in it. The full horror of the situation is made apparent not by Arnon’s seeking to represent the contradictions in the attitude of his uncle, of whom his final words are that he was ‘brave, honest, but stupid – he didn’t understand what happened’, but that nothing Asscher did would have changed the fundamentals of the situation.147 As Michal Unger puts it of Chaim Rumkowski, Asscher might have ‘cleared his name’ by a refusal to take part in the deportations, but could not have significantly changed what happened.148 In terms that are less ad personam, Arnon notes that his uncle rebutted the idea of advising the Jews to go into hiding because of the ‘very detrimental’ reprisals from the Germans that could follow, and says, in the present to Lanzmann, ‘I didn’t say to him that it couldn’t.’149 Indeed, as Arnon adds, ‘I wouldn’t say that all the Jews could go into hiding’, since, as he claims, in 1943 and 1944, there was even more ‘difficulty … in finding addresses’ for that purpose.150 In this way, the argument between uncle and nephew was moral as much as practical. Although Arnon and his wife found shelter in late 1943 with Dutch resisters, his own experience is not invoked to draw a more general picture. What Arnon urged on his uncle during their two wartime arguments was not only the idea that more Jews could be saved if Asscher refused to comply with German orders, although that was part of his reasoning, but that the leadership should not be seen as part of the German actions. In this sense, Arnon’s familial link to Asscher is both a boon, in giving him insight in the present as it gave him access to his uncle in the past, and a liability, in making his advice, given to only one of the two Jewish Council leaders, seem personally motivated.151

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Conclusion The interviews considered in this chapter approach the question of liability for the mass murder of the Jews, and the role of Jewish leadership, from perspectives of varying conceptual distance. Bauer’s comparative historical view refutes any ‘stereotype’ of the Judenräte’s responses, since, as Arnon says, it is only ‘today’ that the consistency of Nazi behaviour to which the Jewish Council leaders responded can be perceived as a ‘pattern’.152 Yet, by contrast to Hilberg or Rubenstein, and despite his avowal of the importance of the ‘film medium’ at the interview’s beginning, Bauer’s demeanour, his marshalling of facts and distance from the words of Jacob Gens even as he reads them aloud, are all factors that threaten to render him simply a ‘talking head’ interviewee perhaps better suited to a conventional documentary format.153 By contrast, for all Rubenstein’s generalizing rhetoric, and the telling absence of documents or a backdrop of books from his open-air interview, his presence and utterance has a more performative and eye-catching nature than Bauer’s. Yet Rubenstein’s assigning responsibility to broad cultural and political tendencies edges close to addressing the question ‘why’ that Lanzmann prefers to avoid, without attention to the specific details of the process of murder that feature in the other two encounters. Arnon’s focus on Abraham Asscher reveals the immersion of an individual in events as they played out, for someone like his uncle who could not acknowledge even such information as he had about the larger picture or consistent nature of Nazi behaviour. Indeed, both Asscher and David Cohen were arrested in November 1947 on charges of collaboration as former Jewish Council leaders and tried by a Jewish Court of Honour, at which the question of just such knowledge was at stake.154 Lanzmann’s encounter with Arnon serves to dramatize at the most individual level the detail of impossible decisions in a context of the absence of full knowledge, or not believing in elements of that knowledge, in a way that almost resurrects Arnon’s wartime utterances. Yet in the inescapable context of hindsight, Arnon sums up the outcome of the fateful decisions made by the Amsterdam Jewish Council in his verdict that the Germans ‘succeeded to deport the Jews quietly’.155 Despite the impression that Hilberg is the presiding historicist presence in Shoah, these excluded interviews, particularly those with Bauer and Rubenstein, suggest that other perspectives of this kind existed in Lanzmann’s purview, and that they also became elements in his thinking about the wartime genocide. Hilberg’s arguments about Jewish passivity are explicitly countered by Bauer’s

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conviction instead of the Jews’ political powerlessness, meaning that they were simply ‘of no real importance to the west’, while Rubenstein’s claims point towards a more culpable responsibility shared by the Allied and occupied nations, as well as such institutions as the Catholic Church.156 The theologian’s insistence that the killing of the Jews suited the Allies might seem akin to Bauer’s assertion to Lanzmann that it was the Nazis’ failure to ‘sell’ the Jews to the West that entailed their murder, yet the latter’s observation of a pragmatic fatalism is different from Rubenstein’s imputing a positive preference. Despite his provocative questions about Jewish leaders and scepticism about the rescue mission of Rezső Kasztner as voiced in the present interviews, Lanzmann distanced himself from blanket critical conclusions about the wartime Jewish leadership. He claims in his autobiography that the conduct of the Eichmann Trial ‘unjustly’ placed ‘much of the responsibility and the blame for the extermination on the Judenräte’, while his sole mention of Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the matter in Eichmann in Jerusalem is to condemn her account of the topic on the grounds of its displaying ‘a partiality, a lack of compassion, an arrogance and a failure of comprehension’.157 But Arendt’s verdict on such a figure as Kasztner, whom she declares ‘saved exactly 1,684 people with 476,000 victims’, and, she adds, failed to pass on information about the true danger of deportation ‘to assure quiet and prevent panic’, is not so different from Lanzmann’s own scepticism at the notion of a ‘Noah’s Ark’ rescue.158 It might seem that the director was, at least in the late 1970s, more in agreement with elements of Arendt’s perspective than the denunciation from his autobiography some thirty years later suggests, or at least with those aspects of it that she holds in common with Hilberg. Despite the likeness of some of their verdicts, Hilberg writes with hostility about Arendt’s theorization of ‘banality’ and her claim to have relied on his work, while her criticism of the Jewish Councils is met with his grim argument that the responsibility for failing to resist extended beyond the Councils to the Jewish populace in its entirety, as the result of what he views as the ‘time-honoured Jewish reaction to danger’.159 Hilberg argues that the wartime ‘Jewish calculation that the persecutor would not destroy what he could economically exploit’, a notion put forward in Lanzmann’s questions to Bauer about ‘rescue through work’, was one that ‘dictated accommodation and precluded resistance’.160 Some provocations by Lanzmann of this judgemental kind appear in the interview with Arnon, albeit centred on the Jewish Council’s behaviour rather than that of the Jewish, or indeed non-Jewish, population as a whole. Lanzmann’s choice of phrasing in these instances highlights what he considers the extreme details of compliance.

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Thus he describes the Jewish Council as ‘begging’ the strikers to return to work in February 1941, judges the obsequious wording of a plea by Asscher to the SS officer Willy Lages to safeguard those in mixed marriages as a ‘farce’, satirically refers to the glowing description given by the Jewish Council of conditions at Terezín as one better suited to ‘Acapulco’, and scathingly uses the epithet ‘beautiful’ about a wartime comparison of David Cohen to Moses.161 Such an apparent duality, in which he rejects yet sometimes ascribes blame to Jewish councils, registers a tension between Lanzmann’s wish for a cinematic instantiation of the events and agents of the past, alongside a sympathy with some of Hilberg’s arguments that is challenged by the very interviews that offer such imagery. Bauer’s disagreement with Hilberg and Rubenstein, on the grounds of their viewing bureaucratic modernity itself as both prompt and facilitator of genocide, equally applies to Zygmunt Bauman’s argument in Modernity and the Holocaust, published four years after the release of Shoah in 1989. Indeed, the book ends with an acknowledgement to Shoah that implies its importance for Bauman’s thesis, since he reads it as revealing ‘how few men with guns were needed to murder millions’.162 However, other viewers conclude differently, since, as Griselda Pollock argues, the film’s focus on mass murder at Treblinka and Auschwitz supports an impression rather of ‘spectacular punishment’, or, as Bauer puts it, ‘brute force’, for those who did not instantly comply.163 Both conclude by pointing to Bauman’s omission of the broader context, which Pollock refers to as ‘the indifference of the world’, while Bauer claims Bauman’s contention assumes that ‘the Jews are passive victims, and the Churches, the Allies, the host nations, the neutrals, do not exist’.164 By contrast to all three – Rubenstein, Hilberg and Bauman – Bauer contends it was not technology but Nazi ideology that ‘not only gave rise to the extermination process, but constantly drove it toward completion – in spite, and not because, of the involvement of an instrumentally governed administrative system’.165 Others have added to this position in claiming that, rather than embodying modernity and what Cesarani describes as the ‘mut[ing] of individual responsibility’ through ‘the division of functions’, the wartime genocide was the result of a countermodern assault on equality and democracy.166 The impression of efficiency, or what Hilberg refers to as ‘bureaucrats in a network of offices spanning a continent’, is one arising rather from the effects of such single-minded insistence.167 This is not entirely to reverse the argument that ‘rational bureaucrats’ rather than ‘fanatics’ orchestrated the murder of the Jews, but that, as Bauer implies, the Nazi world view filled administrative structures with murderous doctrine.168

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Yet it might seem that the history of the Jewish Council in the Netherlands is an embodiment of just such convictions as Bauman’s. Bauman takes elements of Hilberg’s and Arendt’s arguments to claim, echoing Rubenstein, that the ‘Holocaust was characteristically modern’, emerging from the ‘breakdown of traditional order’ in substituting for morality a ‘rational’ devotion to the efficiency of production.169 Such ‘rationality’ became the anti-human device by which the Nazis secured their victims’ ‘cooperation’.170 Thus Bauman concludes of situations like that in Amsterdam, but also the ghettos of Łódź and Vilna, that, where a practice to ‘sacrifice some in order to save many’ obtained, ‘the rationality of self-preservation was revealed as the enemy of moral duty’.171 In this way, ‘fighting for petty privileges’, as Bauman puts it, entailed accepting the premises of the overall design.172 In his analysis of this kind of ‘enemy of moral duty’, Bauman judges David Cohen’s post-war defence of the Jewish Council’s position, in his arguing that the very news of wartime murders elsewhere supported their conviction that it could not happen to the Dutch Jews, to reveal not only a ‘rejection of solidarity’, but the acceptance of a principle of ‘differential treatment’.173 In his interview with Lanzmann, Arnon’s recounting his shock at learning of his mother’s ‘protected’ status arises from a similar sense that, in Bauman’s phrasing, the ‘individual rationality’ of striving to survive took place in these circumstances ‘in the service of collective destruction’.174 Yet it might seem, despite Bauman’s acknowledgement that differential life-saving was just an extension of ‘the strategy of destruction’ imposed from without, and his claims about the impersonality of bureaucratic modernity, that there remains an element of blame as detectable in Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and in Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews.175 It is symptomatic that Bauman makes a significant error in relation to the wartime case of the old people in the town of Osmiany near Vilna, who were sent to their deaths under Jacob Gens’s orders in the place of women and children. Bauman claims that the ‘400 elders’ were ‘killed by the Jewish policemen’.176 The very distinction between having responsibility for murder and actually carrying it out arises in the interview between Lanzmann and Bauer, with the latter insisting that the Jewish police did not kill anyone in Osmiany, nor could they have done, since they had no weapons.177 However, this striking mistake reveals Bauman’s investment in arguing for ‘Jewish co-operation in their own destruction’.178 It might seem that Lanzmann chose to interview Arnon because of the particular stance of the Amsterdam Jewish Council, an attitude described by Hilberg as one of ‘anticipatory compliance’ in its distance from a refusal to cooperate.179 However, viewing it in the context of the director’s rescue and

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resistance-related interviews places it within a wider setting of the kind that Pollock and Bauer see as missing from Bauman’s analysis. Thus Bauer concludes that the wartime genocide is ‘terrible and humiliating’ for ‘Jews to contemplate’, generating such ‘social trauma’ that it might feel easier to ‘accuse the Jewish generation that is no longer alive of having failed to rescue their fellows’, than to accept the extent of their helplessness in occupied Europe as well as that of those outside.180 Rather than the interviews discussed in this chapter making a case for imposing responsibility on to the Jews for their own murder, they play a crucial role in the larger picture established by Lanzmann’s rescue and resistance interviews overall. The present topic of leadership and responsibility is just one of those, alongside the series of interviews concerning the War Refugee Board, the rescue initiatives of Weissmandl and Kasztner, and resistance in the ghettos, which give a collective sense of there being no way out.

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Conclusion: Henry Feingold in New York, Shmuel Zygielboim in London

This study has argued for attending to the surrounding context of Shoah, with  its  focus on destruction in the extermination camps, by examining the excluded footage and the efforts directed against the mass murder that it represents. Lanzmann’s interest lies in a particular kind of response, that of rescue and resistance undertaken by, or aimed at assisting, the Jews in the cities, ghettos and countryside of occupied Europe. In this way, the shaping of Shoah is clarified in relation to the material that was put aside to generate its distinctive focus, even though the interviews about efforts at rescue and resistance also represent a chapter in the history of death. The final film’s centring with terrible clarity on the active processes of deportation and mass murder was achieved by excluding those interviews that concern unwinnable dilemmas and international passivity. The examples found in Lanzmann’s outtakes are not narratives of successful survival, but components in the question of how the genocide occurred that haunted his filmmaking. The notion of resistance emerging from the outtake interviews equally differs from post-war definitions that limit it to ‘activity aimed at toppling the [Nazi] regime’, undertaken by nonJewish opponents, whose actions were often directed towards a post-war future.1 Neither was a withdrawal into ‘mere nonconformity’, at the other end of the spectrum of opposition, a possible reaction on the part of the Jews.2 The outtakes considered here point towards Lanzmann’s working practice of seeking a wide range of witnesses to and agents in the events of the Holocaust years, one that transcends Hilberg’s tripartite schema of victims, bystanders and perpetrators in its featuring such interviewees as American government officials, Jewish refugees who fled Nazi-occupied Europe for neutral countries and those speaking on behalf of others.3 Considering how any released version of these outtake interviews would look entails awareness of how the director’s

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methods changed over time, some of his filmmaking techniques moving away from the proscription on historical imagery and the pattern of associative editing that we see in Shoah. The 2013 release The Last of the Unjust includes archival photographs, while The Four Sisters of 2018 avoids crosscutting between its constituent interviews and uses very little interleaved location footage. In examples of particular kinds of rescue, that sponsored from without and that undertaken by the Jews themselves, most notably the War Refugee Board (WRB) and Weissmandl interviews, we might imagine that a new and communally structured filmic form was possible which would have exceeded that of Shoah. Making such a claim about any planned aesthetic experimentation necessarily involves speculation about what form the ‘thinking process’, as described by Kevin Fallis, the negative-cutter at the USHMM, might have taken during the editing stage, since the rushes as they stand could, as he says, be used to ‘tell many stories’.4 Thus, another way of viewing these thematically linked interviews on the WRB and Weissmandl would be to envisage their dispersal among testimonies about different events, as part of a conceptually focused artwork arranged according to ideas – the Allies’ fear that the Nazis would release rather than murder millions of people; campaigners’ convictions that certain efforts could have succeeded given more support – rather than events or governmental bodies. Apart from Lanzmann’s interview with the ‘Righteous Gentile’ Tadeusz Pankiewicz, in any case undertaken for his eyewitness position rather than his actions, the director’s interest in rescue centres on efforts by the Jews themselves or attitudes towards rescue on the part of institutions. The subject of the rescue of Jews by others, as Mark Roseman argues, was itself ‘marginalized’ in early histories of organized resistance in Germany and the occupied countries, since it was not seen to possess ‘the same liberatory goals as armed opposition to the occupiers’.5 While some resisters did attempt to help Jews, in reverse terms, rescuers were not usually associated with armed insurrection. Indeed, any assumption that rescue refers only to assistance proffered from outside means, as Roseman observes, that the emphasis on individual ‘selfless rescuers’ has ‘often overshadowed’ the topic of ‘Jewish “self-help”’6 which is a significant part of Lanzmann’s concern. Yet even singling out such actions as self-rescue or resistance from among the range of those undertaken by Jews in occupied Europe risks establishing a hierarchy that isolates ‘a special category of behaviour’.7 As the interviews imply, self-help was not the only valid response to the events of the Holocaust years, nor was resistance’s armed variant its only viable form. More recent approaches acknowledge the inextricability of the impulse and effect of rescue and resistance, since both were attempts at disrupting

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the process of murder, as conveyed in Arno Lustiger’s compound phrase Rettungswiderstand, ‘rescue as resistance’.8 However, the sense of rescue and resistance that emerges from Lanzmann’s outtake interviews differs from such a category when considered from the victims’ perspective. Not only might both initiatives be viewed as having failed, given the numbers killed, but each could entail the loss rather than the preservation of life. The aim of ‘striking a blow against the Nazi machine’ meant that, as Michael Marrus puts it, ‘Jewish resistance … assumed the form of an armed protest’, or ‘a last, suicidal gesture of anger and vengeance of a doomed community’.9 In such a way, armed revolt was planned in the knowledge that it would lead to death, as emerges in the interview with Abba Kovner about Vilna, while efforts to save some led to the death of others, as Leib Garfunkel’s account of Kovno shows. Rescue was almost impossible to effect from within occupied Europe, as we see in the case of Rabbi Weissmandl in Slovakia, yet too slow and scant when coming from outside, as revealed in the encounters with WRB members. The nature of genocide as the targeting of a whole group affects the meaning of rescue in such circumstances, given that the saving of individuals in the extra-concentrationary world was necessarily at the expense of the community as a whole, in its involving either in practice or by implication the act of choosing between people. If Lanzmann’s impulse was to explore why mass murder occurred despite the attempts mounted against it, which themselves depended on the recognition that genocide was taking place, his conclusion, given in an interview soon after The Karski Report was released in 2010, is blunt: ‘Could the Jews have been saved? My answer is no. I’m very deeply convinced of this.’10 This is a pragmatic judgement about the possibilities that existed at the time, rather than a fatalistic conviction of the Holocaust’s inevitability, its potential cinematic form apparent in the interviews discussed here. I will conclude with two final examples of Lanzmann’s interviews that explore the position of the Allies at whom his remark is directed: that with the American historian Henry Feingold, and another with Faivel Zygielboim, the brother of the Bundist politician Shmuel Zygielboim, who came as a member of the Polish National Council to London, where he died by suicide on 11 May 1943. Feingold’s political judgement, that some of the greatest failures took place at the Evian conference in 1938, complements Zygielboim’s personal despair, occasioned by the crushing of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and lack of action decided upon at the Bermuda conference of 1943. As Isabelle Tombs puts it of Zygielboim’s efforts to publicize the details of genocide, even his closest allies in London ‘reached the conclusion that no concrete or practical proposals for the rescue of Jews could be put forward beyond a swift

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Allied victory and retribution for crimes after the war’.11 Zygielboim’s reaction to such a stance was to take his own life. Feingold claims that, as a refugee historian like Bauer and Hilberg, whose family fled Germany in 1939 when he was eight, ‘I wanted to discover why other families failed to find a haven in America. I learned that America did not want the refugees and that American Jewry lacked the cohesiveness and influence to help’ (Figure 7.1).12 In visual support for the nature of this investigation in the interview with Lanzmann, Feingold is shown sitting at a desk piled high with papers and books, his back to a window through which is visible a panorama of high-rise Manhattan buildings, lit up as night falls (Figure 7.2). An Anglepoise desk-lamp serves as a spotlight, so that Lanzmann, occasionally visible from behind, is in shadow, while Feingold’s face is illuminated, the impression of his apparently broad smile offset by his eyes’ anxious expression. Feingold claims of the Evian Conference that the ‘Germans learned from … the refugee phase’ of the pre-war era, since ‘the signals’ they received were: FEINGOLD:  The silence of the Pope, the inability of Roosevelt to act, the lack of courage of the International Red Cross and all the witnessing nations and agencies.13

In his emphasizing the irony of a common vocabulary, as a more moderate version of Richard Rubenstein’s conviction of a shared agenda, Feingold claims that both Allies and Nazis used the term ‘resettlement’ in relation to the Jews,

Figure 7.1  Henry Feingold, NYC.

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Figure 7.2  Claude Lanzmann and Henry Feingold with night-time backdrop.

the former in the sense of identifying a haven beyond their own borders, the latter as a euphemism for a ‘processed killing operation’.14 As Lanzmann pithily summarizes: LANZMANN:  And it was the same pattern too, I think, in another way. Because Hitler said, I don’t want the Jews. And the Allies said, We don’t want them too. They have to be resettled.15

The act of ventriloquism on Feingold’s part that follows is one that gives expression to this ‘pattern’. He reads aloud from a British memorandum at the time of Bermuda in which concerns are voiced that Germany and its satellites might ‘change over from a policy of extermination to one of extrusion’, that is, from murder to expulsion.16 The memorandum concludes, as Feingold recites, ‘If Hitler accepted a proposal to release a million of unwanted persons, we might find ourselves in a very difficult position.’17 This statement is an instance of Lanzmann’s valuing documents, not just as remnants of events but in their status as the prompts for action – or, crucially, as in the present case, for inaction. In a shift from the political to the metaphysical, Feingold concludes that the Allied leaders failed to understand, through their viewing the fate of the Jews as a ‘minor concern’ in the war effort, that ‘what was going up in the chimneys of Auschwitz was a little bit of their world’.18 Such an analysis, with its intersection of practical and philosophical approaches to considering the impossibility of

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saving the Jews, is well suited to Lanzmann’s project. Yet Feingold’s very analysis of geographical remoteness, with the ‘absence of physical control of the slaughter’ that characterized American policy towards the Jews, is reproduced in his own distanced position.19 Despite such instances as the British memorandum recited by Feingold, and references throughout the outtakes to restrictions on immigration to Palestine, the readings on behalf of Shmuel Zygielboim by his brother Faivel are the closest any of the outtake material arrives at representing a London-centred perspective.20 Faivel reads out correspondence from and sent to his brother, most notably the final cable received from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. As if in response, he also reads Zygielboim’s ‘suicide note’, in the form of letters addressed to family and friends, as well as to the London-based Polish president Władysław Raczkiewicz and prime minister Władysław Sikorski, intended also for Allied government leaders and for the press. The presence of the late Zygielboim is substituted for in a series of visual traces, including a photograph and a handwritten letter in Yiddish sent by him from New York, while his words are read aloud by someone who was close to him. Yet, by contrast to the Weissmandl interviews, it is the end of Zygielboim’s life and his death by suicide, alongside the recitation of words written with their posthumous reception already in mind, in relation to which his biography assumes significance for Lanzmann (Figure 7.3). The 1943 cable sent from Warsaw by members of the underground Bund was entitled ‘What have you accomplished?’, as if in direct reproach to Zygielboim.

Figure 7.3  Faivel Zygielboim reads beneath a photograph of his brother Shmuel.

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Faivel had left Poland for South Africa before the war, and his success in Johannesburg’s Yiddish theatre is evident in his recitation.21 He pauses dramatically after each instance of reading aloud the cable’s telegraphic use of ‘stop’ in the place of punctuation, giving the word the force of an ominous warning or command: FAIVEL:  ‘WORLD OF FREEDOM AND JUSTICE REMAINS SILENT AND INACTIVE STOP ASTONISHING STOP … WIRE IMMEDIATELY WHAT HAVE YOU DONE STOP.’22

Although Zygielboim’s suicide letter concerns an international failure to act, rather than the active commission of violence, he gives what could be seen as a posthumous response to this cable in the words addressed to Raczkiewicz and Sikorski. He describes the Allied governments as ‘accomplices’ in the murders, since they substituted ‘passive observation’ for ‘a concrete action for the purpose of curtailing this crime’.23 In Zygielboim’s words, as recited by his brother: FAIVEL:  The responsibility for the crime of murdering all the Jewish population in Poland falls in the first instance on the perpetrators, but indirectly also burdens the whole of humanity.24

Lanzmann responds to Faivel’s summary of his brother’s last words with a statement of the present encounter’s burden of meaning: FAIVEL:  His last words were, ‘I could not help them while alive; maybe my death will help to arouse human conscience’. LANZMANN:  Yes, but it was an illusion – it didn’t help.25

Lanzmann’s observation is significant as a verdict on all the rescue and resistance interviews. A final silent reel of Faivel at his home in Tel Aviv makes clear one of the connections this footage was planned to establish, through a close-up on a copy of Adam Czerniaków’s Warsaw Ghetto Diary protruding from a bookshelf, from which Raul Hilberg reads in Shoah. The fact that the Czerniaków footage was included in the finished film, while Zygielboim’s was not, arises from the latter’s more distant position as an exile rather than an eyewitness. Yet, in the outtakes from the interview in Shoah with Jan Karski, the former envoy recounts his meeting with Zygielboim in London, concluding that ‘the death of Zygielboim for me shows more than anything else the Jewish tragedy in the Second World War.’26 Such an estimate of the centrality of Zygielboim’s fate, arising from Karski’s sense of ‘this total helplessness, indifference of the world … and the Jews perishing’, could act as an epigraph for Lanzmann’s rescue and resistance footage as a whole.27

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Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes

In the interviews with Feingold and Zygielboim, we encounter what Julie Gottlieb calls ‘the internalization of dramatic socio-political change’ that irrevocably shaped their lives and made them important witnesses for Lanzmann’s purposes, determining both Feingold’s role as a Holocaust historian and Zygielboim’s despairing suicide.28 As the voicing of the cable from the Warsaw Ghetto shows, the reincarnation of Zygielboim by means of his brother’s presence and voice would be a fitting coda to any film on the topic of failed rescue. The universal address of the cable’s concluding rhetorical question, ‘What have you done?’, would be aptly suited as its very final line.

Notes Introduction 1

2

3

4

5 6

7

8 9

The phrase is Annette Wieviorka’s, from The Era of the Witness, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1999. See also Amit Pinchevski on the ‘recorded afterlife’ that video testimony offers, Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2019, 55. The outtakes were created by Claude Lanzmann during the filming of Shoah and are used and cited by permission of the USHMM and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem. Caroline Wake, ‘Regarding the Recording: The Viewer of Video Testimony, the Cocomplexity of Copresence and the Possibility of Tertiary Witnessing’, History and Memory 25 (1) 2013, 111–44: 112. See Jennifer Cazenave’s account of the USHMM directors Raye Farr and Michael Berenbaum on acquiring the archive to ‘rescue’ and disseminate the material to the public, An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’, Albany, NY: SUNY Press 2019, xxiii–iv. As well as Lanzmann’s own account in his 2009 autobiography, The Patagonian Hare, and my own BFI Modern Classics volume on Shoah (2011), see Cazenave, ‘Introduction’, An Archive of the Catastrophe and the contributions to Erin McGlothlin, Brad Prager and Markus Zisselsberger, eds, The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’ and Its Outtakes (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press 2020), by Lindsay Zarwell and Leslie Swift, and Regina Longo. See David MacDougall, ‘When Less Is Less: The Long Take and the Documentary’, Film Quarterly 46 (2) 1992–3, 36–46. The catalogue can be viewed on the USHMM website, Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, ‘Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection – Outtakes’, https://www. ushmm.org/m/pdfs/SHOAH-Catalog-2018.pdf See Jeffrey Shandler’s study of the Shoah Foundation holdings, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2017, and Noah Shenker’s comparative study including the USHMM and Fortunoff Archive, Reframing Holocaust Testimony, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2015. Ziva Postec: The Editor behind the Film ‘Shoah’ (Cathérine Hébert, Canada 2018), all subsequent quotations my own transcriptions. See Yehuda Bauer’s discussion of this process in his Rethinking the Holocaust, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2001, 238.

194

Notes

10 As Cazenave points out, Lanzmann decided not to pursue interviews relating to the Vatican, for monetary reasons, An Archive of Atrocity, 7. 11 See Robert Rozett’s account of the historiography of resistance in his ‘Jewish Resistance’, in Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of the Holocaust, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2004, 341–63. 12 See the outtakes of the interview with Rudolf Vrba in relation to his conviction that information was suppressed, ‘Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, Interview with Rudolf Vrba’, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1004165; Patrick Henry, ‘Introduction’, in Patrick Henry, ed., arguing against the ‘myth of passivity’, Jewish Resistance against the Nazis, Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America 2014, xiii; Robert S. Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust: How and Why the Holocaust Happened, London: Phoenix 2002, 190. 13 Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1989, 135. 14 Bauer, quoted in Rozett, ‘Jewish Resistance’, 347. 15 Henry Feingold, ‘The Holocaust as Change Agent’, in Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf, eds, The Holocaust as Change Agent: Major Changes within the Jewish People in the Wake of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem Studies XXVI 1993, 11. 16 Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian, Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee 1996, 134–6. 17 Postec, in Hébert, Ziva Postec. 18 Cazenave, An Archive of the Catastrophe xxxiv. 19 Barbara Warnock, Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust, London: Stephen Morris 2020. 20 From Lanzmann’s questions to Karski in The Karski Report (2010) about Roosevelt’s awareness of events in Europe. 21 Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1994, p. 16. 22 The phrase is Marrus’s, The Holocaust in History, p. 136. 23 This term echoes the title of James Fenwick, Kieran Foster and David Eldridge’s coedited volume Shadow Cinema: The Historical and Production Contexts of Unmade Films, London: Bloomsbury 2021. 24 Claude Lanzmann, Cathy Caruth and David Rodowick, ‘The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann’, American Imago 48 (4) 1991, 473–95. 25 Vrba, ‘Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection’. 26 Letter to Roswell McClelland, quoted in Cazenave, An Archive of the Catastrophe, 5. 27 McGlothlin, Prager and Zisselsberger recount the history of Shoah’s critical reception as one that changes from considering the film an almost unmediated record of genocide to acknowledging its highly constructed form and Lanzmann’s auteurist status, ‘Introduction’, The Construction of Testimony, 12–15. 28 Adam Roberts, ‘Trims (working title)’, 2016, https://www.adamroberts.info/adamroberts-films.html, accessed 31 July 2022.

Notes

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29 Michael Fleming, ‘Zygielbojm in London: Labour, the Holocaust, and the Politics of Memory’, in Michael Fleming, ed., Essays Commemorating Szmuel Zygielbojm, London: PUNO Press 2018, 95 n. 103; and David Rosenberg, ‘The Struggle to Memorialize Zygielbojm in London’, in ibid., 15. 30 Michael Fleming, ‘Introduction’, to Fleming, ed., Essays Commemorating Szmuel Zygielbojm, 3; Fleming, ‘Zygielbojm in London’, 63. 31 Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, p. 123, and Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, New York: Colophon 1979 [1961], 671. 32 Alexander J. Groth, ‘Absolving the Allies? Another Look at the Anglo-American Response to the Holocaust’, Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs 8 (1), 115–30: 128. 33 Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare, 435. 34 André Habib, ‘Delay, Estrangement, Loss: The Meanings of Translation in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’, SubStance 44 (2) 2015, 108–28: 114. 35 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, Oxford: Polity 1989, 117. 36 See Tony Kushner, ‘Britain, the United States and the Holocaust: In Search of a Historiography’, in Stone, ed., The Historiography of the Holocaust, 253–76: 257–8, and Rozett on the impossibility of success in such cases as Poland or Slovakia where underground Jewish movements were ‘bereft of significant allies’, ‘Jewish Resistance’, 354. 37 Lanzmann, quoting Hilberg, in his ‘Raul Hilberg, Actor in Shoah’, in J.S. Pacy and A.P. Wertheimer, eds, Perspectives on the Holocaust: Essays in Honour of Raul Hilberg, Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1995, 85–7: 87. 38 Cazenave, An Archive of the Catastrophe, xxxii. 39 McGlothlin, Prager and Zisselsberger, ‘Introduction’, 4. 40 ‘Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, Interview with Abba Kovner’, https:// collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1004166 41 Habib, ‘Delay, Estrangement, Loss’, 123. 42 Ibid., 109–10. But see also Dorota Glowacka on the question of mistranslation, ‘“Traduttore traditore”: Claude Lanzmann’s Polish Translations’, in McGlothlin, et al., The Construction of Testimony, 141–74. 43 Habib, ‘Delay, Estrangement, Loss’, 113. 44 Gary Weissman, ‘Yehuda Lerner’s Living Words: Translation and Transcription in Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4p.m.’, in McGlothlin, et al. (eds), The Construction of Testimony, 175–206: 197. 45 Habib, ‘Delay, Estrangement, Loss’, 117. 46 Elizabeth Cowie, University of Kent Film Research Seminar, University of Kent, 2 October 2019. 47 Max Wallace, In the Name of Humanity: The Secret Deal to End the Holocaust, New York: Skyhorse 2018; Joel S. Fishman, ‘On Jewish Survival during the Occupation: The Case of Jacob van Amerongen’, Studia Rosenthaliana 33 (2) 1999, 160–73; Rebecca Erbelding, Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe, New York: Doubleday 2018.

196

Notes

48 Lanzmann Shoah Collection, ‘Treblinka’, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/ catalog/irn1005029 49 Postec, Ziva Postec. 50 Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto 1941–1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism, Berkeley: University of California University Press 2008, 288. 51 Cazenave, An Archive of the Catastrophe, xxxi. 52 Ibid., 117, xxxv. 53 McGlothlin, Prager and Zisselsberger, ‘Introduction’, 16. 54 Cazenave, An Archive of the Catastrophe, xxxvi. 55 Tim Cole, Images of the Holocaust: The Myth of the ‘Shoah’ Business, London: Duckworth 1999, 89. 56 Claude Lanzmann, ‘Why Spielberg Has Distorted the Truth’, Guardian Weekly, 3 April 1994, 14. 57 Marrus, The Holocaust in History, 137. 58 Rozett, ‘Jewish Resistance’, 357.

Chapter 1 1

Porat describes the reading in January 1942 in Vilna, based on her interviews with survivors who were present, The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Yuval, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2010 [2009], 68–9. 2 Ibid., 76, 68. 3 Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection ‘Abba Kovner’, with French transcript and English translation, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1004166. All references are to the English translation of the transcript, my page numbering. 4 Dina Porat, ‘The Vilna Proclamation of 1 January 1942 in Historical Perspective’, Yad Vashem Studies 25 1996, 99–136: 101, 111. 5 James M. Glass, Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust: Moral Uses of Violence and Will, Palgrave: New York 2004 [1988], 49–50. 6 Transcript, 16. 7 Ibid., 25. 8 Ibid. 9 Evgeny Finkel, ‘The Phoenix Effect of State Repression: Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust’, American Political Science Review 101 (2) 2015, 339–53: 339. 10 Transcript, 26. 11 Quoted in Porat, ‘Vilna Proclamation’, 105. 12 Ibid., 112. 13 Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow, 61. 14 Transcript, 27.

Notes

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15 Ibid., 32. 16 Lucy Dawidowicz, ed., A Holocaust Reader, West Orange, NJ: Behrman House 1976, 330; Shai Lavi, ‘“The Jews Are Coming”: Vengeance and Revenge in Post-Nazi Europe’, Law, Culture and the Humanities 1 2005, 282–301: 293. 17 Yitzhak Arad, et al., eds, Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland the Soviet Union, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem 1993. 18 Zvia Ginor, ‘“Meteor-Yid”: Abba Kovner’s Poetic Confrontation with Jewish History’, Judaism 48 (1) 1999, 35–48: 36. 19 State of Israel, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem. Trust for the Publication of the Proceedings of the Eichmann Trial, Jerusalem 1992, 460. See the filmed record of the Eichmann Trial, session 57, USHMM, ‘Testimony of Abba Kovner’, 4 May 1961, Capital Cities Broadcasting, directed by Leo Hurwitz, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1001558, accessed 31 July 2022. 20 Michal Arbell, ‘Abba Kovner: The Ritual Function of His Battle Missives’, Jewish Social Studies 18 (3) 2012, 93–119: 110. 21 Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow, 72. 22 Michael Kovner, Ezekiel’s World: A Graphic Novel, Tel Aviv: Cohel 2015, 233. 23 Michael Kovner, ‘In Memory of My Mother’, https://www.michaelkovner.com/ said04eng, accessed 31 July 2022. 24 Yael S. Feldman, ‘“Not as Sheep Led to Slaughter”? On Trauma, Selective Memory, and the Making of Historical Consciousness’, Jewish Social Studies 19 (3) 139–69: 151, 141; see also Yael S. Feldman and Steven Bowman, ‘Let Us Not Die as Sheep Led to the Slaughter: On the Rhetorical Link between the Hasmonean Revolt and the Vilna Ghetto Uprising’, Ha’aretz, 6 December 2007, https://www.haaretz. com/2007-12-06/ty-article/let-us-not-die-as-sheep-led-to-the-slaughter/0000017fe565-da9b-a1ff-ed6f4cd30000, accessed 31 July 2022. 25 Feldman and Bowman, ‘Let Us Not Die’. 26 Ibid. 27 Feldman, ‘Not as Sheep Led to Slaughter?’, 148. 28 Robert Rozett, ‘Jewish Resistance’, in Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of the Holocaust, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2004, 341–63: 341. 29 Ibid., 341. 30 Robert Rozett, ‘Beyond Lambs and Lions: Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust’, Ha’aretz, 3 April 2013, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2013-04-03/ty-article/. premium/robert-rozett-lambs-and-lions-escaping-nazis/0000017f-dbcd-df9c-a17fffddb2970000, accessed 31 July 2022. 31 Feldman, ‘Not as Sheep Led to Slaughter?’, 149. 32 Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, eds, The Holocaust and the Nakba, New York: Columbia University Press 2018, 336; Feldman, ‘Not as Sheep Led to Slaughter?’, 149.

198

Notes

33 Rozett, ‘Jewish Resistance’, 343. 34 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, third edition, volume III, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2003 [1961], 1111. 35 See Yitzhak Arad’s description of Kovner’s appeal in the archive alongside ‘additional items’, including the text Lanzmann starts to read out, with ‘no indication as to who composed’ it, Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust, Jerusalem: KTAV 1980, 232. 36 Dawidowicz, ed., A Holocaust Reader, 334–5, see also note on the source and its translation, 391. 37 See Steve Hochstadt, ed., Sources of the Holocaust, New York: Palgrave 2004, 186–8, and Anson Rabinbach, ed., The Third Reich Sourcebook, Berkeley: University of California Press 2013, 767–9. 38 Transcript, 21. 39 Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, ‘Gustav Laabs and Lettre Becker’, German transcript and English translation, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/ irn1002784 40 Transcript, 21. 41 Ibid., 27. 42 Lanzmann assumes its critical meaning in describing the ‘sheep to the slaughter’ phrase as ‘unacceptable’, in an interview with Simone de Beauvoir of 1966, quoted in Jennifer Cazenave, An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’, New York: SUNY Press 2019, 15. 43 Sara Bender quotes Mordecai Tenenbaum’s use of the slogan in Yiddish to urge resistance in Bialystok, with its reference to the ‘shechita’ of kosher slaughter: ‘Lomir nisht geyn vi shof tzu der shekhite!’, The Jews of Białystok during World War II and the Holocaust, Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press 2008 [1997], 157. 44 Transcript, 22. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 20. 47 Ibid., 23. 48 Ibid., 23, 20. 49 Ibid., 25. 50 Kovner, Ezekiel’s World, 3. 51 Transcript, 39. 52 Ibid., 5. 53 Feldman, ‘Not as Sheep Led to Slaughter?’, 151, 143. 54 Ginor, ‘Meteor-Yid’, 228. 55 Transcript, 4. 56 Ibid., 5. 57 Ibid., 4. 58 Ibid., 7.

Notes

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59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 8. 61 Ibid., 20. 62 Ibid., 21. 63 Ibid., 13. 64 Ibid. 65 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, London: Vintage 1989 [1986], 53. 66 Transcript, 45. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 35. 69 The precept was engraved on a ring made from gold taken from the dental work of one of the ‘Schindler Jews’ and presented to Schindler after the war in gratitude for his efforts (see David M. Crowe, Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story behind the List, Cambridge, MA: Westview Press 2004, 453–4). 70 Transcript, 28. 71 Ibid.36. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 38. 74 Ibid., 36. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 37. 77 Ibid., 36. 78 Ibid., 38. 79 Kovner won such literary awards for his poetry as the Brenner Prize in 1968, the Israel Prize in 1970 and Prime Minister’s Prize in 1986; he is interviewed in documentaries such as Partisans of Vilna (Josh Waletzky 1986), appears in archival footage in Channel 4’s Holocaust: The Revenge Plot (Nick Green 2018) and episode 8 of the television series Jewish Avengers, about the post-war Nakam movement; see also Jason Porath’s online graphic biography of Vitka Kempner, Avenger of the Holocaust, https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/princesses/vitka-kempner, accessed 31 July 2022, as well as Michael Kovner’s fictional portrait in Ezekiel’s World. 80 Claude Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir, trans. Frank Wynne, London: Atlantic Books 2012 [2009], 436. 81 Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow, 23. 82 Abba Kovner, Scrolls of Testimony, trans. Eddie Levenson, New York: Jewish Publication Society 2001, xi. 83 Ginor, ‘Meteor-Yid’, 36. 84 Feldman, ‘Not as Sheep Led to Slaughter?’, 146. 85 Dalia Ofer, ‘Victims, Fighters, Survivors: Quietism and Activism in Israeli Historical Consciousness’, Common Knowledge 16 (3) 2010, 493–517: 496.

200

Notes

86 Bauer, quoted in Feldman, ‘Not as Sheep Led to Slaughter?’, 141. 87 Transcript, 3. 88 State of Israel, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, 464. 89 Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow, 73. 90 Transcript, 1. 91 Ibid. 92 See Jonathan Freedland, ‘The Day Israel saw Shoah’, The Guardian, 10 December 2015, in which he argues that the smoke in Ben Shemen conveys the omnipresent and ‘shaping’ role of the Holocaust in Israel. Freedland recounts Zaidel’s angrily terminating an interview with a researcher who ‘suggested that the Jews of Europe had gone to their deaths “like sheep to the slaughter”’. 93 Feldman, ‘Not as Sheep Led to Slaughter?’, 139. 94 Ibid. 95 Transcript, 23.

Chapter 2 1

The nature and tone of Grünwald’s accusation are evident in this extract from one of his pamphlets, entitled ‘Letters to My Friends in the Mizrachi’, that is, in the east: ‘Who is this fellow who has been put high on the list of candidates for Israel’s parliament by the government party Mapai? This character is Dr. Rudolf Kastner, political adventurer, driven by sickly megalomania … My God! Kastner’s deeds in Budapest cost us the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews!’ Quoted from the trial transcript in Ben Hecht’s critical account of Kasztner’s activities, Perfidy, New York: Julian Messner 1961, 44–5. 2 Quoted in Ladislaus Löb, Dealing with Satan: Rezső Kasztner’s Daring Rescue Mission, London: Jonathan Cape 2008, 261, where he has ‘Satan’ for ‘devil’. 3 Quoted in Akiva Orr, Israel: Politics, Myths and Identity Crises, London: Pluto Press 1994, 83. 4 Yehuda Bauer, ‘Conclusion: The Holocaust in Hungary: Was Rescue Possible?’, in David Cesarani, ed., Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary, Oxford: Berg 1997, 201 5 Orr, Israel, 83. It was Kasztner’s committing perjury by denying he had spoken in defence of Becher that constituted a ‘turning-point’ against him in the court-case; for the complex reasons why he might have done so in the political context of the time, see Shoshana Barri, ‘The Question of Kastner’s Testimonies on Behalf of Nazi War Criminals’, The Journal of Israeli History 18 (2–3), 139–65. 6 Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, ‘Hansi Brand’, https://collections.ushmm.org/ search/catalog/irn1003911, accompanied by a German transcript and translation into English; all page references are to the English transcript. The latter is numbered

Notes

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in two parts, 1–7 for the translation from Hebrew, starting again at 1 when Brand starts to speak in German: I have added ‘A’ to references from the first seven pages to avoid confusion. 7 Transcript, 19. 8 Paul Sanders calls the judgement a ‘fiasco’, in ‘The “Strange Mr Kastner”– Leadership Ethics in Holocaust-Era Hungary, in the Light of Grey Zones and Dirty Hands’, Leadership 12 (1) 2015, 4–33: 7; Hanna Yablonka refers to Halevi’s ‘injudicious language’, ‘The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel: The Nuremberg, Kapos, Kastner and Eichmann Trials’, Israel Studies 8 (3) 2003, 1–24: 14. 9 Transcript, 6A. 10 Ibid. 11 Anna Porter describes Hansi Brand as Kasztner’s ‘partner in saving lives’, as well as, for a brief period, his romantic partner, Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust, London: Constable 2008 [2007], 5. 12 Transcript, 6A. 13 Andrea Pető, ‘Non-remembering the Holocaust in Hungary and Poland’, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, 31 2019, 471–80: 471. 14 Transcript, 4–5. 15 Thomas Komoly, in a critique of Paul Bogdanor’s 2016 book Kasztner’s Crime, ‘Distorting the Holocaust in Hungary’, Tablet, 19 March 2019, https://www. tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/257386/distorting-the-holocaust-inhungary, accessed 31 July 2022. 16 Transcript, 12. 17 Ibid., 36. 18 Ibid., 12. 19 Ibid., 2. 20 Bauer, ‘Conclusion: The Holocaust in Hungary’, 200. 21 Ibid., 206. 22 Transcript, 24. 23 Ibid., 34. 24 Cesarani, ‘Introduction’, Genocide and Rescue, 20. 25 See U. Henry Gehrlach, ‘Eichmann’s Blood-Barter in Hungary: Five Dramas’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 7 (2) 2008, 217–30, on plays that respond to the events of the trial; the documentary Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt with the Nazis (Gaylen Ross, USA 2009), and Sharon Geva’s contention that in November 1994, ‘Hansi Brand became a local heroine in Israel, when the drama The Kastner Trial was broadcast on Israeli Television’, ‘Wife, Lover, Woman: The Image of Hansi Brand in Israeli Public Discourse’, Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issue 27 2014, 97–119: 103.

202

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26 See the interview with Ze’ev Eckstein: Elad Zeret, ‘Kastner’s Killer: I Never Would Have Shot Him Today’, 29 October 2014, https://www.ynetnews.com/ articles/0,7340,L-4585767,00.html, accessed 31 July 2022. 27 Barri, ‘The Question of Kastner’s Testimonies’, 147. 28 Yechiam Weitz, ‘The Holocaust on Trial: The Impact of the Kasztner and Eichmann Trials on Israeli Society’, Israel Studies 1 (2) 1996, 1–26: 6. 29 Ibid., 7. 30 Tim Cole, Images of the Holocaust: The Myth of the ‘Shoah Business’, London: Duckworth 1999, 60. 31 Weitz, ‘The Holocaust on Trial’, 7. 32 Quoted in Geva, ‘Wife, Lover, Woman’, 110. 33 Sanders, ‘The Strange Mr Kasztner’, 11. He cites the possibility of adopting a ‘median position’, as he claims Bauer does, which Sanders judges fails to provide ‘a compelling narrative’, unlike the polarized viewpoints, ibid. 34 Ibid., 8. 35 Transcript, 32. 36 Ibid., 29. 37 Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, USHMM, ‘Shmuel Tamir’, https://collections. ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1004453 38 See the filmed record of trial sessions 59 and 60, USHMM, ‘Testimonies of H. Brand, J. Brand, M. Rosenberg’, 31 May 1961, Capital Cities Broadcasting, directed by Leo Hurwitz, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1001689, accessed 31 July 2022. 39 In the interview conducted with Brand towards the end of her life for Petr Bok and Martin Smok’s television documentary Among Blind Fools (Czech Republic 1998), she speaks in her native Hungarian and seems more relaxed in the context of a film which is more sympathetically oriented towards attempted rescue. 40 Sanders, ‘The “Strange Mr Kastner”’, 24. 41 Yablonka, ‘The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel’, 12; transcript, 6. 42 Transcript, 13. 43 Geva, ‘Wife, Lover, Woman’, 11. 44 Transcript, 37. 45 Francine Kaufmann, ‘The Ambiguous Task of the Interpreter in Claude Lanzmann’s Films Shoah and Sobibor: Between the Director and the Survivors of the Camps and Ghettos’, in Michaela Wolf, ed., Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps, London: Bloomsbury 2016, 161–80: 174. 46 Ibid. 47 See Jennifer Cazenave, An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’, New York: SUNY Press 2019, 51. Dorota Glowacka points out that Srebnik’s actual surname ‘Srebrnik’ is so universally misspelt

Notes

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that it is now the name by which he is known, ‘“Traduttore traditore’: Claude Lanzmann’s Polish Translations’, in Erin McGlothlin, et al., eds, The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’ and Its Outtakes, Wayne State University Press 2020, 154. 48 Kaufmann, ‘The Ambiguous Task of the Interpreter’, 166. 49 Ibid., 164. See also André Habib, ‘Delay, Estrangement, Loss: The Meanings of Translation in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’, SubStance 44 (2) 108–28: 118. 50 It is likely this translator took the place of Kaufmann, who thought she would not be able to interpret for Kovner’s interview during the visit to Israel in autumn 1979 since it coincided with Rosh Hashanah (Kaufmann, ‘The Ambiguous Task of the Interpreter’, 166 n. 11). Although the dates for Kovner’s interview were changed and she did take that role, the one with Brand is likely to have occurred around the period of the festival that year, 22–23 September. 51 Kaufmann, ‘The Ambiguous Task of the Interpreter’, 165. 52 Transcript, 6. 53 Ibid., 7. 54 Ibid., 6. 55 Yablonka, ‘The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel’, 15. 56 Geva, ‘Wife, Lover, Woman’, 104 57 Ibid., 106; State of Israel, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, 1045. 58 Geva, ‘Wife, Lover, Woman’, 104. 59 Transcript, 24. 60 In German, as in the Hebrew title of her memoir, Brand uses the term ‘Satan’: ‘er [Halevi] hat seine Seele für Satan verkauft’. 61 Transcript, 7. 62 Geva, ‘Wife, Lover, Woman’, 106. 63 Transcript, 21. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 22. 67 Rezső Kasztner, The Kasztner Report: The Report of the Budapest Jewish Rescue Committee, 1942–1945, eds László Karsai and Judit Molnár, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem 2013. Lanzmann quotes the very same pair of passages in the interview with Tamir. 68 Transcript, 26. 69 Peter Burke, What Is the History of Knowledge? Cambridge: Polity 2015, 58. 70 Transcript, 28. 71 Ibid., 17. 72 Ibid., 20. 73 Ibid., 3.

204

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74 ‘Rupture’ is Rémy Besson’s term, from Shoah: Une Double Réference, Paris: MkF Editions 2017, 255. 75 Burke, What Is the History of Knowledge?, 4. 76 Transcript, 4A. 77 Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 197. 78 Transcript, 21, 28. 79 Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 197. 80 Ibid., 207. 81 Löb, quoted in Komoly, ‘Distorting the Holocaust in Hungary’; Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, p. 197; Shlomo Aronson, ‘The Quadruple Trap of the European Jews, as Reflected in New Archival Sources’, in Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, eds John K. Roth, et al. 2001, 381–8. 82 Michael André Bernstein, ‘Victims-in-Waiting: Backshadowing and the Representation of European Jewry’, New Literary History 29 (4) 1998, 625–51: 626. 83 Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 197. 84 Transcript, 16, 85 Ibid., 15. 86 Besson, Shoah, 84, writing on interviews that include impressions of arrival at a death-camp. 87 Yablonka, ‘The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel’, 16. 88 Ibid., 17. 89 Sanders, ‘The “Strange Mr Kastner”’, 12; transcript, 36. 90 Besson, Shoah. 91 Transcript, 2A. 92 Ibid. 93 Geva, ‘Wife, Lover, Woman’, 114. 94 Transcript, 5. 95 Ibid., 108, 113, 105. 96 State of Israel, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, 1060. 97 Yablonka, ‘The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel’, 20. 98 Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 204, 201, Sanders, ‘The “Strange Mr Kastner”’, 24. 99 Sanders, ‘The “Strange Mr Kastner”’, 17. 100 Cazenave, An Archive of the Catastrophe, 168. 101 Sanders, ‘The “Strange Mr Kastner”’, 23. 102 Transcript, 2. 103 Yablonka, ‘The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel’, 14–15. 104 Cesarani describes the trial and furore as ‘one of the first points of definition of the new state’, The Holocaust in Hungary, 7.

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Chapter 3 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

Quoted in Jill Robbins, ‘The Writing of the Holocaust: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’, Prooftexts 7 (3) 1987, 249–58: 252. Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, ‘Gustav Laabs and Lettre Becker’, https:// collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1002784 See Gila Fatran, ‘The “Working Group”’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 8 (2) 1994, 164–201. Max Wallace, In the Name of Humanity: The Secret Deal to End the Holocaust, Delaware, NY: Skyhorse 2018 [2017], 327. Abraham Fuchs, The Unheeded Cry, New York: Mesorah Publications 1998 [1984], introduction. See https://www.oxfordchabad.org/templates/articlecco_cdo/aid/3659256/jewish/ Michael-Dov-Weissmandl-Remembering-an-Oxford-Rabbi-Who-Saved-Jewsfrom-the-Holocaust.htm, accessed 31 July 2022. Livia Rothkirchen, ‘The Slovak Enigma: A Reassessment of the Halt to the Deportations’, East Central Europe 10 (1–2) 1983, 3–13: 3. Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press 2002 [2001], 179. Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press 1994, 74; and Rethinking the Holocaust, 182. Transcript, 54. Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, ‘Shmuel Tamir’ https://collections.ushmm. org/search/catalog/irn1004453; ‘Becher – Mt Kisco/Weissmandl’, https:// collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1004794 Martin Smok, personal correspondence, 2 March 2019. Pieter Vermeulen, ‘Video Testimony, Modernity, and the Claims of Melancholia’, Criticism 53 (4) 549–68: 555. Ibid., 554. Cynthia Elyce Rubin, introduction, Siegmund Forst: A Lifetime in Arts and Letters, New York: Yeshiva University Museum 1997, 26; note the variant spelling of Forst’s first name. ‘Siegmunt Forst’, USHMM interview and English transcript, https://collections. ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1003913. All page references are to this transcript. Transcript, 1. Forst was born in 1904, a year after Weissmandl, Rubin, Siegmund Forst, 17. Transcript, 4. Brad Prager, After the Fact: The Holocaust in 21st Century Documentary Film, New York: Bloomsbury 2015, 150–1. Transcript, 42.

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22 Ibid., 43. 23 Ibid., 41–2. 24 See Mordechai Paldiel, Saving One’s Own: Jewish Rescuers during the Holocaust, New York: Jewish Publication Society 2017, 121. 25 Transcript, 42. 26 Ibid., 4–5. 27 Ibid., 36. 28 Ibid., 12. 29 Ibid., 12, 16–17. 30 Ibid., 28–9. See Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, London: Routledge 1973 [1966]; Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Reflections of a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Stanley Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1980 [1966]. 31 Transcript, 19. 32 Ibid., 15. 33 Ibid., 25. 34 Rubin, ‘Introduction’, 43. 35 Transcript, 55. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 57. 38 Max Wallace, personal communication, 24 March 2019. 39 The fund was HIJEFS, Hilfsverein für Jüdische Fluchtlinge im Shanghai, Paldiel, Saving One’s Own, 361. 40 Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, ‘Hermann Landau’, including English transcript, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1003916. All page references are to this transcript. 41 Transcript, 1. 42 Wake, ‘Regarding the Recording’, 114. 43 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984 [1963], especially 5–46. 44 Transcript, 4. 45 Ibid., 10. 46 Ibid., 11. 47 Ibid., 38. 48 Ibid., 33. 49 Ibid., 37. 50 Ibid., 38. 51 Ibid., 39. 52 Ibid., 19. 53 Ibid.,16. 54 Ibid.

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55 Ibid., 24. 56 Fuchs estimates a cost of $10,000 per letter, including bribing diplomats and couriers for their delivery, The Unheeded Cry, 99. 57 Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, Limited Inc, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 1988 [1972], 10. 58 Ibid., 20; Lori Wike, ‘Photographs and Signatures: Absence, Presence and Temporality in Barthes and Derrida’, InVisible Culture 3, 2000, https://www. rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue3/wike.htm, accessed 31 July 2022. 59 Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, 20. 60 Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, ‘André Steiner’, https://collections.ushmm. org/search/catalog/irn1003919, with English transcript. All page references are to this transcript. 61 Transcript, 90. 62 Ibid., 1. 63 Although Eva Fogelman argues in her ‘Teachers’ Guide’ to André’s Lives (https:// misc.icarusfilms.com/guide/andreliv.pdf, accessed 31 July 2022) that Steiner told his story for the first time to Lanzmann, and indeed Lichtenstein’s film emphasizes the effect of silence about the past on the architect’s relationships with his two sons, he had recounted his experiences before. Steiner testified against the SS officer Dieter Wisliceny at a Czech tribunal, and a 1964 interview, taped by Isaiah Jellinek and held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, covers similar topics to that with Lanzmann, as Fuchs’s quotations from it reveal, The Unheeded Cry, 49, 64. 64 Transcript, 26. 65 Ibid., 1. 66 Ibid., 24, 25. 67 Ibid., 21. 68 Fuchs, The Unheeded Cry, 129, n. 6. 69 Transcript, 22. 70 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1984, 21, 26. 71 Transcript, 23. 72 Ibid., 22. 73 Ibid., 23. 74 Ibid., 75. 75 Ibid., 32. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., 76. 78 Ibid., 43. 79 Ibid., 32. $10,000 in 1942 was worth almost $182,000 in 2022. For Philip Roth’s perception of the fictive potential of another element in Weissmandl’s history, the post-war efforts to establish a yeshiva in New York, see Steven Fink’s essay on the

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novelist’s short story, ‘Fact, Fiction, and History in Philip Roth’s “Eli, the Fanatic”’, MELUS 39 (3) 2014, 89–111. 80 Transcript, 39. 81 Ibid., 36. 82 Ibid., 33. 83 Ibid., 41. 84 Ibid., 42. 85 Ibid., 55. In 2022, $2 million would represent almost $36 million. 86 Ibid., 45. 87 Rothkirchen sees the pause as due to a combination of factors, including ‘active local protest’ and ‘outside intervention’, including that of the church, ‘The Slovak Enigma’, 13. 88 Transcript, 43. 89 Ibid., 14. 90 Ibid., 59–61. Steiner is rendered speechless on learning from Lanzmann the fate of this trainload of children, sent to Terezín en route for Switzerland to demonstrate the Nazis’ good faith in the proposed exchange. However, since the payment demanded for this train was not forthcoming, the children were sent to Auschwitz and killed. In Among Blind Fools, Steiner repeats the story, including its distressing conclusion as he had learnt it from Lanzmann. 91 Transcript, 67. 92 Ibid., 69–70. 93 Ibid., 70. 94 Ibid., 86. 95 Ibid., 78. 96 Ibid., 77. 97 Ibid., 86. 98 Ibid., 90. 99 Forst transcript, 60. 100 Ibid. 101 Paldiel, Saving One’s Own, 126. 102 Weissmandl, Min ha-Metzar [From the Catastrophe], Jerusalem n.p. 1960, see also his contribution to The Holocaust Victims Accuse, ed. Rabbi Moshe Shonfeld, New York: Neturei Karta 1977. 103 Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 241. John Conway describes Weissmandl’s actions in terms of complicity: see the exchange between him and Gila Fatran in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9 (2) 1995, 269–76. 104 For all its otherwise remarkable content, the three-part television documentary Among Blind Fools (Petr Bok and Martin Smok, 1998) takes a more conventional form. It does so by integrating extracts from interviews undertaken twenty years on with the same three witnesses Lanzmann had filmed, among others, within a

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chronological and explanatory framework that uses voiceover and music, archival footage, illustrative photographs and even a recording of Weissmandl’s voice, to present a biography of the rabbi in the context of the Holocaust in Slovakia. 105 Clio Barnard, quoted in David Cox, ‘Clio Barnard’s The Arbor Is Out of Lip-Synch with Reality’, The Guardian, 25 October 2010. 106 See Karmakar’s Press Release from 2000, updated in 2011, https://static1. squarespace.com/static/5724ab6027d4bd23efd03ef6/t/58aca70e29687f0ba867 5b20/1487709968758/HP-Pressedossier-2000.updated.pdf, accessed 31 July 2022. 107 See the notes to a screening of Hate Radio, https://www.ntgent.be/en/productions/ hate-radio, accessed 31 July 2022, and Susanne Knittel’s article about Rau’s re-enactments, ‘The Ruins of Europe: Milo Rau’s Europe Trilogy and the (Re) Mediation of the Real’, Frames 29 (1) 2016, 41–59. 108 Quoted in Vivian M. Patraka, Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and the Holocaust, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1999, 102. 109 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, London: Routledge 1994 [1993], 10.

Chapter 4 1

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Samuel D. Kassow, ‘Introduction’, in Samuel Shalkowsky, ed., The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2014, 46; see also Sharon Kangisser Cohen, ‘The Experience of the Jewish Family in the Nazi Ghetto: Kovno – A Case Study’, Journal of Family History 31 (3) 2006, 267–88. Robert Rozett, quoting Shmuel Krakowski, ‘Jewish Resistance’, in Dan Stone, ed., Historiography of the Holocaust, London: Palgrave 2004, 49. Evgeny Finkel, Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust, Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2017, 137. Laura J. Hilton, review of Zoe Waxman, Women in the Holocaust, H-German, October 2018, https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/2771263/hiltonwaxman-women-holocaust-feminist-history Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, USHMM, ‘Hersh Smolar – Minsk Ghetto’, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1003871, including English translation. Except where the German transcript is specified, all page references are to the English transcript, here, 51. Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto 1941–1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism, Berkeley: University of California University Press 2008, 286. This was awarded in 1983, the year of the museum’s foundation. The Yad Vashem account of Pankiewicz’s award lists the names of five individuals who

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were hidden by him: https://righteous.yadvashem.org/?search=Tadeusz%20 Pankiewicz&searchType=righteous_only&language=en&itemId=4016763&ind=0, accessed 31 July 2022. Jan Karski was similarly honoured as a Righteous among the Nations, ‘although he had not saved individual Jews’, but because he ‘risked his life in order to alert the world to the murder’, https://righteous.yadvashem. org/?search=Jan%20Karski&searchType=righteous_only&language=en&itemId=40 43972&ind=0, accessed 31 July 2022. 8 Tadeusz Pankiewicz, The Cracow Ghetto Pharmacy, Washington, DC: USHMM 1988, ix. 9 Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, USHMM, ‘Tadeusz Pankiewicz – Cracow’, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1004087, including English translation. All page references are to this transcript, here 2. 10 Tadeusz Pankiewicz, The Krakow Ghetto Pharmacy, new edition, trans. Garry Malloy, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie 2013, 4. 11 See Kinga Kołodziejska, ‘In the Shadow of Tadeusz Pankiewicz: Irka, Helena and Aurelia’, https://muzea.malopolska.pl/en/articles/489, accessed 31 July 2022. 12 Pankiewicz, The Cracow Ghetto Pharmacy, 73. 13 Transcript, 18. 14 Ibid., 5. 15 Ibid., 5. 16 Ibid., 4. 17 Ibid., 5. 18 It is numbered 17 Plac Bohaterów Getta, while the pharmacy was at number 18. Katarzyna Zimmerer describes 17, no longer standing, as the residence of the Glaser family during the ghetto’s existence, ‘Traces of Memory’, in Michał Szymonik, trans., The Eagle Pharmacy: History and Memory, Kraków: Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa 2013, 65. 19 Pankiewicz, The Cracow Ghetto Pharmacy, 9, where he lists the names of resisters known to him, including Shoah’s Yitzhak Zukerman. 20 Jan Gryta notes that the earliest plaque in the square, installed in March 1948 to commemorate the third anniversary of the ghetto’s destruction, read, ‘In memory of the heroes and martyrs of the Kraków Ghetto’, revealing that ‘the remembrance of the fighters was made equal with that of the murdered Jews’, ‘The Politics of Remembrance in Kraków’, Eagle Pharmacy, 162. 21 Pankiewicz, The Cracow Ghetto Pharmacy, 7. 22 Transcript, 6. 23 Pankiewicz, The Cracow Ghetto Pharmacy, 46; transcript, 7. 24 Transcript, 20. 25 Ibid., 21. 26 Ibid., 1. 27 Ibid., 5.

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28 German transcript, 5. 29 Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Brady, London: Continuum 2006 [1947], 62–3. 30 Jan Gryta, ‘The Politics of Remembrance in Kraków: The Holocaust Memorial Monuments, Plaques and Obelisks before 1989’, in Eagle Pharmacy, 157. 31 Pankiewicz, The Cracow Ghetto Pharmacy, 106. 32 Transcript, 14. 33 Ibid., 14. 34 Gryta, ‘The Politics of Remembrance’, 157; Anna Pióro, ‘The Eagle Pharmacy: Regained Memory. The History of the Pharmacy as an Instance of Manipulating Collective Memory’, in The Eagle Pharmacy, 208. 35 Maurizio Cinquegrani, Journey to Poland: Documentary Landscapes of the Holocaust, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2018, 106. 36 Tadeusz Pankiewicz, ‘The Eagle Pharmacy in the Cracow Ghetto’, in Wladyslaw Bartoszewski with Zofia Lewin, eds, The Samaritans, Twayne: New York 1970 [1966], 173–8: 174. 37 Transcript, 4. 38 Ibid., 25. 39 Ibid., 26. 40 Pióro, ‘The Eagle Pharmacy’, 216. 41 Transcript, 25. 42 Pióro, ‘The Eagle Pharmacy’, 229. 43 Transcript, 27. 44 Pióro, ‘The Eagle Pharmacy’, p. 187. 45 Jonathan Webber, ‘Jewish Kraków, Real and Imagined: Notes on the Sociology of Memory’, The Eagle Pharmacy, 260. 46 Pióro, ‘The Eagle Pharmacy’, 208. 47 See Cinquegrani on the use of this footage for the director’s 2006 film of the same title, Apteka Pod Orłem (Poland: TVP), Journey to Poland, 107–9. 48 Gryta, ‘The Politics of Remembrance in Kraków’, 180. Habib describes the impression of Lanzmann’s ‘alienation, anger and hostility’ in Shoah towards ‘the Polish people’, ‘Delay, Estrangement, Loss’, 118. 49 Transcript, 24. 50 Gryta, ‘The Politics of Remembrance in Kraków’, 141. 51 Transcript, 53. 52 Ibid., 5. 53 Gennady Estraikh, ‘The Missing Years: Yiddish Writers in Soviet Bialystok, 1939–1941’, East European Jewish Affairs 46 (2) 2016, 176–91: 177–82. 54 Transcript, 4.

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55 Alexander Smolar, interview with Natallia Radzina, ‘Hersh Smolar, The Unknown Hero Belarus Can Be Proud Of ’, Charter ’97, https://charter97.org/en/ news/2019/6/28/339373/, accessed 31 July 2022; transcript, 3. 56 Transcript, 4. 57 Ibid., 61. 58 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, New York: Basic Books 2010, 230. 59 Transcript, 1. 60 Habib, ‘Delay, Estrangement, Loss’, 116. 61 Ibid. 62 Transcript, 1–2. 63 Ibid., 44. 64 Ibid., 46. 65 Ibid., 41. 66 Ibid., 42. 67 See Yuri Suhl, They Fought Back: The Story of Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, New York: Schocken Books 1976. 68 Anika Walke, ‘Jewish Youth in the Minsk Ghetto: How Age and Gender Mattered’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15 (3) 2014, 535–62: 544. 69 Transcript, 20 70 Ibid., 22, German transcript, 22. 71 Elhanan Elkes, for instance, refers to ‘the greatest Haman of all times’ in the letter to his children from the Kovno Ghetto, dated 19 October 1943, in Joel Elkes, Dr Elkhanan Elkes of the Kovno Ghetto: A Son’s Holocaust Memoir, Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 1999, 80. 72 Transcript, 30. 73 Estraikh, ‘The Missing Years’, 187. 74 The phrase is from Hersh Smolar, The Minsk Ghetto: Soviet-Jewish Partisans against the Nazis, trans. Max Rosenfeld, New York: Holocaust Library 1989, 99. 75 Smolar, The Minsk Ghetto, 94. 76 Transcript, 37. 77 See Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto, 145. 78 Transcript, 40. 79 Walke, ‘Jewish Youth’, 544. 80 Leonid Rein, ‘The Radicalization of Anti-Jewish Policies in Nazi-Occupied Belarus’, in Alex Kay, et al., eds, Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization, Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer 2013, 233. 81 Transcript, 54. 82 See Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams’s convincing reading of Bomba’s Yiddish utterance, The Auschwitz Sonderkommando: Testimonies, Histories, Representations, London: Palgrave 2019, 237.

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83 Transcript, 1; thanks to Axel Stähler for discussing this with me. 84 Alexander Smolar, interview. Alexander Smolar’s observation that, since only his father was a Yiddish-speaker, Polish was the family language, emphasizes the significance of multilingualism for Smolar, whose ability also to speak Russian after living there in the early 1920s was a factor in his successfully leading the underground in Minsk, where it was the main language (Snyder, Bloodlands, 231). 85 Transcript, 2. 86 See Beate Muller, ‘Translating Trauma: David Boder’s 1946 Interviews with Holocaust Survivors’, Translation and Literature 23 (2) 2014, 257–71: 264. 87 Transcript, 6. 88 My rendition of the dialogue; see transcript 6, German transcript 6. 89 Transcript, 6. 90 Hannah Pollin-Galay, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2018, 176. 91 Transcript 29, German transcript 29. 92 Thanks to Dominic Williams for pointing this out. 93 Transcript 21, German transcript 21. 94 Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish, Berkeley: University of California Press 1990, 26. 95 Transcript 57, German transcript 57. 96 Although present at this interview in her role of a research assistant and not as a translator, Coulmas could understand and, given her knowledge of German and Hebrew, also read Yiddish, personal communication, 7 July 2019. 97 Thanks to Marilyn Campeau and Richard Musson for discussing this with me, and to Eli Jany for his expertise in deciphering the Yiddish terms. 98 Transcript 22, German transcript. 99 Rémy Besson, ‘The Karski Report: A Voice with the Ring of Truth’, études photographiques, 27 (2011), online at: https://journals.openedition.org/etudesph otographiques/3467?lang=en, accessed 31 July 2022, and Chare and Williams on Müller, The Auschwitz Sonderkommando, 219–48. 100 Smolar, quoted in Suhl, They Fought Back, 261. 101 See Barbara Epstein, ‘Jewish-Byelorussian Solidarity in World War Two Minsk’, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Washington, DC: USHMM 2005, https://www. ushmm.org/m/pdfs/Publication_OP_2005-10.pdf, accessed 31 July 2022. 102 Epstein, ‘Jewish-Byelorussian Solidarity’, 70. 103 Transcript, 56. 104 Ibid., 57. 105 Transcript 57, German transcript 57. 106 Ibid., 4, 57. 107 Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto, 128. 108 Ibid., 284–5.

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109 Snyder, Bloodlands, 234. 110 Wendy Lower quoted in Walke, ‘Jewish Youth’, 542. 111 Transcript, 60. 112 Ibid., 54. 113 Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, USHMM, ‘Leib Garfunkel – Kovno Ghetto’, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1003914, including English transcript. All page references are to this transcript. 114 See Jennifer Cazenave, An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’, New York: SUNY Press 2019, 173. 115 Claude Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir, trans. Frank Wynne, London: Atlantic Books 2012 [2009], 412. 116 ‘Leyb Gorfinkel’, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, https:// yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Gorfinkel_Leyb, accessed 31 July 2022. 117 Transcript, 15. 118 See Kangisser Cohen, ‘The Experience of the Jewish Family’, and Dalia Ofer, ‘Swearing-In Ceremony: The Police in the Kovno Ghetto, 1 November 1942’. Partial Answers 7 (2) 2009, 229–41. 119 Transcript, 1. 120 Joel Elkes calls his father’s letter ‘the only testament’ by a Council leader, suggesting the reason for Lanzmann’s valuing its perspective on the ghetto, Dr Elkhanan Elkes of the Kovno Ghetto, 79. 121 Transcript, 1. 122 Other accounts describe this speech being given by Karl Jäger, for instance, Sol Littman, War Criminal on Trial: Rauca of Kovno, Toronto: Key Porter Books 1998 [1983], 65. 123 Transcript, 4. 124 Ibid., 1. 125 Ibid., 44. 126 For instance, ibid., 12 127 Ibid., 2. 128 Ibid., 5. 129 Ibid., 45. 130 Ibid., 21–2. 131 Ibid., 23. 132 Ibid. 133 Ibid., 24. 134 Ibid., 25. 135 Samuel D. Kassow, ‘Introduction’, The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Police, by anonymous members of the Kovno Ghetto Police, ed. and trans. Samuel Schalkowsky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2014, 23. 136 Transcript, 27.

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137 Ibid., 30. 138 Ibid., 31. See also Cazenave’s quoting Czerniaków using the same image in the Warsaw Ghetto, An Archive of the Catastrophe, 21. 139 Transcript, 34, 31. 140 Ibid., 33. 141 See Nehemia Stern on the responsa of Rabbi Oshry, who often deputized for the older Rabbi Shapiro in the ghetto, and what he calls the ‘tragic limitations’ of Oshry’s judgements on the new reality of genocide, ‘“To Sanctify the Name of God”: Ritual Precision and Martyrdom in Rabbi Ephraim Oshry’s Holocaust responsa’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 22 (1) 2014, 100–24: 100. 142 Transcript, 34. 143 Ibid., 36. 144 Ibid., 35. 145 Ibid., 33. 146 Ibid., 36. 147 Kassow, ‘Introduction’, 51. 148 Ibid., 48–50, quoting Aryeh Segalson’s memoir, Balev ha’ofel [In the Heart of the Citadel: A View from within the Destruction of Jewish Kovno], Jerusalem: Yad Vashem 2004, and Lazar Goldstein’s equally censorious memoir of 1985, From Ghetto Kovno to Dachau, New York: Esther Goldstein. 149 Ibid., 50. 150 Ibid., 6. 151 Ibid., 21. 152 Transcript, 38. 153 Garfunkel’s description of the scene is similar to that by Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, Rabbi Shapiro’s pupil and deputy, suggesting not only that he was familiar with this account, but that its religious cast influenced his sense of communal responsibility. Oshry writes: ‘This was a melancholy day, drenched in rain and snow that fell together from the skies. It was as if even the inhabitants of heaven, the lofty angels who serve the almighty God, were in shock, as if they were asking, “Where is the God of gods?”’, quoted in Stern, ‘To Sanctify the Name of God’, 112, 107. 154 Kassow, ‘Introduction’, 49–50. 155 Transcript, 42. 156 Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto, 32. 157 Lucien Steinberg, ‘Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust’, in Yisrael Gutman and Efraim Zuroff, ed., Proceedings of the Second Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem 1977, 603–15: 603 158 Steinberg, ‘Rescue Attempts’, 603. 159 Smolar transcript, 53. 160 Ibid. 161 Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto, 289.

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162 Epstein, ‘Jewish-Belorussian Solidarity’, 69. 163 Pióro, ‘The Eagle Pharmacy’, 187. 164 Quoted in Elkes, Dr Elkhanan Elkes, 116. 165 Steinberg, ‘Rescue Attempts’, 604.

Chapter 5 1

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Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, USHMM, ‘Peter Bergson and Samuel Merlin – New York’, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1002779, all page references to the transcript, here 42. Quoted in Stuart Jeffries, ‘Claude Lanzmann on Why Holocaust Documentary Shoah Still Matters’, The Guardian, 9 June 2011, 14. Transcript, 2. ‘Nuisance diplomat’ is from Monty Penkower, ‘In Dramatic Dissent: The Bergson Boys’, American Jewish History 70 (3) 1981, 281–309: 301. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 13. Mark A. Raider, ‘“Irresponsible, Undisciplined Opposition”: Ben Halpern on the Bergson Group and Jewish Terrorism in Pre-state Palestine’, American Jewish History 92 (3) 313–60: 318. Penkower, ‘In Dramatic Dissent’, 308; transcript, 45. Ibid., 306. David S. Wyman, ‘The Bergson Group, America and the Holocaust: A Previously Unpublished Interview with Peter Bergson’, American Jewish History 89 (1) 2011, 3–34: 5. Amanda Rothschild’s three criteria, not directly including public pressure, for the United States to take action in situations of genocide are thus fulfilled: ‘dissent within the president’s inner circle; a high degree of congressional pressure on the president to change policy; and the president’s perception that inaction will lead to personal political costs’, ‘Rousing a Response: When the United States Changes Policy toward Mass Killing’, International Security 42 (2) 2017, 120–54: 126. Ibid., 127. Transcript, 6. Ibid., 6. Rafael Medoff, review of Louis Rapoport, Shake Heaven and Earth: Peter Bergson and the Struggle to Rescue the Jews of Europe, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 15 (1) 2001, 136–9: 136. Transcript, 1. Ibid., 10. See Sarah E. Peck, ‘The Campaign for an American Response to the Nazi Holocaust, 1943–1945’, Journal of Contemporary History 15 (2) 1980, 367–400: 370.

Notes 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41

217

Transcript, 1. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3. The epithet is Roswell McClelland’s, used approvingly of Meyer, McClelland transcript 23. Transcript, 9. Rafael Medoff, ‘Conflicts between American Jewish Leaders and Dissidents over Responding to News of the Holocaust: Three Episodes between 1942 to 1943’, Journal of Genocide Research 5 (3) 2003, 439–50: 447. Peck, ‘The Campaign for an American Response’. Transcript, 44. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 14. Penkower, ‘In Dramatic Dissent’, 284, 340. Eran Kaplan, ‘A Rebel with a Cause: Hillel Kook, Begin and Jabotinsky’s Ideological Legacy’, Israel Studies 10 (3) 2005, 87–103: 100; transcript, 17, Transcript, 21 (despite gaps in the transcript the detail is clear in the soundtrack). Ibid., 25. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 40; David S. Wyman and Rafael Medoff, A Race against Death: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust, New York: The New Press 2002, 30–1. Transcript, 41. Ibid., 22. Rafael Medoff, ed., Too Little and Almost Too Late: The War Refugee Board and America’s Response to the Holocaust, Washington, DC: Wyman Institute 2017. Hasian argues that world leaders who were once ‘applauded’ are now unjustly ‘vilified’ for their wartime behaviour, and that a ‘universalist’ approach, not singling out the Jews for mention and about which Bergson bitterly complains, was ‘considered crucial in the liberal discourse of saving’ at the time, ‘Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Holocaust, and Modernity’s Rescue Rhetorics’, Communication Quarterly 51 (2) 2003, 154–73: 155, 161. Erbelding claims that ‘by the 1970s, a narrative of an indifferent America, an antisemitic State Department, and a refusal to bomb Auschwitz had taken hold with the American public’, which her study seeks to counter, War Rescue Board, New York: Doubleday 2018, 274. See also the controversy following the USHMM’s 2018 exhibition about American responses to the Holocaust, Dina Kraft, ‘The Battle over FDR’s Record on Saving Jews from the Nazis’, Ha’aretz, 6 January 2019. Transcript, 22. Ibid., 43. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press 1982 [1975], 272; transcript, 27.

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42 The sense in which Bergson, and by extension Sauvage, uses the commandment depends on a translation of the kind in the Common Jewish Bible: ‘Do not go around spreading slander among your people, but also don’t stand idly by when your neighbor’s life is at stake’. Other translations focus rather on the outlawing of false testimony when this might endanger someone’s life. For different versions, see https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/EN/Leviticus+19:16, accessed 31 July 2022. 43 Kaplan, ‘A Rebel with a Cause’, 348. 44 Transcript, 20. 45 Ibid., 29. Estimates claim the WRB saved 200,000 lives, Yad Vashem, ‘War Refugee Board’, https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206488. pdf, accessed 31 July 2022. 46 Transcript, 25. 47 Penkower, ‘In Dramatic Dissent’, 309. 48 Bergson transcript, 5; Bergson’s epithet, ‘a good guy but a bureaucrat’, quoted in Wyman and Medoff, A Race against Death, 165. 49 Michael Mashberg, ‘Documents Concerning the American State Department and the Stateless European Jews, 1942–1944’, Jewish Social Studies 39 (1/2) 1977, 163–82: 179. 50 Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, ‘John Pehle – Allies’, https://collections. ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1002780, all page references to transcript, here 1. 51 Transcript, 2. 52 Ibid., 2. 53 Wyman, A Race against Death, 31. 54 Transcript, 8, 12. 55 Bergson transcript, 36. 56 Transcript, 26. See Jennifer Cazenave’s description of the outtakes’ ‘reverse shot’ of Western reactions in response to Shoah’s focus on the East, An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’, New York: SUNY Press 2019, 179. 57 Transcript, 5. 58 Ibid., 14. 59 Ibid., 16. 60 Ibid., 14–15. 61 Ibid., 17. 62 Ibid., 6. 63 Ibid., 29–31. 64 Ibid., 30–2. 65 Ibid., 34. 66 Ibid., 36. 67 Ibid., 34.

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68 David Thomson, ‘The Man We Love to Love’, The Guardian, 22 November 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2002/nov/22/artsfeatures9, accessed 31 July 2022. 69 Roswell and Marjorie McClelland Papers, Series 2: Biographical Information 1948–95, USHMM, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn80304#?rsc=1 75489&cv=0&c=0&m=0&s=0&xywh=-895%2C-200%2C4562%2C3988. 70 Transcript, 2. 71 McClelland Papers. 72 Yehuda Bauer, The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness, Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1979, 226. 73 Transcript, 6. 74 Ibid., 7. 75 Ibid., 23. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., 10. 78 Pehle transcript, 15, 79 Transcript, 11. 80 Ibid., 11. 81 Ibid., 13. Max Wallace claims this characterization shows McClelland ‘falsely believed that [Sternbuch] was a rabbi’, In the Name of Humanity: The Secret Deal to End the Holocaust, New York: Skyhorse 2018, 215, but it seems rather that any orthodox man resembled a rabbi in the interviewee’s eyes. 82 Transcript, 13. 83 Ibid., 15. 84 Ibid., 13. 85 Pehle transcript, 46, In an interview from 1978 in Medoff ’s Too Little and Almost Too Late, Henry Morgenthau’s secretary Henrietta Klotz describes overhearing an exchange in Yiddish between Kalmanowitz and a fellow rabbi, in which the former asked if he had ‘cried well’, suggesting an element of performing to expectations, 63. 86 Transcript, 14. 87 Ibid., 36. 88 From the opposite perspective, Samuel Merlin praises orthodox Jewish figures as ‘emotionally involved [people who] co-operated with us to the full extent’, Bergson transcript, 9. 89 Transcript, 17. 90 Ibid., 19. 91 Ibid., 17. 92 Ibid., 16. 93 Ibid., 19. 94 Ibid., 25.

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95 Ibid., 26. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid., 34. 98 Ibid., 35. 99 Ibid., 37. 100 Ibid., 39. 101 David Krantzler refers to McClelland as a ‘silent antagonist’ whose ‘constant stalling’ was part of his ‘negative role’ in relation to the ‘protective’ citizenship papers arranged by Mantello at Geneva’s Salvadoran Consulate, The Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz: George Mantello, El Salvador and Switzerland’s Finest Hour, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press 2000, 216–17. 102 Feingold transcript, 14. 103 Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, ‘Robert Reams – “Fish(ing) Party”’, https:// collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1004818, all page references to transcript, here 26. 104 Transcript, 12. 105 Ibid., 23. 106 Memorial Page for Dorothy Reams, Kent-Forest Lawn Funeral Home, https://www. kentforestlawn.com/tributes/Dorothy-Reams, accessed 31 July 2022. 107 Claude Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir, trans. Frank Wynne, London: Atlantic Books 2012 [2009], 423. 108 Transcript, 2. 109 Ibid., 3. 110 Ibid. 111 Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare, 423. 112 Transcript, 6. 113 Charles McNulty, review of Accomplices by Bernard Weinraub, Los Angeles Times, 25 July 2008, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-accomplices252008jul25-story.html, accessed 31 July 2022. 114 Transcript, 24. 115 Pehle transcript, 29. 116 Feingold transcript, 10. 117 Transcript, 22. 118 Ibid., 18. See Richard Breitman’s summary of estimates of Long, including his ‘inflexible adherence to the letter of the law’, in ‘The Allied War Effort and the Jews, 1942–3’, Journal of Contemporary History 20 (1) 1985, 135–56: 136. 119 Transcript, 20–1. 120 McNulty, review. 121 Yehuda Bauer, ‘Holocaust Rescue Revisited’, Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs 7 (3) 2013, 127–42: 130. 122 McClelland transcript, 36.

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Chapter 6 1

Dan Michman prefers the term ‘headship’ to leadership, ‘On the Historical Interpretation of the Judenräte Issue: Between Intentionalism, Functionalism and the Integrationist Approach of the 1990s’, in Moshe Zimmermann, ed., On Germans and Jews under the Nazi Regime: Essays by Three Generations of Historians, Jerusalem: Magnes Press 2006, 386–90: 392, but my usage of ‘leadership’ follows that of Lanzmann and his interviewees. 2 Arnon’s first name is given as ‘Jacob’ in the USHMM archive, but the transliterated Hebrew version used here is that by which he was known in Israel. 3 David Cesarani, ‘The Extraordinary Power of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’, New Statesman, 2 December 2010. 4 Dalia Karpel, ‘History Professor Yehuda Bauer: “Netanyahu Doesn’t Know History”’, Ha’aretz, 21 February 2013; Jonathan Freedland, ‘The Day Israel Saw Shoah’, The Guardian, 10 December 2015. 5 Claude Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir, trans. Frank Wynne, London: Atlantic Books 2012 [2009], 411, 421. 6 Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare, 430. 7 Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, ‘Yehuda Bauer’, https://collections.ushmm. org/search/catalog/irn1004791, all page references to the transcript. 8 Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare, 412. 9 Claude Lanzmann, ‘Raul Hilberg, Actor in Shoah’, in James S. Pacy and Alan Wertheimer, eds, Perspectives on the Holocaust: Essays in Honor of Raul Hilberg, Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1995, 185. 10 Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare, 413. 11 Lanzmann, ‘Raul Hilberg, Actor in Shoah’, 186; Noah Shenker, ‘“The Dead Are Not Around”: Raul Hilberg as Historical Revenant in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’, in Erin McGlothlin, et al., eds, The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’ and Its Outtakes, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press 2020, 115–40: 115–16. 12 Cesarani, ‘The Extraordinary Power of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’. 13 Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2001, 128–9. 14 Ibid., 129. 15 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 662. 16 Ibid., 662, 666. 17 Yehuda Bauer, The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness, Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1979, 5; transcript, 15. 18 Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 26. 19 Adam Brown, Judging ‘Privileged’ Jews: Holocaust Ethics, Representation and the ‘Grey Zone’, Oxford: Berghahn 2013, 109. 20 Ibid., 114.

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21 Raul Hilberg, ‘The Ghetto as a Form of Government’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 450 (1) 1980, 96–112: 186. 22 Shenker, ‘The Dead Are Not Around’, 131. 23 Lanzmann, ‘Raul Hilberg, Actor in Shoah’, 187. 24 Ibid. 25 Transcript, 66. 26 Ibid., 32. 27 Brown, Judging ‘Privileged’ Jews, 113. 28 Transcript, 8. 29 Ibid., 14. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 6–8. 32 Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 133. 33 Transcript, 9; and ibid., 132. 34 Ibid., 10; ibid. 35 Ibid., 18. 36 Ibid., 7. 37 Ibid., 10. 38 Ibid. The eyewitness to whom Bauer refers is probably Michael Chęciński. Although they do not dispute the account of the ‘underground’ member Moishe Hussid murdering in Auschwitz Leon Rosenblatt, the chief of the Jewish Police in the Łódź Ghetto, other survivors, including Tzipora Hager Halivni and Philip Goldstein, dispute the suggestion that he killed Rumkowski, ‘How Rumkowski Died’, in the letters page of Commentary, September 1979, https://www. commentarymagazine.com/articles/rumkowski-in-auschwitz/; Michal Unger describes Chęciński as ‘unreliable’, Reassessment of the Image of Chaim Rumkowski, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem 2004, 51. 39 Rumkowski’s ‘Give me your children’ appeal of 1942 is sufficiently infamous to appear in the Penguin Book of Modern Speeches, ed. Brian MacArthur, London: Penguin 2017, where it is described as ‘perhaps the most horrifying speech in this anthology’ – despite the inclusion of orations by Hitler and Heydrich. 40 Lanzmann, ‘Raul Hilberg, Actor’, 187. 41 Transcript, 21. 42 Ibid., 29. 43 Ibid., 21. 44 Ibid., 30. 45 Ibid., 31. 46 Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg, quoted in Yehuda Shurpin, ‘The Trolley Problem in Judaism: Sacrifice One Life to Save Many?’, https://www.chabad.org/library/ article_cdo/aid/4372124/jewish/The-Trolley-Problem-in-Judaism.htm, accessed 31 July 2022. Shurpin adds, ‘thus, we must refrain from taking action that implies

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we know how to evaluate one life over another or even many’, as applicable to the present dilemma when faced with ‘two bad choices’. The conclusion is: ‘All we can do is leave it to heaven and follow the Talmudic dictum shev ve’al ta’aseh (“sit and do nothing”), taking a passive tack, for any active killing is forbidden.’ Nonetheless, a decision to ‘do nothing’ might itself have later been judged as compliance. 47 Transcript, 32. 48 Quoted in Brown, Judging ‘Privileged Jews’, 111. 49 Transcript, 30. 50 Ibid., 28–9. 51 Ibid., 57. 52 Ibid., 59–60. 53 Ibid., 65. 54 Ibid., 63. 55 Ibid., 65. 56 Ibid., 66. 57 Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, New York: Macmillan 1966. 58 Richard Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future, New York: Harper & Row 1975. 59 Ibid., 6. 60 Ibid., italics in original. 61 Ibid., 95. 62 Michael Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America, New York: Oxford University Press 2001, 101. 63 Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, ‘Richard Rubenstein’, https://collections. ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1004819, all page references to the transcript or sound-only transcript, as indicated. 64 See https://www.floridastateparks.org/WakullaSprings, accessed 31 July 2022. 65 Transcript, 18. 66 Ibid., 1. 67 Ibid., 2. 68 Lanzmann, ‘Richard Rubenstein’. I have replaced the annotation’s phrase ‘similarities’ with ‘contrast’ for clarity. 69 Transcript, 2. 70 Ibid., 3. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 4. 73 Rubenstein, The Cunning of History, 98. 74 Transcript, 10. 75 Sound-only transcript, 1. 76 Transcript, 6.

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77 Ibid., 7. 78 Ibid., 17. This assertion is followed by Rubenstein’s quoting Lord Moyne’s rhetorical question about the Jews of Hungary during the ‘blood for trucks’ negotiations in 1944, ‘What shall I do with those million Jews? Where shall I put them?’, perhaps the source from which Lanzmann quotes the utterance in several of the War Refugee Board interviews. 79 Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz, 104. 80 Transcript, 7. 81 Ibid., 101. 82 James Call, ‘Wakulla Springs Mysteries’, Tallahassee Democrat, https:// eu.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2019/06/07/wakulla-springs-mysteriesnow-include-apple-snail-eggs-and-limpkin/1333126001/, accessed 31 July 2022. 83 Transcript, 14. 84 Sound-only transcript, 5. 85 Transcript, 16. 86 Ibid., 12. 87 Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz, 104. 88 Transcript, 14. 89 Ibid., 13. 90 Bauer, The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness, 25. 91 Transcript, 15. 92 Stuart Jeffries, ‘Claude Lanzmann on Why Holocaust Documentary Shoah Still Matters’, The Guardian, 9 January 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/ jun/09/claude-lanzmann-shoah-holocaust-documentary, accessed 31 July 2022. 93 Bauer transcript, 6. 94 Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, ‘Jacob Arnon’, https://collections.ushmm. org/search/catalog/irn1002781, all page references to the transcript; quotation in subheading, 53. 95 Arnon’s obituary, from the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, outlines his journey from socialism to Zionism, Joel S. Fishman, ‘On Jewish Survival during the Occupation: The Vision of Jacob van Amerongen’, Studia Rosenthalia 33 (2) 1999, 160–73. 96 Transcript, 4. 97 Ibid., 2–4. 98 Ibid., 3. 99 Ibid., 1–2. 100 Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History, Berkeley: University of California Press 1994, 9. 101 Transcript, 2. 102 Fishman, ‘On Jewish Survival’, 163.

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103 Fishman, ‘On Jewish Survival during the Occupation’, 173. He claims that Arnon was the first to use this wartime term for going into hiding, coined during the Nazi occupation and meaning ‘diving under’, 166. 104 Transcript, 23. 105 Jacob Presser, Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry, trans. Arnold Pomerans, New York: Souvenir Press 1968 [1965], 272–3. 106 Transcript, 7. 107 Ibid., 8. 108 Ibid., 8–9. 109 The phrase is Zygmunt Bauman’s, from Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Polity 1989, 133; transcript, 5. 110 Transcript, 10. 111 Ibid., 10. 112 Ibid., 13, 9. 113 Ibid., 13. 114 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 117. 115 Ibid., 149. 116 Transcript, 31. 117 Ibid., 31. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid., 31–2. 120 Ibid., 14. 121 Ibid., 14–15. 122 Ibid., 29. 123 Ibid., 13, Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 122. 124 Transcript, 20. 125 Ibid., 19. 126 Fishman, ‘On Jewish Survival during the Occupation’, 169, 172. 127 Transcript, 20. 128 Ibid., 30. 129 Ibid. 130 Ibid., 32. 131 Ibid., 14. 132 Ibid., 49. 133 Ibid., 45, my emphasis. 134 Ibid., 2. 135 Ibid. 136 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 364. See also Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller, ‘Anti-Jewish Policy and Organization of the Deportations in France and the Netherlands, 1940–1944: A Comparative Study’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 20 (3) 2006, 437–73, which concludes similarly.

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137 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1977 [1963], 116. 138 Transcript, 16. 139 Ibid., 21. 140 Ibid., 29. 141 Ibid., 37. 142 Ibid., 21. 143 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 135. 144 Transcript, 36. 145 Ibid., 52. 146 Ibid., 56. 147 Ibid., 55. 148 Unger, Reassessment, 44. 149 Transcript, 36. 150 Ibid., 40. 151 Arnon describes to Fishman feeling ‘personally ashamed’ at the ‘family tragedy’ occasioned by Asscher’s wartime role and their breach, ‘Jewish Survival during the Occupation’, 161. 152 Bauer transcript 15, Arnon transcript, 6. 153 Ibid., 4. Lanzmann rejects the term ‘talking heads’ for his filmmaking, as quoted in Stuart Liebman, ‘Lanzmann’s Memory Theater’, Criterion Collection, 4 March 2014, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3084-lanzmann-s-memory-theater, accessed 31 July 2022. 154 Presser, Ashes in the Wind, 270–1. Although both men were forbidden from holding leadership roles in the Jewish community, the sentences were quashed in 1950 – too late for Asscher, who had died earlier that year, and who was so adversely affected by the initial verdict that he left orders not to be given a Jewish burial. 155 Arnon transcript, 40. 156 Bauer, The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness, 11. 157 Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare, 425. 158 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 116, 118. 159 Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian, Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee 1996, 149–52. 160 Ibid., 126–7. 161 Arnon transcript, 12, 22, 51. 162 Griselda Pollock, talk delivered at the Zygmunt Bauman symposium, University of Leeds, September 2019, ‘Modernity and the Holocaust as Symptom of History as Trauma: the case of Bauman’s Modernity in the Arts and Humanities’; Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 202. 163 Pollock, ‘Modernity’; Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 178.

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164 Pollock, ‘Modernity’; Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 111. 165 Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 78. 166 David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, London: Heinemann 2004, 354; Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 140, 143; see also Bob Cannon, ‘Towards a Theory of Counter-Modernity: Rethinking Zygmunt Bauman’s Holocaust Writings’, Critical Sociology 42 (1) 2014, 49–69. 167 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, xi. 168 Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz, 104. 169 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, xiii. 170 Ibid., 135. 171 Ibid., 138. 172 Ibid., 131. 173 Ibid., 132–3. 174 Ibid., 135. 175 Ibid., 142. 176 Ibid., 141. 177 Bauer transcript, 29. 178 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 141, 143. 179 Quoted in Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 134. 180 Ibid., 241.

Conclusion Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1989, 146. Mark Roseman, Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2019, 230, 233. 3 See Tony Kushner and Aimee Bunting, Co-presents to the Holocaust, forthcoming, and Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2019. 4 Ziva Postec, Cathérine Hébert, 2019. 5 Roseman, Lives Reclaimed, 233. 6 Ibid., 236. 7 Robert Rozett, ‘Jewish Resistance’, in Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of the Holocaust, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2004, 341. 8 Quoted in Roseman, Lives Reclaimed, 233. 9 Marrus, The Holocaust in History, 137, 146. 10 Quoted in Stuart Jeffries, ‘Claude Lanzmann on Why Holocaust Documentary Shoah Still Matters’, The Guardian, 9 January 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/ jun/09/claude-lanzmann-shoah-holocaust-documentary, accessed 31 July 2022. 1 2

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11 Isabelle Tombs, ‘“Morituri vos salutant”: Szmul Zygielbojm’s Suicide in May 1943 and the International Socialist Community in London’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 14 (2) 2000, 242–65: 257. 12 Henry Feingold, Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press 1995, 2. 13 Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, ‘Henry Feingold’, https://collections.ushmm. org/search/catalog/irn1004817, all page references to the transcript, here 26. 14 Transcript, 22. 15 Ibid., 19. 16 Ibid., 46. 17 Ibid., 47. 18 Ibid., 34. 19 Ibid., 49. 20 Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, ‘Faivel Ziegelbaum’, https://collections. ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1005024, all page references to the transcript. 21 Interview with Faivel’s daughters, Ilana Slomowitz and Aveda Ayalon, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=G2hkpHrs1X8; and his niece, Leah Zygielbojm Davidson, ‘Growing Up in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the Yiddish Theatre’, Der Bay. 11, https://derbay.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/DerBay2015.pdf, accessed 31 July 2022. 22 Transcript, 10. 23 Ibid., 11. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 8. 26 Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, ‘Jan Karski’, https://collections.ushmm.org/ search/catalog/irn1003915, all page references to the transcript, here 51. 27 Karski transcript, 51. Karski also enacts aspects of the meeting with Zygielboim in his Polish-language account for Mieczysława Wazacz’s 2001 film The Wall. Although Wazacz’s documentary was released twenty years after Karski’s interview with Lanzmann, given the unseen nature of the latter’s outtakes, its detail of the meeting was received as new material. 28 Julie Gottlieb, ‘Suicide, Society and Crisis’, https://mhs.group.shef.ac.uk/suicidesociety-crisis-julie-gottliebs-wellcome-trust-seed-funded-project/, accessed 31 July 2022.

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Filmography Among Blind Fools (Petr Bok and Martin Smok, Czech Republic 1998) André’s Lives (Brad Lichtenstein, USA 1999) Apteka Pod Orłem (Krzysztof Miklaszewski, Poland: TVP 2006) The Four Sisters (Claude Lanzmann, France 2018) Hate Radio (Milo Rau, Germany 2011) The Himmler Project (Romuald Karmakar, Germany 2000) Holocaust: The Revenge Plot (Nick Green 2018, Channel 4) The Karski Report (Claude Lanzmann, France 2010) The Kastner Trial (Uri Barbash, Israeli Television 2000) Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt with the Nazis (Gaylen Ross, USA 2009) Not Idly By: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust (Pierre Sauvage, USA 2019) Partisans of Vilna (Josh Waletzky, USA 1986) Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, USA 1993) Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4pm (Claude Lanzmann, France 2001) Spectres of the Shoah (Adam Benzine, USA 2015) A Visitor from the Living (Claude Lanzmann, France 1999) The Wall (Mieczysława Wazacz, Poland 2001) Ziva Postec: The Editor behind the Film ‘Shoah’ (Cathérine Hébert, Canada 2018)

Archives Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection – ‘Outtakes’, Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, USHMM. Roswell and Marjorie McClelland Papers, USHMM.

Index Adorno, Thedor 63 Alexandrowicz, Chaim 119 Allies 6, 8, 10, 12, 42, 53, 70, 122, 168, 180–1, 186 Altman, Tusia 19 Améry, Jean 64 Among Blind Fools (Petr Bok and Martin Smok, 1999) 208 nn. 90, 104 André’s Lives (Brad Lichtenstein 1999) 73, 207 n. 63 Apfelbaum, Fanny 47 Arendt, Hannah 24, 166–7, 176–7, 180, 182 Armenian genocide 144 Arnon, Loes 170 Arnon, Ya’akov 12–13, 15, 17, 42, 117, 153, 169–78, 180–2, 226 n. 151 Asscher, Abraham 12–13, 117, 153, 169–78, 180–1, 226 n. 154 Aubuoy, Bernard 9, 146 Auschwitz 3, 6, 18, 41, 42, 53, 60, 61, 65, 124, 189; bombing of 9, 70, 122, 130–2, 136, 138, 143–4, 160, 169 Austria 64, 77, 128, 156 Bakhtin, Mikhail 67, 75, 80 Barasz, Efraim 154, 159 Barnard, Clio 82 Barri, Shoshana 43, 58 Barthes, Roland 71–2 Bauer, Yehuda 3, 6, 12, 33, 36, 39, 42, 52–3, 81, 138, 151, 153, 154–63, 166, 168, 172, 177, 178, 179, 183, 188 Bauman, Zygmunt 12, 153, 173, 177, 181–3. See also modernity Becher, Kurt 39, 41, 43, 138, 200 n. 5 Becher, Mr 61, 81 Becker, August 101 Belarus 8, 17, 31, 83–4, 96–107, 119, 161 Belgium 9, 66, 118 Bełżec 66, 86, 111 Ben Gurion, David 43

Benzine, Adam 15 Bergen-Belsen 42, 175 Bergson, Peter 12, 120, 121, 122–30, 133, 144, 218 n. 42 Berle, Adolf 126 Bermuda Conference (1943) 145, 150, 169–70, 187, 189 Besson, Rémy 55, 204 n. 74 Bettelheim, Bruno 24 Biren, Paula 17 Bodleian Library 60 Bogdanor, Paul 44 Bomba, Abraham 92, 99, 102, 212 n. 82 Brand, Hansi 3, 11, 17, 39–58, 80, 106, 136 Brand, Joel 40, 41, 49, 52, 56, 139 Bratislava Working Group 11, 59, 72–80, 132 Broad, Pery 3, 51 Brown, Adam 158 Byrne, James MacGregor 137 Cazenave, Jennifer 13, 17, 218 n. 56 Celler, Emanuel 134 Cesarani, David 153, 156 Champetier, Caroline 9 Chapuis, Dominique 9 Chełmno 25–6, 37, 59, 101 Cinquegrani, Maurizio 211 n. 47 Cohen, David 169, 170, 172–8, 180–2, 226 n. 154 Cole, Tim 18, 43 Coulmas, Corinna 8, 105, 213 n. 96 Cowie, Elizabeth 14 Czerniaków, Adam 10, 11, 59, 158, 160, 174, 191 Dachau 109 Danek, Aurelia 86 Dawidowicz, Lucy 25, 27 Derrida, Jacques 71–2 Deutschkron, Inge 7

238

Index

Drancy 143 Droździkowska, Irena 86 Dugin, Itzak 37, 47 Dunbar, Andrea 82 Eckstein, Ze’ev 43 Eichmann, Adolf 39, 41, 44, 45, 47, 54, 56, 58, 76 Eichmann Trial 19, 21, 22, 25, 35, 36, 45, 49, 54, 56, 180 Einsatzgruppen 50–1, 52, 105 Elias, Ruth 17 Elkes, Elhanan 109, 110, 119, 212 n. 71 Epstein, Barbara 106–7 Erbelding, Rebecca 15, 129, 144, 217 n. 38 Estraikh, Gennady 100 Europa Plan 12, 41, 60, 65, 78–9 Evian Conference (1938) 169–70, 187, 188 Fallis, Kevin 186 Feingold, Henry 6, 8, 9, 13, 145, 149, 187–90 Feldman, Yael 23–4, 37 Fink, Steven 207 n. 79 Finkel, Evgeny 21 Fishman, Joel 15, 170, 171, 175 Fleischmann, Gisi 17, 61, 76–8 Fleming, Michael 10 Fogelman, Eva 207 n. 63 Forst, Siegmunt 11, 61, 62–5, 70, 80, 82 The Four Sisters (Claude Lanzmann, 2018) 3, 17, 55, 111, 115, 186 France 118, 132, 138, 143 Frank, Hans 85 Frankfurter, Felix 53 Freedland, Jonathan 200 n. 92 Fuchs, Abraham 74 Garfunkel, Leib 8, 12, 17, 33, 83–4, 108–18, 157, 187 Gawkowski, Henryk 92 Gens, Jacob 33, 34, 154, 158, 160–3, 178 Gerasimenko, Nasari 101 Geva, Sharon 46, 49, 56 Ginor, Zvia 22, 31, 36 Glasberg, Jimmy 9 Glazar, Richard 47 Glowacka, Dorota 200 n. 92 Goebbels, Josef 128 Goldstein, Lazar 117

Gottlieb, Julie 192 Great Britain 8, 42–3, 64, 79, 189–92. See also Palestine Groth, Alexander 10 Grünwald, Malchiel 39, 43, 58, 200 n. 1 Gryta, Jan 91, 96 Gutman, Yisrael 7 Habib, André 14, 211 n. 48 Halevi, Benjamin 39, 40, 43, 49 Hareven, Alouph 154 Harrison, Leland 135 Harshav, Benjamin 104 Hasian, Marouf 129, 217 n. 38 Hausner, Gideon 31, 54–5 Hecht, Ben 124, 128 Hilberg, Raul 7, 10, 12, 24–5, 31, 59, 116, 156–8, 160, 166, 179–80, 182, 185, 188, 191 Himmler, Heinrich 82 Hitler, Adolf 20, 21, 23, 124, 168, 189 Hungary 4, 6, 8, 17, 39–58, 60, 69, 79, 120, 136, 143, 160–3 Jabotinsky, Eri 129 Jabotinsky, Ze’ev 124, 129 Janicka, Barbara 47 Jarvik, Laurence 123 Jewish Councils (Judenräte) 5–6, 9, 10, 12, 59, 72, 79, 83, 89, 96, 103, 109, 117, 153 Joffe, Moshe 100, 104 Jordan, Friz 114 Just, Willy 25, 59 Kalmanowitz, Rabbi Abraham 141–2, 219 n. 85 Kaplan, Eran 127, 129 Karmarkar, Romuald 82 Karski, Jan 53, 105, 122, 158, 191, 210 n. 7 The Karski Report (Claude Lanzmann, 2010) 3, 53, 110, 169, 187 Kassow, Samuel 114, 117 Kasztner, Rezső 34, 41, 49, 53–5, 61, 79, 81, 154, 158, 180; Kasztner Train 4, 11, 39, 42, 53, 55, 162–3, 200 n. 5; Kasztner Trial 39, 53–4, 56 Kaufmann, Francine 14, 29, 47 Kempner, Vitka 17, 21, 23, 199 n. 79

Index Klemperer, Victor 91 knowledge, realization, understanding 5, 51, 52–4, 167 Komoly, Otto 41 Kook, Rabbi Abraham, Isaac 124 Kook, Rabbi Dov 124 Koso, Isidor 74–6 Kovner, Abba 3, 8, 11, 14, 17, 19–37, 39, 51, 53, 58, 65, 68, 78, 79, 107, 114, 155, 156, 157, 162, 174, 187 Kovner, Michael 23 Kraków Ghetto 85–96 Krantzler, David 144, 220 n. 101 Kretschmer, Karl 51 Krywaniuk, Helena 86 Kube, Wilhelm 105 Laabs, Gustav 26, 58, 101 Lages, Willy 181 Landau, Hermann 9, 11, 15, 61, 64, 66–72, 74, 82, 134, 142 Lapierre, Dominique, and Larry Collins 125 The Last of the Unjust (Claude Lanzmann, 2013) 3, 11, 57, 87, 111, 186. See also Murmelstein, Benjamin Laval, Pierre 138–9 Levi, Primo 33, 57, 161 Levin, Nora 125 Lichtenstein, Brad 73 Lichtman, Ada 17 Lindbergh, Charles 149 Lithuania 17, 19–37, 58, 78, 83–4, 108–18, 154–63, 182, 187 Löb, Ladislaus 53 Long, Breckinridge 17, 145, 148, 150, 151 Lubtchansky, William 9 Lustiger, Arno 187 McClelland, Marjorie 137 McClelland, Roswell 9, 12, 15, 75, 121, 137–44 McCloy, John 136, 144 McGlothlin, Erin 17 Mantello, George 220 n. 101 Marrus, Michael 6, 187 Marton, Ernst 55 Marton, Hanna 17, 55–6, 105, 163 Mashberg, Michael 130 Mauthausen 172, 177

239

Mayer, Saly 67, 126, 138 Medoff, Rafael 129 Merlin, Samuel 125, 128, 133, 134, 219 n. 88 Miklaszewski, Krzysztof 95 modernity 12, 163–9, 179, 181–3. See also Bauman, Zygmunt Morgan, Michael 167 Morgenthau, Henry 135 Morocco 64 Moyne, Walter Guinness, First Baron 139, 224 n. 78 Müller, Filip 7, 105, 154 Murmelstein, Benjamin 11, 57, 79, 87 Mushkin, Eliahu 103 Najdus-Smolar, Walentyna 97 Netherlands 169–78 Not Idly By: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust (Pierre Sauvage, 2019) 15, 123, 129 Oberhauser, Josef 63 Ofer, Dalia 36 Oshry, Rabbi Ephraim 215 nn. 141, 153 Paisikovitch, Dov 147 Palestine 22, 55, 66, 126, 154, 168, 190 Pankiewicz, Tadeusz 12, 17, 83, 84, 85–96, 107, 186, 209 n. 7 Peck, Sarah 127 Pehle, John 12, 121, 130–7, 139, 143, 148 Pető, Andrea 41 photographs 62–3, 67, 70–1, 74, 110–12, 113, 186, 190 Pictet, Jean 3, 4 Pióro, Anna 94, 119 Podchlebnik, Michael 35, 99, 101 Poland 5, 20, 37, 59, 66, 69, 83–4, 85–96, 97, 106, 134–5, 154–63, 168, 182 policemen, ghetto 3, 153, 160–1, 182, 222 n. 38 Pollin-Galay, Hannah 104 Pollock, Griselda 181, 183 Porat, Dina 19, 36 Porter, Anna 44, 201 n. 11 Postec, Ziva 5, 7, 9, 15 Prager, Brad 17 Presser, Jacob 172

240

Index

Quakers 138, 143 Raczkiewicz, Władysław 190 Rau, Milo 82 Rauff, Walter 25, 59, 101 Reams, Dorothy 17, 145, 148–50 Reams, Robert Borden 12, 17, 139, 144–50 Red Cross 3, 4, 6, 188 Rein, Leonid 101 reincarnation 2, 50, 53, 122, 192 Riegner Telegram 134–5 Roberts, Adam 9–10 Romania 128, 133–5 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 13, 53, 125, 126, 135, 151, 168 Roseman, Mark 186–7 Rotem, Simcha 7, 85 Roth, Ferdinand 78 Roth, Philip 207 n. 79 Rothkirchen, Livia 208 n. 87 Rothschild, Amanda 216 n. 12 Rozett, Robert 18, 24 Rubenstein, Richard 12, 15, 17, 153, 163–9, 188 Rumkowski, Chaim 154, 159–61, 172, 178, 222 n. 39 Rwandan genocide 82 Sanders, Paul 44, 45, 57, 202 n. 33 Sauvage, Pierre 15, 123, 125, 129, 218 n. 42 Schindler, Oscar 33, 81 Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) 18 Schubert, Heinz 50 Schwalb, Nathan 69 Servatius, Robert 49 Shanghai 30, 66 Shapiro, Avraham 115–17, 215 n. 141 Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) 1–2, 7–9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 25, 35, 37, 47–8, 58, 59, 63, 92, 96, 99, 101, 105, 122, 153, 154, 160, 185, 191. See also under individuals’ names Sikorski, Władysław 190 Slovakia 6, 8, 11, 17, 59–82, 120, 161, 187 Smolar, Alexander 97, 213 n. 84 Smolar, Hersh 6, 12, 17, 83–4, 96–107, 154 Sobibór 175 Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4pm (Claude Lanzmann, 2001) 3, 47, 97 Sonderkommando 18, 147, 154

South Africa 191 Soviet Union 37 Spain 132 Spectres of the Shoah (Adam Benzine, 2015) 15 Srebnik, Simon (Szymon Srebrnik) 47, 202 n. 47 Steinberg, Lucien 98, 118–19, 120, 159 Steiner, André 11, 61, 64, 72–80, 81, 207 n. 63 Steiner, Gertrude 158 Steinfeldt-Levy, Irena 8, 12, 17, 28, 108–18 Sternbuch, Isaac 15, 66, 141–2 Sternbuch, Recha 15, 66, 141 Stewart, James 136 Strasshof 42 Suhl, Yuri 97–8 Switzerland 9, 15, 39, 42, 51, 66–72, 79, 121, 134–5, 138, 141–4, 145 Sylman, Yaacov 59 Tamir, Shmuel 39, 43, 45, 55, 61, 81 Tenenbaum, Mordechai 198 n. 43 Terezín 4, 57, 79, 175, 176, 181 Thalmann, Rita, and Emmanuel Feinermann 125 Thomson, David 136 Treblinka 15–16, 18, 92, 96, 124, 134, 160, 181 Turkey 41–2, 49, 56, 128 Ukraine 37, 52, 105 Ungar, Shmuel 60, 79 Unger, Michal 178 USA 9, 13, 15, 60–3, 66, 72–4, 163–9, 187–90. See also Roosevelt, Franklin Delano; War Refugee Board van Amerongen-Asscher, Rosette 175, 182 Vermeulen, Pieter 62 A Visitor from the Living (Claude Lanzmann, 1999) 3 Voltaire 137 Vrba, Rudolf 7, 8, 51, 79, 136, 138, 154 Wake, Caroline 1 Walke, Anika 100 The Wall (Mieczysława Wazacz, 2001) 228 n. 27 Wallace, Max 15

Index Wannsee Conference 20 War Refugee Board 5, 12, 17, 43, 84, 120, 121–51, 183, 186, 187 Warsaw Ghetto 7, 59, 89, 158, 190, 192 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 8, 80, 84–5, 107, 119, 145, 187. See also Rotem, Simcha; Zuckerman, Yitzhak Webber, Jonathan 95 Weinraub, Bernard 123, 151 Weiss, Peter 82 Weissman, Gary 14 Weissmandl, Rabbi Michael 9, 11, 17, 18, 41, 59–82, 126, 130, 134, 136, 142, 154, 186, 187 Weitz, Yechiam 43 Welles, Sumner 134 Wetzler, Alfred 51, 138 Wike, Lori 71–2

241

Wirth, Christian 63, 111 Wise, Rabbi Stephen 124, 126–7, 151 Wisliceny, Dieter 39, 41, 76–7, 81, 207 n. 63 Wistrich, Robert 6 Wyman, David 124 Yablonka, Hanna 55, 57 Yiddish 12, 19, 27, 47, 84, 97, 103–7, 213 n. 84 Zaidel, Motke 37, 47, 200 n. 92 Zisselsberger, Markus 17 Ziva Postec: The Editor behind the Film ‘Shoah’ (Cathérine Hébert, 2018) 5, 15 Zuckerman, Yitzhak 7, 85 Zygielboim, Faivel 8, 187–92 Zygielboim, Shmuel 8, 13, 18, 187–92

242

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244

245

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