Claude Lanzmann today

BERLINALE 2013 –  CLAUDE LANZMANN, HOLOCAUST CHRONICLER, AT BERLIN --  His Documentary films are Epic Bulwarks against Historical Forgetfulness

By Alex Deleon-Pevner

Many international stars and film luminaries passed through the portals of the latest Berlin film festival in February 2013 but, very probably, the one who will be longest remembered in historical terms is Claude Lanzmann, 87 year old French chronicler of the Holocaust.  Mr. Lanzmann. Whose works have been shown here frequently over the years, was honored this year by a lifetime achievement Golden Festival Bear, and a complete retrospective of all of his works were screened during the ten days of the fest.  Among them was the landmark nine-hour long ultra holocaust documentary SHOAH, made in 1985 along with shorter works, some only finished in the past few years.

A program of Lanzmann films which I found especially interesting was a brace of interviews entitled “A visitor from the living” 1997, and “The Karski Report”, 2010, shown upstairs in Cinemaxx Kino 8, which is generally dedicated to special retrospectives and requires the mounting of many stairs to get to this very special festival corner. The first of these focuses on French speaking Swiss doctor Maurice Roussel who, as a young Red Cross volunteer, visited the Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague in 1944 and, totally taken in by the Nazi propaganda in place at the time,  turned in a favorable report regarding the conditions there. The prisoners in the camp were mostly well-to-do Jews and, during the time of the Red Cross visit, the camp had been specially prepared as a showcase to demonstrate to the world how humanely the Germans treated their detainees. The terrorized Jewish prisoners had to go along with this incredible fakery merely to gain a slight extension of their implicit death sentences.

 A show indicating that EVERYTHING WAS FINE and dandy was put on for the visitors, among  them Roussel, who tells Lanzmann in this interview that never was there the slightest indication – even a raised eyebrow or a sidelong look -- from the Jewish inmates to indicate that this was all a sham, and that they were under threat of death not to reveal anything. Even today he finds it remarkable that the Jews were so entirely complicit in their own doom! Lanzmann keeps driving hard questions at the interviewee but Rousell sticks to his guns and says basically; “This is what I saw, and therefore I had to make a favorable report on the conditions of the camp – I had no other choice”. 

Naïve young Roussel also managed, miraculously, to get into Ausschwitz and meet the head of the most notorious of all German death camps in his office – but he actually saw nothing other than a polite friendly German gentleman who was merely doing his job, so he claimed, to sincerely promote the German war effort.  This interview conducted entirely in French was almost hypnotic with its implications of witnessing but not seeing the evil of the Nazis, and their total power over their victims -- but it was merely a prelude to the shocker that came afterwards, the interview with Jan Karski, who, as a courier for the Polish government in exile in London, was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto and into a Concentration camp in 1942, and returned to give a full eyewitness report to Churchill and to President Roosevelt at the wartime White House.

HOLOCAUST DENIAL AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS  --                                                 

FDR and Jewish Judge Felix Frankfurter were both unable to deal with Karski’s incontestable eye witness testimonial.

“The Karski Report” which followed immediately turned out to be the single most compelling film experience of my entire festival week. During my own days in Poland I had read quite a bit about Karski and been fascinated by his incredible story, but had always wondered what it would be like to meet him in person –and here he was up on the screen in cinema 8 larger than life.  Jan Karski, a courier for the AK, the Underground Polish Army under German occupation, and a non-Jewish Polish observer of Nazi bestiality in Poland, was one of the unsung heroes of WW II -- unsung largely because his heroism fell on deaf ears when he emerged in England and the US to tell his story. Lanzmann conducted two days of interviews with Karski at his home in Washington DC in 1985, but only the first part was shown earlier in SHOAH. The fascinating second day, reedited in 2010, is the substance of this amazing film interview.

What is amazing, of course, is the fact that Karski witnessed the ongoing atrocities with his own eyes, but nobody outside of Poland in the so-called free world wanted to believe him, or else thought his account of German brutality was so exaggerated that it was beyond belief and must be a fabrication.

In the film we see Karski close-up, now a lean middle aged professor of political science with silver hair, pale blue eyes, and wearing a natty silver suit, seated in an armchair in his book lined study, as he reflects upon each question posed to him by Lanzmann, then answers fully in carefully considered detail. The most chilling part of the interview is the account of his meeting with FDR, president Roosevelt, for a half hour at the White House in 1943. He has been carefully coached by the Polish ambassador as to protocol and is told to be concise, unemotional, and to the point. Karski knows that the president is a cripple behind his desk, but he also sees him as a man who is totally aware of his gigantic position as a shaper of world events, one of the most powerful men in the world – and one who expresses himself only in all-encompassing broad international terms. Karski opens with a description of what he saw in Warsaw and Ausschwitz,  but the president takes little note of it, only seeing it as a small part of a much larger problem. Roosevelt goes on and on about the need to defeat the Nazis and liberate Poland, but never makes any further reference to the mass murder of the Jews that Karski has mentioned. The next day Karski is introduced to Supreme court justice Felix Frankfurter, himself Jewish and one of Roosevelt’s closest confidants. Frankfurter’s reaction to Karski’s story is that he “cannot believe it” – talk about stomach churning Holocaust denial at the highest levels imaginable – and here from a Jewish man who was in a position to actually do something about it – but chose not to – in the name of “higher considerations!

The thing that makes this straightforward interview film so gripping is the steely unshakable presence of the man Jan Karski himself – reconstructing before our eyes moments of amazing intimate confrontation with the highest powers in the world and his absolutely cold recitation of the facts –nothing but the facts, as Sergeant Friday might put it … I left that screening with my head spinning and had a brief chat with a young German student who burst into tears as she acknowledged that her own grandfather might well have been one of the concentration camp killers. Claude Lanzmann, a French survivor of the WW II underground resistance, not of a concentration camp – has done more than make documentary films – he has literally made history by devoting a lifetime to making absolutely sure that this is all recorded for posterity.   Had I only seen this one film my Berlinale 2013 would have been complete. Karski's closing words summing up the denial of his witnessing are most telling ... "Sometimes there are limitations on what the human mind is capable of imagining...