I realized A living person who passes based on an interview that Maurice Rossel gave me in 1979, while I was filming Shoah. For reasons of length and architecture, I had given up dealing head-on in my film with the extraordinary subject of Theresienstadt, which was both central and lateral in the course and genesis of the destruction of European Jews. We know that Theresienstadt, a fortress city located sixty kilometers north-east of Prague, was elected by the Nazis to be the site of what Adolf Eichmann himself called a “model ghetto”, a ghetto for the record. Empty of its Czech inhabitants, it welcomed, from November 1941 to April 1945, those called the “Prominenten”, who had long since integrated into German society, who had failed to emigrate or who, too old to start their lives again, had given up doing so, wanting to believe that they were protected by their very status (decorated veterans of the First World War, great doctors, great lawyers, senior officials and politicians). from pre-Hitler Germany, representatives of Jewish organizations, artists, intellectuals, etc.) and who found it difficult to immediately subject Jews in Poland, the Baltic countries and the Soviet Union to the “special treatment” given to Jews in Poland, the Baltic States and the Soviet Union. Also arriving in Theresienstadt in 1943 and 1944 were a small number of Jews from Denmark who had not managed to escape to Sweden, Holland, Luxembourg, Slovakia, Hungary, Hungary, Poland, and even France.
The truth is that this “model ghetto” was a place of transit, first or last stage, as you like, of a journey to death that led most of those who stayed there to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Sobibor, Belzec or Treblinka, sometimes after a detour through the ghettos of Poland, Belarus or the Baltic which were not “models”.
Very accurate statistics are available on the number of trains and the identity of the victims. The real living conditions in Theresienstadt were appalling: the majority of Jews, men and women concentrated there, were very old and languished in misery, promiscuity, and malnutrition in the overcrowding of the fortress's barracks. In Theresienstadt as elsewhere, the Nazis deceived and robbed those they were preparing to kill: this is how the Gestapo in Frankfurt offered credulous old women in this city, before their deportation to Theresienstadt, the choice between a sunny apartment and another facing north, forcing them to pay the rent of ghost housing in advance.
The Jews were not the only ones to be deceived: ghetto “for the watch” or even the “Potemkin” ghetto (legend has it that Prince Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin had artificial villages built along the road that Catherine II, Empress of Russia, had to take along the road that Catherine II, empress of Russia, had to take during a visit to Ukraine and Crimea, newly annexed territories), Theresienstadt was to be shown and was.
At the head of an ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) delegation, Maurice Rossel inspected the ghetto in June 1944, with the consent of the German authorities.
I thank Maurice Rossel for allowing me to use today the interview he gave me in 1979.
“Now in my eighties,” he wrote to me, “I don't remember very well the man I was then. I think I'm wiser or crazier, and it's the same thing. Be charitable, don't make me look too ridiculous.”
I did not try to do it.
