I made A visitor from the living based on an interview Maurice Rossel gave me in 1979, whilst Shoah was being filmed. For reasons of length and structure, I had decided against tackling head-on in my film the extraordinary subject of Theresienstadt, which was both central and peripheral to the course and origins of the extermination of the Jews of Europe. It is wellknown that Theresienstadt, a fortress town situated sixty kilometres north-east of Prague, was chosen by the Nazis to be the site of what Adolf Eichmann himself called a ‘model ghetto’ – a ghetto for posterity. Cleared of its Czech inhabitants, it housed, from November 1941 to April 1945, those known as the ‘Prominenten’ – people who had long been integrated into German society, who had notemigrated or who, being too old to start their lives afresh, had given up on doing so, believing themselves to be protected by their status, and whom it was difficult to subject to the same treatment as the Jews of Poland, the Baltic states and the Soviet Union.
A small number of Danish Jews, having failed to escape to Sweden, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and even France, also arrived in Theresienstadt in 1943 and 1944.
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.
