“Paula Biren, Ruth Elias, Ada Lichtman and Hanna Marton, these four women, their faces, their voices, their stories, have never left me. And in a way, you can already see their importance in the rest of my work. Paula Biren and Ruth Elias appear briefly in Shoah, even though the bias to remain focused on the core of the extermination forced me to focus on the few survivors of the Sonderkommandos, who were exclusively male.
Ada Lichtman and her husband are quoted by Yehuda Lerner in Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. As for Hanna Marton, she was very present in my mind during my preparation work on The Last of the Unjust, to the point that I had thought of integrating it into it, but the detour by the Kasztner train would have taken us away from Benjamin Murmelstein's so dense subject. The more I thought about these four women, the more pressing the need to bring back these feminine faces of the Holocaust seemed to me. The power of their presence on the screen, their beauty, their voices that are each different, each different, alive at times, dead for others, full of ghosts and terror and vibrant with such a profound intelligence, illuminate as never before the destiny of women engulfed in the Nazi mechanism of annihilation of the Jewish people.
Each of them approaches, with a unique point of view, little-known chapters of extermination.
The wonderful and so moving Ruth Elias, whose speech is so radically accurate and sharp, so beautiful when she plays the accordion, reveals one of the most appalling stories ever, from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz.
Paula Biren, a brilliant intelligence with extreme charm, appointed a member of the Jewish female ghetto police by Rumkowski, the “King Khail”, dean of the Lodz Ghetto, allows us to approach the terrible and so singular history of this ghetto. The first to be established and the last to be liquidated, the Lodz ghetto was held by an iron fist by Rumkowski, convinced that by transforming the ghetto population into a slave labor force in the service of the Reich, he could save them.
Ada Lichtman, a witness in Krakow to the atrocious murder and without the remains of her entire family in the first week of the war, tells the story of the daily life of a slave at the Sobibor extermination camp, responsible, among other things, for refurbishing the dolls of the exterminated children so that the Nazi officers could offer them to their own children.
Hanna Marton, plagued by an inescapable remorse, recounts the odyssey of the “Kasztner Train”, Noah's Ark, which, the result of an agreement concluded with Eichmann, allowed 1600 Hungarian Jews to embark for Bergen-Belsen and Switzerland while at the same time several hundred thousand of their compatriots were savagely gassed en masse in Auschwitz. ”
Claude Lanzmann
