Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein was the last president of Judenrat (Jewish Council) in Theresienstadt. I filmed it for a whole week, in Rome in 1975. In my opinion, the case of Theresienstadt was crucial, both lateral and central to the genesis and development of the Final Solution. But I did not include in the construction of Shoah these long hours of interviews, yet rich in first-hand revelations. It took me a long time to realize that Benjamin Murmelstein and Theresienstadt required a film in itself.
60 kilometers northwest of Prague, Theresienstadt, a fortress city built at the end of the 18th century by Emperor Joseph II in honor of his mother, Maria Theresa of Austria, was elected by the Nazis to be the site of what Adolf Eichmann himself called a “model ghetto” - a ghetto for the watch. In March 1938, a year after the annexation of Austria (Anschluss), Germany had dismantled the Czechoslovak Republic, replaced by the rump state of Slovakia, which it made its ally, and the protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia (the Hitlerian name of the Czech Republic). The decision to create the Theresienstadt ghetto was taken in November 1941. As they had done in all the ghettos in Poland since October 1939, the Nazis established a Council of Elders there, composed of twelve members and chaired by a dean, also known as Judenältesten - literally: “the oldest of the Jews” -vocabulary of contempt and dread with tribal connotation. Thus, in Theresienstadt, during the four years of existence of the ghetto, there were three Jewish deans in succession.
The first, Jacob Edelstein, was from Prague, a Zionist, and loved youth. After two years of Nazi hell, where everything, absolutely everything, was forbidden to Jews, he welcomed the birth of Theresienstadt with blind optimism, hoping that the difficult life that awaited them would be like training for their future establishment in Palestine. The Nazis arrested him in Theresienstadt at the beginning of 1944, deported him to Auschwitz, killed him with a bullet in the neck (Genickschuss), after having murdered, in front of his eyes and in the same way, his wife and two children. The second dean was called Paul Eppstein, he was from Berlin and he too died of a bullet in the neck in Theresienstadt itself, in the Kleine Festung (Small Fortress), which served as a prison and a place of execution.
Benjamin Murmelstein, the third and last, was a rabbi in Vienna, assistant to Josef Löwenherz, who presided over the Jewish community in the Austrian capital.
Murmelstein was dramatically ugly and brilliantly intelligent, the smartest of the three and, in my opinion, the bravest. Unlike Jacob Edelstein, he could not bear the suffering of old men. Although he succeeded in maintaining the ghetto until the last days of the war, in sparing his population from the death walks ordered by Hitler, he concentrated on himself the hatred of a number of survivors. Possessing a diplomatic passport from the International Committee of the Red Cross, he could easily have fled. He refused, preferring to be arrested and imprisoned by the Czechs, who accused him of collaborating with the enemy. He remained in prison for 18 months before being acquitted of all charges. He went into exile in Rome, where he led a very rough existence, never went to Israel despite his deep desire to do so and his pure love for this land.
All Jewish elders met a tragic end and Benjamin Murmelstein was the only one who remained alive, making his testimony infinitely valuable. He does not lie, he is ironic, sardonic, hard on others and on himself. Thinking of the title of André Schwarz-Bart's masterpiece, The Last of the Righteous, he called himself “The Last of the Unjust.” It is therefore he who gave its title to the film which is the source of this book. Before our interviews in 1975, he wrote a book in Italian called Terezin, il ghetto-modello di Eichmann (Theresienstadt, Eichmann's model ghetto), published in 1961. The tone of the book and that of the interviews are very different: the book depicts the victims and their appalling suffering with fraternal compassion and true writing skills, while in our interviews Murmelstein presents his own defense instead.
When he first appears in the film, we are in 1943, when a “transport” of German Jews arriving from Hamburg arrives, the Nazis having decided to return Germany. Judenrein (purged of its Jews) and to deport to Theresienstadt those who had hitherto been allowed by their status to remain at home, even under the worst conditions. But since 1941, Theresienstadt was mostly populated by Czech and Austrian Jews. Thanks to the former, members of the technical office responsible for drawing up construction plans and outstanding designers, we have an extraordinary collection of works of art that bear witness to what the real life of the “model ghetto” was: built to house a maximum of 7,000 soldiers, Theresienstadt absorbed 50,000 Jews during peak periods. Most of these brilliant painters and designers, who got up in the middle of the night to secretly create their work that they buried deep in the ground, were murdered in the gas chambers of the extermination camps. But their names are forever in our memories. Those of the great musicians, actors, writers, directors who passed through Theresienstadt before dying further east as well. A final word: commissioned by Eichmann to organize the forced emigration of Jews from Austria to Vienna from the summer of 1938 until the outbreak of war, Benjamin Murmelstein succeeded in getting more than 120,000 out of Vienna.
