When I was eight years old my parents and I were living in Yugoslavia, and one of my mum’s goals in life at the time was to teach a young Helene about “the real world”. This included all manner of trips to other European countries to visit places like the catacombs and famous sewers of Paris, as well as Dachau concentration camp. Dachau was the first of the Nazi concentration camps opened in Germany and was intended to hold political prisoners, and I vividly remember that our trip there was via a bus that left from a busy Munich bus station with no number or destination displayed on its front. The camp is located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory northeast of the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km northwest of Munich, and it was interesting to me even then that the local people were fully willing to acknowledge its existence to visiting tourists, but literally dared not speak its name. Opened in 1933 by Heinrich Himmler, its purpose was enlarged to include forced labour and eventually, the imprisonment of Jews, ordinary German and Austrian criminals, as well as foreign nationals from countries that Germany occupied or invaded further down the track. I was hugely affected by the trip as a kid, especially as the day was grey and we were amongst just a handful of people there. The gravity of its history weighed heavily on my mind even at eight years old – it was my first knowledge of The Holocaust, and a very vivid one at that.
When I was eight years old my parents and I were living in Yugoslavia, and one of my mum’s goals in life at the time was to teach a young Helene about “the real world”. This included all manner of trips to other European countries to visit places like the catacombs and famous sewers of Paris, as well as Dachau concentration camp. Dachau was the first of the Nazi concentration camps opened in Germany and was intended to hold political prisoners, and I vividly remember that our trip there was via a bus that left from a busy Munich bus station with no number or destination displayed on its front. The camp is located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory northeast of the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km northwest of Munich, and it was interesting to me even then that the local people were fully willing to acknowledge its existence to visiting tourists, but literally dared not speak its name. Opened in 1933 by Heinrich Himmler, its purpose was enlarged to include forced labour and eventually, the imprisonment of Jews, ordinary German and Austrian criminals, as well as foreign nationals from countries that Germany occupied or invaded further down the track. I was hugely affected by the trip as a kid, especially as the day was grey and we were amongst just a handful of people there. The gravity of its history weighed heavily on my mind even at eight years old – it was my first knowledge of The Holocaust, and a very vivid one at that.
Which brings me to tonight’s lengthy documentary THE LAST OF THE UNJUST, which has the aforementioned atrocity as its overarching theme but has a very interesting and polarising character as its subject matter.
In 1975, renowned director Claude Lanzmann (then embarking upon his Holocaust documentary SHOAH) travelled to Rome to interview Benjamin Murmelstein, the only surviving president of the Jewish Council in Theresienstadt. This was Adolf Eichmann’s so-called “model ghetto” in which thousands died in appalling squalor, while many more were transported on to meet their eventual end within the death camps in “the East”. Shunned after the war as a collaborator, Murmelstein was imprisoned and then acquitted by the Czech authorities and lived to tell the tale.
The establishment of Theresienstadt was in itself a unique piece of propaganda crafted by Eichmann, designed to mislead the world and Jewish people regarding its real nature, which was to be the last step before the gas chamber. Murmelstein was forced to negotiate day after day from 1938 until the end of the war with Eichmann, to whose trial Murmelstein wasn't even called to testify. This is despite the fact that he was without a doubt the one who knew the Nazi executioner best.
The 1975 interviews with Murmelstein that are shown in the documentary were recorded in Rome, where he lived in self-described exile. Lanzmann at first conducted them for the aforementioned SHOAH, but were never included. Before Lanzmann shows any of that interview footage, however, he presents himself in the present day at the train station in the Czech Republic where Jews disembarked for Theresienstadt. Then he visits the well-preserved remnants of the camp itself, which makes for stark viewing. It sets the scene nicely (for want of a better word), and it’s this attention to detail that keeps your attention throughout the almost four hour long film.
The compelling documentary may well have been filmed way back in 1975 for the larger part, but assembled only in 2013 and therefore cast in a very modern light. It reveals a little-known yet fundamental aspect of the Holocaust, and sheds light on a whole new moral conundrum in what was never a black and white time in history.
Murmelstein says of his trial by the Czechs after the war, "an Elder of the Jews can be condemned. In fact, he must be condemned. But he can't be judged, because one cannot take his place…" Fascinating and disturbing stuff.