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THE LAST OF THE UNJUST

Who in the world today

knows the name of Bohusovice

and its station?

On the heavily trafficked line

from Prague to Dresden and on to Berlin.

We cannot...

We cannot control the traffic.

However...

between November 1941

and the spring of 1945,

140,000 Jews

disembarked onto these very platforms.

Or, rather, were disembarked.

To be led,

in the worst possible conditions, three kilometers from here

to Theresienstadt, still known in Czech as Terezin,

the town that Hitler had just given as a gift to the Jews.

The event was reported in all the Nazi newspapers...

"The Führer gives the gift of a town to the Jews."

What a gift!

Reading of extracts from Benjamin Murmelstein's book,

"Terezin, il ghetto modello di Eichmann".

In Germany,

rumors say a town has been given to the Jews,

a thermal spa with hotels and pensions.

This idyllic spot would welcome

all those who, because of their age

or because they were war invalids, were unsuited for work.

Jewish organizations had been authorized to draw up contracts

that awarded accommodation in the spa at Terezin for life

if the signatories transferred all their property

to Eichmann's fund.

The German Jews had been raised

with a reverential respect for every form of authority

and so none of them imagined calling the Führer's gift into question.

The wealthy willingly yielded to the request

to hand over all their property

because they thus procured the means to take care of their fellow Jews

impoverished by 10 years of Nazi rule.

In Vienna, the elderly, the sick, the blind and the insane

kicked into the cattle wagons

still bore the mark of hobnailed boots on them when they arrived.

Those from Hamburg, however,

were given an opportunity to admire the generous way

in which the enemies of the Reich were treated:

2nd class carriages, padded seats for everyone,

suitcases filled with food and medicine

to make the stay at the Terezin spa more pleasant.

When the train pulled into the station at Bohusovice,

the journey was over and the illusions too.

The welcome committee was made up of SS militiamen,

anxious young Jews and a few Czech gendarmes...

Flowers were missing.

From the carriage windows,

hoary heads peered out looking for a porter.

Their expressions soon shift from curiosity to doubt

and then to terror.

To screamed orders,

the elderly try to climb down from the train in their best clothes

to make a good impression in the boarding houses

where they have booked rooms

with views of the lake from the panoramic terrace.

No one holds out a hand to the newcomers.

Some of them fall, bowler hats roll over the ground,

shoving, slapping, beating, screams, women's sobs,

a tangle of bodies, crutches and suitcases.

An apocalyptic vision.

It took a few hours to master the chaos.

The elderly who were still standing

took the road to Terezin in single file.

The others followed, thrown onto trucks like logs.

Only then did the Jewish porters,

supervised by the SS, step in to load suitcases

that were officially waiting to be searched

but that, in fact, were simply confiscated.

In Berlin, everything proceeded briskly

as Jews vied to sign life annuity contracts.

The railway company gave full priority

to the convoys organized by Eichmann.

Within a few weeks,

40,000 old people had reached the ghetto.

In seeking a solution,

the administrators discovered the huge attics

beneath the red roofs of the barracks.

Once they were settled on a brick floor,

the elderly no longer got up again.

To find a tap, a sink or a toilet,

they had to go down and up an endless flight of stairs,

an impossible undertaking.

In the burning heat of high summer,

infested with lice

and stifled by the suffocating stench,

one could find lying in the dust and their own excrement

university professors, cripples,

decorated war veterans, top industrialists and many others

who had brought with them documents

proving they had founded schools,

funded hospitals,

created scholarships and occupied honorable functions

in a society

that was still willing to undergo the Jewish invasion.

The lucky few

who had found a place in one of the evacuated houses

tried to explore the town, went out and sometimes never returned.

Dazed and confused,

the elderly roamed the streets,

barely recognizing the house where they had slept.

An orientation service was created especially

to pick up these wandering Jews

and verify their identity.

Berlin is aware of the seriousness of the situation:

there is not enough room in the ghetto for all these people.

Heading east from Theresienstadt, they record

2,000 deportees in June,

2,000 in July and 3,000 in August,

thus freeing a few pallets.

There are 155 deaths in May

and 2,327 in August.

Perfect German coordination has led to the completion in time

of the construction of four crematorium ovens

in a valley outside the town.

For the dead, a hearse is not enough

because 30 corpses at a time are carried on a large trailer.

Bedrich Lederer, from Prague. He survived.

Ferdinand Bloch murdered in Theresienstadt.

The funeral ceremony,

always collective for 30 to 40 corpses,

takes place four times a day

in a hut near the gate.

Bedrich Fritta, died in Auschwitz in October 1944.

The coffins are not sealed

because they are made so that the lid and sides can be used again

for another dead body

while the base goes into the oven with the corpse

and helps fuel the fire.

The organization of death makes progress,

becoming more and more sophisticated.

For the living, the worst is about to happen.

Everywhere, hearses are requisitioned from Jewish communities in Bohemia

where there is no one left to take to the cemetery.

Otto Ungar, died in 1945 from the after-effects of deportation.

In front of the hearse, two curved figures pretend to pull

and, around it, 10, 15 and even 20 people,

men and women, could either be pushing the hearse

or clinging to it to avoid falling.

Yet it advances.

In these hearses,

they carry bread to be handed out,

coal for heating,

dirty linen for the laundries

and inert little old people being taken for delousing.

Built for the dead, these hearses serve the living

but are we still living?

A certain Mr. Korbhof tells me,

"We are on a ghost ship.

"We are all dead even if we don't know it yet."

On one of the hearses, a sign reads, "Kitchen for Children".

The unduly slow pace of the hearses prevails in the town.

Here, death does not strike its victims in a flash

but rather in slow motion like a decrepit and toothless beast.

It does not hurt them: it claws them and leaves them to rot.

The hearse is used by the living.

It's the world upside down.

This is Rome.

Yes, it's Rome.

Beautiful city, isn't it?

I don't think Rome needs my opinion to be beautiful.

Then again, I'm neither an artist nor an art expert...

Are you happy in Rome?

My hesitation is a partial answer.

But to answer you all the same, I'll say,

to the extent that a Jew in exile can be happy, yes.

- Yes? - Yes.

But it's so strange, so bizarre, to...

to return to this past here in Rome.

Isn't it?

Actually, here in Rome,

the past we're talking about

had repercussions for the whole of Europe.

As with a forest, you see,

when it's destroyed.

Its destruction has climatic repercussions

on a whole region. Even far from where it stood.

Similarly, the absence of Judaism from the East,

European Judaism, one could say,

has climatic repercussions on the whole world.

Be it Rome or any other city.

We can talk about it in Rome.

Judaism is missing. It is lacking from the world that was destroyed.

Here in Rome too.

Yes, but what do you feel

when you talk about this past?

Today?

Yes... I mean...

returning to the past is never that pleasant.

Not because I have personal reasons not to return to the past,

but fundamentally.

Fundamentally. Look. Allow me to refer to a myth...

You know that mythology is my field

as a discipline.

It's the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.

She is in the realm of the dead and her husband manages to free her.

Shortly before she leaves the realm of the dead,

she looks back

and she is obliged to stay.

Sometimes, looking back is not a good thing.

Then again...

Do you think it's dangerous?

It could be dangerous.

Then again, as you know, we've talked at length.

You have persuaded me

that our conversation is important

and that is the reason why

I have accepted. On the other hand,

we shall perhaps return to this...

In my public activity in the past,

my activity at the time,

I never let danger stop me from doing what I had to.

I consider the conversation that we are having today

as a belated epilogue to my activity of the period.

And that is why I'm ignoring the danger

to place myself at your disposal.

Yes, but...

30 years have gone by...

You remained silent for 30 years.

I wasn't completely silent.

Not completely but...

Firstly, other people talked so much

that I preferred to let them talk.

Other people?

As for me,

I published a book on Theresienstadt in 1961.

Eichmann ghetto modello?

Terezin, il ghetto modello di Eichmann,

and... a few years later...

I had the chance to publish in the press

an account of my activities

as Elder of the Jews in Theresienstadt.

One cannot say that I remained silent.

But this is your first time in front of a camera?

Not my first time ever in front of a film camera, no.

The first time, I was filmed in '44...

In Theresienstadt?

In Theresienstadt, during the work on the town's embellishment as...

- Embellishment? - ...the Elder's representative.

I didn't personally decide on the embellishment of the town.

But during the embellishment work,

they shot a film, "Theresienstadt".

At the meeting of the Jewish Council.

Eppstein gave a speech.

I was sitting next to him, listening attentively.

Benjamin Murmelstein, sitting to the left of Elder Eppstein

who gives a speech to the Jewish Council

on the embellishment of Theresienstadt,

Stadtverschönerung.

Eppstein doesn't know he will be executed a few weeks later.

I saw that film.

And I was very pleased

that the scene I appeared in

had been cut.

It's simple. At first, I didn't understand why.

I was with Eppstein in the scene.

In the meantime, Eppstein had been executed.

And a dead Elder of the Jews cannot be used for propaganda,

can he?

That is why they cut the film and removed

that scene.

A city of barracks is the work center.

Mutually beneficial work is performed by teams of 100.

Groups are trained according to skills and then retrained if needed.

Those willing to work can immediately fit into the labor force.

When the work day is over and evening begins,

the laborers leave the factories and return to the town.

Use of free time is left to the individual.

Often, workers flock to the soccer game,

Theresienstadt's major sports event.

To accommodate the spectators, the matches are held

in the courtyard of the Dresdener Barrack.

The @ teams have only 7 men each due to limited space.

Nonetheless, enthusiastic fans watch a spirited game from beginning to end.

A municipal bath serves the population.

Evening lectures on the sciences and arts are regularly attended.

I had a very hard time finding you

and I'm glad I have.

Many people told me, "Murmelstein is dead"

or "Murmelstein must be very, very old"...

He is!

- No. - He is.

I'll tell you something.

Those who told you that were right.

There's an old proverb from the Talmud that says,

"A poor man is just like a dead man."

If that's what you understood, you weren't wrong.

But that's not exactly how it is because...

You're the last of the Elders of the Jews.

No, I'm the only one still alive.

The last one, say. However you mean that,

whether you mean it qualitatively or chronologically,

doesn't really matter.

Yes, but you're the last. There are no others.

- No. - No others anywhere. Is that right?

No, not as far as I know. Not as far as I know.

I'm the last.

It's rather strange to be the last.

When I arrived for my interrogation

for the first time

in Pankratz Prison in Prague in 1945,

the question asked was,

"How come you're alive?"

"How come you're alive?"

But since I'm not the type to panic easily and be submissive,

I replied, "And you, how come you're alive?"

From my reaction, he saw that he couldn't unnerve me

and he said,

"Yes, all the Jewish Elders have been killed, etc."

And, with those words, a huge debate was launched.

I made a specific demand...

I told him,

"I won't answer you until you bring me my luggage."

So they fetched my things,

because I remained silent otherwise.

And then I took from my bag

an International Red Cross passport.

Not a refugee's passport, but a diplomat's passport.

The passport of a member from the delegation

of the International Red Cross in Czechoslovakia,

that acted as a pass for the police, military roadblocks, etc.

So I said, "I wanted to show you this

"so that you can see that since May 5, 1945,

"for six weeks now, I've stayed here even though I could have left.

"I stayed because I wanted to talk to you.

"And I'm talking now as a prisoner, of course,

"but you could say that I'm a voluntary prisoner."

- A voluntary prisoner? - Yes, exactly.

Since I could have left at any time.

But you didn't.

"I didn't leave. So now we can talk, can't we?"

I'm going to tell you something.

I didn't tell him. I wasn't as clever as he was...

Perhaps it's because I didn't think of it back then.

Do you know the story of the Thousand and One Nights?

There's a princess and a sultan.

The sultan kills all women.

One of them survives because she has to tell a tale.

And she takes so long

to tell her tale that she is saved in the end.

I survived because I had a tale to tell.

I had to tell the tale of the Jews' paradise, Theresienstadt.

They imagined that I would tell them

about a ghetto where the Jews live as in paradise,

where they are happy.

They kept me to tell this tale.

And that was the case until May 5, 1945,

when the International Red Cross was in Theresienstadt.

They perhaps made a slight blunder.

To stay in the realm of stories, you know the tale of Red Riding Hood.

The wolf that puts on the grandmother's cape

and gets into bed disguised as the grandmother?

When the hood falls by accident, at that specific moment,

the animal appears and we see that it isn't the grandmother.

That's more or less what happened on May 5.

And so the ghetto was saved.

And so was I. They didn't take me. That's the mystery of survival.

I couldn't have told him that. He wouldn't have understood.

You alone can testify about the Elder of the Jews.

No, no, that's a different category.

One cannot say that. Let's say...

a doctor can talk about doctors. They form a professional body.

An engineer can talk about engineers.

Elder of the Jews is a category

that changed with the circumstances.

- That's true but... - Always changed.

But the problems...

The problems? The problems weren't... aren't always... not always...

They were different in Theresienstadt, different in the East...

But, deep down, it was the same thing, you see.

Deep down, the Elder of the Jews

was always between the hammer and the anvil,

between the Jews and the Germans.

And the person in that position

can deaden a lot of blows.

Thus, the blow from above does not strike the anvil.

But he takes all the blows. Not one could be avoided.

In the ancient East, there was a custom

according to which a slave was named king.

He could govern for a day. After that, he was executed.

And, during that day, he was mocked, insulted and then executed.

This myth was passed on.

It went from the Orient to Rome.

The Romans then carried it to the Rhine.

There, they have their Prince of Carnival.

Rumkowski (the Lodz Jewish Elder) had no idea of all that

and believed that the Elder was a tragi-comic character.

They say he had himself called Krol Chaïm,

- King Chaïm. - King Chaïm?

King Chaïm, Krol Chaïm, it's Polish.

Yes, he made a fool of himself. He knew that the Jewish Elder

was a comic character, a caricature... He knew that.

In the mind of the Nazis, it was a caricature.

A mockery.

Yes, a caricature, a character that is created

in order to insult him

and then kill him when he is no longer of any use.

You see?

The system repeats itself. It was the same at the Crucifixion.

When Jesus is insulted by the soldiers.

The legion that was in Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion

was previously garrisoned in a place

where such practices were current. We know that.

You see?

Rumkowski had clearly understood that the Elder of the Jews

was in fact a tragi-comic character.

Hausner (Eichmann's prosecutor) could have avoided talking nonsense.

In his book,

Justice in Jerusalem,

he writes about two Jewish Elders

who were the "tools or marionettes" of the Germans.

One of them was Rumkowski

and he talks about the fact

that this marionette voluntarily boarded the train

to accompany the last Jew to Auschwitz.

I do not see any resemblance there with a marionette.

Where I'm concerned, he doesn't explain

why I was a marionette.

He calls me a marionette and that's that.

Everyone knows, he claims.

He sees Rumkowski's departure for Auschwitz as evidence.

Things in which he was a mere instrument.

In my case, he considers it obvious that I was a tool.

I'll tell you something fundamental about the Jewish Elder.

The Elder was in the position of a marionette,

a comic marionette.

But that marionette had to act in such a way

that his comic nature would alter the course of things.

No one could nor should understand that.

Otherwise, we'd have been slaughtered. He had to act in such a way

that, as a marionette, he would change things.

Usually, marionettes are worked by strings.

That marionette had to pull its own strings.

That was the difficulty of the Elder's task.

Others don't understand a thing.

That marionette had to pull its own strings.

The others had to dance around it.

The Heuriger, the Viennese vineyards

Dr. Murmelstein, when did you begin

to work for the Jewish Community of Vienna?

I joined the administrative department

of the Jewish Community in June 1938.

When it was reopened.

After the Anschluss?

After the Anschluss.

It was the outcome of a process that had begun years before.

In 1934, to be precise.

I was still the rabbi

of the 20th district.

It was the second largest Jewish district in Vienna.

At a certain point...

there was a ceremony for fighters fallen on the front

in the synagogue where I officiated.

I spoke about the 12,000 unknown soldiers.

And I said, "Each people has its unknown soldier.

"We Jews have 12,000 of them.

"They are the 12,000 who died in battle

"and that Goebbels has had removed from the war memorials."

After the Anschluss, the Community was banned

and its leading representatives were arrested.

Subsequently, when the Jewish Community reopened,

it was obvious that we needed

to put out two appeals.

One appeal to young people

and a second, basic appeal

also directed towards foreign nations

and designed to represent the interests of the Community.

In short, we had to preserve our dignity

while saying at the same time, "We have to emigrate."

After they thought of me, at the time,

to handle the matters of youth,

I was asked

to draw up the appeal to young people. Which I did.

The basic appeal, the main appeal,

they tried and tried but nothing came of it.

In the end, I was given

the task of composing that appeal.

I wrote it and not only was it passed by the censors

but it also met with a certain approval

from the Jewish point of view.

And this led to the first contacts

of an administrative nature with the Jewish Community.

Namely, they gave me the task

of writing the reports for the authorities.

The reports for the authorities had to be...

Which authorities?

The Nazi authorities.

The way I saw it, these reports shouldn't be servile.

They had to show the Jewish point of view

but presented in such a way as to attain something.

And so, one fine day,

I was ordered to deliver a report that had to be written quickly

to a certain Mr. Eichmann.

He received me in a stairwell.

At that time, he didn't have an office.

He was an Untersturmführer, in other words a lieutenant,

and his whole office consisted of a huge briefcase.

He received me in a stairwell and...

we discussed the report, standing there on the stairs.

That was the first time that I saw Eichmann, in '38.

After that, I had to spend 7 years with him...

- When was this? - The summer of 1938...

Before the war?

Well before the war, yes.

It was well before the war. Summer '38. The war began in '39.

Summer '38?

Summer '38. Yes.

After that, I was in contact with him for a full seven years.

Seitenstettengasse. On the left side of the street,

the buildings of the Viennese Jewish Community,

still standing in spite of the war.

He soon guessed

that I could be useful.

In particular, he wanted to study emigration.

In Vienna, nobody knew anything about emigration.

We had a few specialists,

specialists in emigration, people from travel agencies

or shipping companies,

who had lost their jobs

and whom the Jewish Community had hired for its emigration service.

Eichmann wanted to study Jewish emigration?

No, in general. Emigration and Jewish emigration.

At that time, he needed someone...

I'm sorry, Dr. Murmelstein, the Office for Jewish Emigration...

Was only established later. Much later.

He needed someone to study the problems for him,

prepare the documents, read the necessary books

and come up with a resume. You understand?

At the time, he did not say what I'm telling you now,

that he wanted to learn about it, but this is how it went...

A report would arrive. Obersturmführer

or Untersturmführer Eichmann would demand a report on this or that.

Within two hours.

So I would have to find the books,

sum them up, dictate and deliver the report.

It was a crash course.

I taught him all about emigration.

Yes, all right...

In Vienna, he claimed to be an emigration expert.

I taught him something that I hardly knew myself.

Did you prepare the reports personally?

I wrote them and learned at the same time.

When a topic was proposed, I had to gather the literature...

For instance? Can you give an example?

No, I forget now.

But anything on Jewish emigration, on the history of it,

on... on how things unfolded

concerning emigration to America, the statistics, etc...

I had to sum up encyclopedias and books for him,

after learning all about it myself.

Did you take the task seriously or not too seriously?

- He was serious about it. - But you?

For me, it was serious. I had to do it. It was very serious.

It's true, it was absurd, but it was work.

And although I needed 3 hours, the job had to be done in one.

Because of that, it was very serious.

No other possibility?

No, it all depended on when he had to deliver it

or answer the questions.

If he had to answer a question within an hour,

he needed the report in time, you see?

If my work were to take 3 hours, that was a disaster.

Couldn't you have said 3 hours weren't enough?

It was said

but it led to threats, screams and so on...

He had traveled to Jerusalem

claiming to be an emigration expert. (The English expelled him)

Of course he was an expert. He had learned from me.

- Was he really an expert or... - No!

No. You see, I think...

he knew things superficially.

Superficially.

Only superficially,

just as it was said that Eichmann understood Hebrew.

You understand? Among the many absurd...

No. Among the many absurd claims,

a book asserts that I supposedly taught him Hebrew.

In any case, I never taught him Hebrew.

I know that he demanded a translation once

and I saw that he didn't know which page to take the text from.

He had no idea.

He had acquired a superficial culture concerning Jewish emigration.

Relations with Eichmann weren't simple.

In my own way, I tried to bring

a relaxed air in the sense

that I spoke my mind with him.

Once, for instance, in Berlin,

all three of us were summoned together,

Edelstein, Eppstein and myself,

to be given instructions.

Edelstein for...

For Prague.

Eppstein for Berlin and me for Vienna.

When?

That was sometime in 1940.

After he finished, he said to me, "Stay, I need to talk to you."

It was as if the devil had invited me. I didn't like it.

People would talk... "Why is Murmelstein with Eichmann?"

"What did Eichmann say?" "Why did he need to talk to him?"

In such cases, people always...

So I simply said to him,

"Forgive me, Sturmbannführer,

"I have already booked my plane ticket."

I thought Eppstein and Edelstein, standing stiff, were going to faint.

But he calmly replied,

"In that case, Saturday perhaps. I'll be in Vienna."

"I'll send for you."

It was that simple. That was how...

You were totally free.

I always strived for total freedom...

I always tried to have that.

- That was how, for example... - Were you afraid?

Afraid... You know, if you show that you're afraid,

all is lost.

- But were you afraid? - Yes.

- Yes? - Yes.

Yes. I was... I was... Afraid... My God...

Afraid. One could not be anything but afraid

because I saw Eichmann, on November 10,

burst into my office with a revolver in his hand...

That was... November 10, 1938?

November 10, 1938. Kristallnacht.

This is a very important event

because the verdict in Eichmann's trial

stressed that there was no proof

that he took part in Kristallnacht.

I don't know how they reached that conclusion.

Because I was woken at 3 a.m.

on the night of December 9 to 10...

November.

November, excuse me, November.

I was woken

by the janitor of the Tempelgasse synagogue

where I officiated at the time.

Vienna's largest synagogue.

He told me that he had visitors. He couldn't say more.

I immediately got dressed and went to Seitenstettengasse,

to the Jewish Community offices.

I was even arrested on the street

and led to the temple on Seitenstettengasse

where I saw a gang

that was systematically destroying everything.

They shattered the holy objects with hammers and axes.

And the one overseeing it all was Herr Eichmann.

- Eichmann was there? - He was, overseeing everything.

And then...

Were they soldiers?

They were... They were a special SS unit.

It's a strange coincidence you should ask that question

because, when I arrived there, I found people

in field gray uniforms

and I told myself, "All right, the army is here."

Back then, we mistakenly thought the army embodied order.

But this was the SS. The so-called SS law enforcement unit.

They were in field grey, not in black.

It was the first time that the SS weren't in black.

Eichmann was there with a revolver?

No, he was there with a crowbar.

He was destroying religious items in the temple.

- Eichmann himself? - Eichmann himself.

The members of the congregation of the Seitenstettengasse synagogue

during the attack carried out before their eyes by Eichmann.

A story without words.

Cigarettes stuck in their mouths, the killers in black uniforms

parade near their Mercedes Benz's.

March 18, 1938.

Six days after the Anschluss.

First Nazi raid on the Vienna Jewish Community.

Murmelstein is in the middle, standing,

in this photo taken by the Nazis.

All of them, except for Murmelstein,

will be arrested a few days later.

March 18, 1938.

Josef Löwenherz, head of the Jewish Community of Vienna,

interrogated by Eichmann, sitting, and Hagen

before being arrested.

The Jews of Vienna, forced by the Nazis

to clean the streets barehanded.

42 synagogues were burned and destroyed

during Kristallnacht.

Some were razed to the ground.

Only one of them,

located inside the buildings on Seitenstettengasse,

was not left a ruin.

It has been completely restored.

It is the only place of Jewish worship in Vienna today.

Cantor Shmuel Barzilai was singing the Kol Nidre,

the first prayer of Yom Kippur

that relieves human beings of their commitments towards God,

thus allowing them to make a fresh start,

as if purified for the new year.

In memory of the 65,000 Austrian Jews

murdered between 1938 and 1945

by the National Socialists and all their supporters.

"This is why I weep

"and my eyes overflow with tears.

"No one is near to comfort me, no one to restore my spirit.

"My children are destitute

"because the enemy has prevailed."

Jeremy's Lamentations, 1:16.

The Kaddish, the prayer for the dead,

for the martyrs of World War Two and the fighters of World War One.

Pathway of Remembrance

The Jewish prayer house in the Leopoldstadt district.

This is where the Leopoldstadt temple stood,

built in 1858 in the Moorish style

from plans by the architect Leopold Förster.

On November 10, 1938,

during Kristallnacht,

it was destroyed and razed to the ground

by the National Socialist barbarians.

Pathway of Remembrance

Encountered by chance,

6 non-Jewish Viennese

were following the Pathway of Remembrance that day.

"In memory of our 40,000 Jewish fellow citizens

"who, between October 1941

"and March 1943,

"were gathered in this part of the school

"and from here deported to the death camps.

"May we never forget."

"The Pathway of Remembrance

"in memory of the mass deportation of Austrian Jews

"70 years ago."

And, after a while, I was taken away

and transferred to the apartment of Emil Engel.

At the time, I was only number 3 in the Jewish Community.

Emil Engel was number 2.

Löwenherz was away in Paris.

- Dr. Joseph Löwenherz? - He was in Paris.

Yes, the head. He was in Paris.

I was taken to Engel's place, to his apartment,

and the two of us had to stay there under guard

for one or two hours.

Afterwards...

each one of us had to go to our own office.

As soon as I sat down at my desk,

Eichmann burst in like a madman,

a revolver in his hand. I thought he would shoot.

"Emigration must not stop! It has to continue!"

So I thought to myself...

I didn't understand...

One felt like crying when it was laughable.

This was how he wanted to encourage emigration.

Where were you?

I was at my desk and he threw open the door before me,

aimed his revolver at me. "Emigration has to continue!"

Promoting emigration in this manner seemed unusual to me.

But, afterwards, he calmed down

and...

a few days later, after Löwenherz had returned,

he made up a story

saying that he had to come

to the Jewish Community on November 10

or the whole place would have been destroyed.

He went there to protect the building and the offices.

A protector.

The Community's protector. That was the role he played.

You know...

when you know that and then read, in the court's ruling,

that Eichmann's involvement in the events of November 10

hasn't been proved,

that strikes you as odd.

Because... Let me tell you something.

Regarding Eichmann's trial. Because...

it didn't take a genius to convict Eichmann.

Nor to execute Eichmann.

It could have been done without a trial.

But since there was a trial,

it had to be done correctly, by the book.

Yet they omitted

such important things as November 10...

If you'll allow me to digress, I'd like to tell you

that concerning November 10,

since we're talking about it,

I don't at all agree with the usual version of the facts.

November 10

has no link with Grynszpan's attack on the Nazi diplomat Von Rath in Paris.

No!

November 10 was the 20th anniversary

of the proclamation of the Weimar Republic.

On November 10, 1918,

Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the Weimar Republic,

also known as the Jews' Republic.

There are declarations from both Hitler and Rosenberg,

stating that on November 10, 1918,

the Jews betrayed Germany and would pay for it.

Yes, but why didn't you attend Eichmann's trial in Israel?

I considered it my duty

to give them my address. I did that.

The intermediary who passed on my address told me

that they had my address and my phone number.

After that, I also provided them with my book.

And then...

The book on Eichmann and Theresienstadt?

On Theresienstadt and Eichmann.

And then I had a letter.

I'll give you a photocopy of that letter,

which says, "Thank you for the book that you sent us.

"We have been able to use it

"insomuch as it confirmed statements by trustworthy witnesses."

I told myself that I couldn't help them.

For them, I wasn't trustworthy.

You see, I bear no grudges and I did my duty.

But nevertheless...

The fact is that the image of Eichmann,

during the trial, was totally distorted.

For example, Mrs. Arendt's theory

about Eichmann's banality was laughable!

Him... Banal?

Eichmann, banal...

For example, the corrupt Eichmann was never...

never once shown.

For example, the so-called Colombian operation...

Eichmann was focused on that and came one day

to tell Löwenherz,

"We must organize group emigration. Turn away individuals!

"We must promote group emigration. We'll finish sooner."

- As if... - Group emigration.

Group emigration. And...

The gas chambers were for groups too...

He wanted group emigration.

One day, he said, "I'll show you how to do group emigration."

"This is Mr. Schlie (Heinrich Schlie), from Hamburg.

"He will provide you with 300 visas for Colombia

"but you must be ready to leave in 3 days."

This Colombian matter was very interesting for me

because I had just joined the emigration service.

We had to get people ready within 3 days.

It was terrible. I got to work, without a break,

and I spent virtually 3 days at my desk.

- And we... - When was this?

In 1938.

Autumn '38.

I got to work, I did all I could, and people got ready.

- In 3 days? - In 3 days.

They sold up, abandoned their apartments...

We had passports issued. Everything!

- In 3 days? - In 3 days. Everything.

Completely? Even apartments?

Everything. They gave them away. They wanted to leave.

- They wanted to leave? - They wanted to leave.

After all that...

we gave the passports to Mr. Schlie

and paid what he asked

because bribes had to be paid to obtain the visas.

You understand?

And then, this Mr. Schlie brought us the passports,

pocketed the money,

and told us,

"But the people cannot leave with these visas.

"They're not valid for Colombia."

It was blatant fraud.

He took the money, he wanted to plan group emigration...

They weren't genuine?

The visas? They were visas but not the right ones.

Invalid. The wrong visas.

- Eichmann knew that? - Obviously!

You understand?

Following that... Mr. Schlie set up shop in Rome

as the head of the Hanseatic Travel Bureau

where he worked the following racket.

People in Vienna had the problem of the concentration camp.

People held in a concentration camp could leave it by proving

that they had an opportunity to emigrate.

And many of them signed up

for an illegal trip to Palestine.

But then it turned out that an illegal trip to Palestine

could only be organized by the Hanseatic Travel Bureau.

And, of course, the Hanseatic Travel Bureau

had nothing at all to do with illegal trips to Palestine.

They were simply swindled by Schlie,

who was nothing other than Eichmann's accomplice.

People had to pay him so much they had nothing left for the trip.

Every man who...

People gave everything?

They gave everything to save relatives from the concentration camp.

Then we had to give them money so they could emigrate.

And if someone protested,

Eichmann had him arrested and handed over to the Gestapo.

And Göring said,

"They cannot leave with money.

"They have to leave their money here."

And then it came to pass

that the Jews had to produce a certificate

proving they had paid their taxes.

For the Jews, the taxes were set at a very high rate

that they couldn't afford to pay.

People bled themselves dry.

They couldn't emigrate because they couldn't pay the taxes.

Moreover...

they had to provide all kinds of certificates.

Notably, that they had paid the dog tax.

Just as an example...

If a Jew was unlucky enough to own a dog...

He had to prove he had paid the gas bill, the electricity bill, the phone bill...

He had to wait in line at every office.

And everywhere Jews had to give up their places to Aryans.

If a Jew was waiting and an Aryan arrived,

the Jew had to move further back.

The situation was impossible.

And so Löwenherz...

spoke to Eichmann during the first few days.

He explained the problems to him.

But the answer to such questions was always

that the Party program said, "Jew, perish", not "Jew, travel!"

Did Eichmann...

No! But that was the Party program.

The answer was, "Jew, perish", not "Jew, travel!"

Eichmann set up what was known as the emigration fund.

In other words,

a Jew who wanted to get a passport

had to provide a list of his financial assets

and was obliged to pay an emigration tax.

He paid it to the emigration fund

that was administered by Eichmann

or, more precisely, by his right-hand man,

Dr. Jacowicz.

This was a very important matter as money is a factor of power.

In this way, Eichmann was independent

of the Economics and Administrative Office of the SS.

While all the camps were Pohl's domain,

Eichmann remained independent, with his own source of income.

But this led to excesses. For instance,

if only a few Jews came to the Central Office one day,

Eichmann would call up and start yelling

that Jews didn't want to emigrate, no passports were being issued...

It was a two-fold problem. Firstly because

if people didn't request passports, they didn't emigrate.

But, above all, he didn't receive any money.

In actual fact,

he contributed very little to emigration from the fund.

Once, he promised...

he promised Löwenherz

that he would contribute to an illegal trip to Palestine.

Then it turned out that the money had been invested

in an "Aryanized" department store.

There was no way to get it back.

But...

this business with the emigration fund and the money

runs through the whole story like a red thread.

I am convinced

that Theresienstadt, in part...

There were several reasons to keep Theresienstadt,

or to eradicate Theresienstadt,

but one of the reasons

for keeping Theresienstadt was the following:

as long as Theresienstadt existed,

Eichmann had a reason to have his own funds, to maintain the ghetto.

His own funds, his own management.

But you, Dr. Murmelstein,

didn't you ever consider emigrating?

Well, you see, the situation was the following:

I could have emigrated because

I had two ways of avoiding the emigration quotas to America.

As a university professor

and as a rabbi.

I could thus leave for America outside of the quotas.

I had offers from England

several times to emigrate there, with job offers too.

Not only entry but also work, with the guarantee of a situation.

I'm going to tell you something.

Once, in April '39, I accompanied

the oldest of Vienna's rabbis, Dr. Taglicht, to London.

I had to go to London and he was emigrating. I took him with me.

I accompanied him on the plane.

- In April '39? - In April '39.

- Did you have a passport? - Yes.

You came back? You could have...

No. Why? Löwenherz left 10 times and always came back.

- I know. - Well?

It's surprising...

But I came back in April '39.

I came back. I took the plane alone.

From London to Vienna, the plane was empty.

It was the day Hitler gave a war speech.

No one dared to go to Germany because they feared

that he would declare war that day.

Until Rotterdam, there were two of us.

From Rotterdam to Vienna, I was alone with the hostess.

- I flew alone on that plane. - A German plane?

No, a Dutch one. KLM.

What I wanted to tell you

was that Dr. Taglicht asked me

to arrange a meeting for him

with Chief Rabbi Hertz. (Joseph Herman Hertz)

I did that.

Chief Rabbi Hertz...

- The Rabbi of London? - Of the British Empire.

He was sick, in fact.

We were told that he didn't want to talk

but he asked me to come to his house...

He wasn't at his office.

He dressed to receive me and even accompanied me

part of the way to the Underground.

He accompanied me.

And...

I told him,

"You see, Chief Rabbi..." - I spoke German to him -

"Dr. Taglicht has come here and he has asked me

"if you can receive him. Do him that honor."

I said koved, in Hebrew. Do him that koved.

He replied, "You know, I'll do koved

"for the rabbi who is going back,

"not the one who is staying here."

"You know, I'll do koved," he said, "for the rabbi who is going back,

"not the one who is staying here."

And, like I said, I went back.

He said you were very courageous to go back.

Yes.

You're not answering my question.

I'm listening.

My question was, in '39, why didn't you...

Listen, it wasn't possible for me to stay in London.

I had left my wife and a child at home.

Yes, but why...

Listen, I'll tell you something else.

Do you want me to admit that I felt I had a mission to carry out

and that's why I didn't leave?

Does that seem so strange?

You see, in June...

This is very interesting...

It's very inter... Look...

It was a mistake... because in June,

I made an even more serious mistake.

In June, in the summer, in June,

two certificates arrived.

- In which year? - '39.

Two certificates arrived.

One in my name... In my wife's name and in my name.

You understand? Straight from Israel, two certificates. At home.

From Israel? Two...

At the time, it was Palestine.

Palestine.

And I relinquished the two certificates

in favor of a student of mine

who was also a friend and who used the two certificates.

His family was like ours: a mature couple with a child.

They emigrated thanks to those certificates.

And I stayed.

You see, I believed I had something to accomplish.

Perhaps that was a mistake I made.

Perhaps if I had emigrated then,

I'd now be living somewhere in Israel or America or England,

in a college or a rabbinical seminary or at some temple.

I'd be a well-established rabbi, no one would bother about me,

no one would have been angry with me...

I wouldn't have had all these experiences...

And everything would be for the best.

But that's not what happened.

I'm going to tell you something.

- Excuse me... - Perhaps I thirsted for adventure.

Perhaps I thirsted for adventure.

A thirst for adventure.

- But it's not a thirst... - For adventure?

But there was an interest in not emigrating but in staying.

You see? But it wasn't only a thirst for adventure.

It was... For example...

Concerning the camps, someone had to do the work.

The camp service dealt with the prisoners.

And so people came out of the camp

and they had a very short time to emigrate.

Otherwise they were told they had to go back to the camp.

They had to go back.

They were so nervous, trembling so much, it was horrible.

And I had to negotiate with the British consul

so that he would grant visas.

Once, I sent him I don't know how many requests

and he said, "My God, I can't do this..."

I replied, "Do this for me and that will be all this week."

He granted them. 3 days later, he had another pile this big.

So he sent for me and said, "A gentleman doesn't act like this.

"You promised not to send any more this week."

I looked...

I looked down at him and said, "You know, Mr. Consul,

"a Jew under Hitler cannot afford the luxury of being a gentleman."

And he gave me the visas.

What do you mean, Dr. Murmelstein, by a "thirst for adventure"?

I mean the following:

that my work, particularly in '39,

had certain results

that brought me some satisfaction,

to the extent that one felt

that one could no longer drop the matter.

Emigration, in '39, in spring and in summer,

proceeded in a satisfactory manner.

It was a success

thanks to an operation that I directed,

Camp Richborough.

The problem with people from the camps was that

they were allowed out because they had a chance to emigrate.

Excuse me, you mean people who came from Dachau for example...

They had a short time.

They were only let out on condition

that they could definitely emigrate immediately.

Getting these people out, around 2,000 of them,

or more than 2,000, getting them out was a huge satisfaction.

And...

Therefore, emigration to Europe, particularly to England,

was very effective.

Nearly every day, special convoys left

with women and children as part of the emigration operation.

It all went through my hands.

And it was... You understand,

it was... it would be "petty" to say

that I saw it as a mission. Yes, certainly.

But I have enough human weakness

to tell you that I also found personal satisfaction in it.

In fact, I just wanted to tell you

that some things inspired tears,

others laughter,

but the main thing was that we were young and healthy.

And we were always hoping to get more and more people out.

Can you imagine the adventure it was,

getting people across occupied France?

Allowing them to reach Portugal

and Spain?

When I first talked about that idea,

which everyone picked up on after,

they thought I was mad.

How was it possible in occupied then unoccupied France?

Transporting people by train through occupied France?

We managed it, we sent people

and it worked with perfect organization. It was...

You sent people to the south of France?

No, not the south of France. Germany, then the French coast,

Spain, Portugal, etc.

We even sent a group of children to America

in that same manner.

Did you feel you were doing that better than anyone else?

You know,

I think that's something felt by anyone who does something

about which he is passionate. He feels he has a mission.

Were you passionate?

Passionate... Passionate,

no one was passionate about the Jews' situation under Hitler.

One cannot say that.

I'm just saying that someone who does something with passion

is always convinced that he has been picked to do it.

Can one say that you had a taste for power?

Listen... If I... I don't want...

to be hypocritical by saying that I didn't.

That it's not true.

But the accusation that I abused my power...

that's... that's a step too far.

In fact, I believe...

- I didn't say that. - All right.

But I'm saying it because, for example,

it says in the Encyclopaedia Judaica

that I abused my power in Vienna.

Not everyone believes that.

Because, in '47, the American Joint Distribution Committee

wrote to thank me for what I had done for the Jews of Vienna.

I'm ready to show that letter to anyone.

But...

I'm only saying it for this reason, I'm not denying it...

but power... the sensation of might... We're all human.

Who doesn't like power?

After all, the chance to launch and accomplish something

is a personal satisfaction.

But for what reason did I abuse my power?

Not for personal advantage,

not for my family's advantage,

but to help people.

Who, apart from a few specialists,

knows the name Nisko?

However, if one wants to understand the genesis of extermination

and how, with devastating speed,

one passes in less than three years

from a blatant policy of persecution

to mass deaths in the gas chambers,

Nisko, a place of desolation, is a key milestone

in the crime that is going to take place.

We are in early October 1939,

the Second World War has just begun

and its first month ends

with the annihilation of Polish sovereignty

and the lightning-fast victory of the German army,

entirely subservient to the new lords,

the Nazi masters of the Great Reich.

The Great Reich for Austria joyfully let herself be annexed

in March 1938,

launching a reign of terror for the 200,000 Jews living there.

And just one year later

Czechoslovakia was dismantled in turn,

replaced by the rump state of Slovakia

and the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia,

the Hitlerian Christian name

for the Czech Republic.

But victory brought the Nazi bureaucrats,

activists by nature,

an unforeseen and extraordinary field of action

that would enable them to develop the full scope of their talent,

a talent found nowhere else, that married violence to falsehood

as never before in the history of mankind.

Since 1933, they have been guided by a single, obsessive idea:

ridding themselves of their Jews, in other words the German Jews.

But the annexation of Austria, the Anschluss,

and the takeover of Czechoslovakia

increase the numbers of people that they wish to see vanish.

Then, all of a sudden, the conquest of Poland

expands their empire but also places three million

more members of the accursed race under their domination.

The sinister paradox

is that before being a problem to solve for the Nazis,

the three million Polish Jews

had been one for the Poles themselves.

The idea of sending the Jews to dwell

in a distant place cut off from the world

was originally a Polish idea

that had taken root three years earlier, in 1936,

in the fertile minds

of a number of members of the Diet in Warsaw.

A commission was formed to examine

if the island of Madagascar would be suited for such a project.

It was called the Lepecki Commission.

Madagascar - Tsiribihna River at dusk

The commission traveled to Madagascar.

Jozef Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister,

openly discussed the Madagascar solution in Berlin

with Von Ribbentrop, his Nazi counterpart,

and influential members of the Auswärtiges Amt,

the German Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

The war put a temporary end to discussions about Madagascar.

They resumed after the defeat of France,

but it would have required an armada to carry out this huge undertaking

and the United Kingdom, which ruled the seas,

had taken the lead in Madagascar.

The solution had to be found on the mainland.

The new empire

required a man capable of taking on the task

of eliminating the Jews and seeing it to completion.

With his experienced team of killers,

Adolf Eichmann didn't back down before any form of inhumanity,

provided he found his interest in it.

The war with Poland had just come to an end.

The three million Polish Jews were not yet his problem.

For now, he viewed Poland, devastated by the Stukas' bombs

as a huge zone, empty and depopulated by the war,

where everything would be possible and could be done without witnesses.

The East, in the German Weltanschauung,

has always been a place of absolute indeterminacy

and the Nazis were at the forefront of this worldview.

The war with Poland ends in late September 1939

and, on 10 October, the Jewish leaders of Austria and Czechoslovakia

are summoned to Mährisch-Ostrau, in Bohemia,

by Eichmann and his cohorts,

to hear that the first deportation of Jews from Vienna and Prague

will take place a few days later.

Since Madagascar is an impossible dream,

it will be replaced by a Jewish reservation

that will be created in Poland, around the small town of Nisko,

on land situated between the Rivers Bug and San,

a brainchild of Eichmann himself.

The Jewish community leaders

have no choice but to comply.

Benjamin Murmelstein from Vienna

and Jacob Edelstein from Prague

will be part of the first convoy of 1,000 people

in charge of building the camp

destined to receive other convoys within a very short period of time.

The first convoy leaves Mährisch-Ostrau on October 18th

and arrives in Nisko on the 19th.

The deportations to Nisko remain largely unknown today.

However, Nisko is paradigmatically

a rehearsal for all the deportations that will follow

throughout the entire duration of the war,

and the helpless old people

who fell in the marshes and mud between the Bug and San

must be counted among the six million.

Madagascar, Nisko,

Theresienstadt, Auschwitz

and ultimately the death camps,

this is the implacable dark line of the Final Solution

to the so-called Jewish "problem".

Don't forget, Madagascar is an island.

Yes, how could I forget that?

In short, a ghetto.

Eichmann wrote, in a report,

that to prevent

other peoples from being contaminated,

the ideal solution would be an island, overseas.

So you see: Madagascar.

They were well aware that it was an island.

But it's an island of 360,000 km2

where there was enough room for the Jews to settle.

Madagascar was also a way

of concealing the Final Solution.

When... the English, let's say,

in May '42, I think, occupied Madagascar,

the Führer himself claimed in a midday speech,

one of his famous midday speeches,

that they wouldn't return Madagascar,

that the English wouldn't return the island to the French.

Yet two weeks later, as if none of that had happened,

he said the Jews should be sent to Madagascar. What was his plan?

It was an obsession.

No, it wasn't an obsession, it was just a camouflage tactic.

"Madagascar" simply means "Final Solution".

When Hitler spoke to Frank (the "German king" of Poland)

about sending the Polish Jews to Madagascar,

at a time when Frank was carrying out the mass murder of Polish Jews,

it's obvious that Madagascar is a word

that conceals another.

A code. A mask.

And this is important because Madagascar,

this promised land of Madagascar,

was passed on as a mask to Theresienstadt

in its role as a lie to the world.

Instead of saying "exterminate", they'd say "send to Madagascar".

And instead of saying "send to Auschwitz",

they'd say, "Theresienstadt".

After Theresienstadt, we'll see, but first Theresienstadt.

On October 15, 1939, I think, I received the order,

just after Poland was occupied, to report, in Mährisch-Ostrau,

to Sturmbannführer Rolf Günther,

who was Eichmann's representative in Berlin.

We knew that it was about a journey to the East.

Because at the same time in... in Vienna,

they had begun to prepare the transport of Jews to the East.

We knew that the two things were probably connected.

Nothing more specific was said.

We knew I was probably going to the East

and we supposed that I might not ever return.

You can imagine how my wife felt about all that.

My wife and my child were to stay behind in Vienna.

So I reported to Mährisch-Ostrau,

to Günther,

and that was when I learned

that transport to Nisko was also being prepared.

- Günther... - Czech transport.

What?

Transport from Mährisch-Ostrau. It wasn't a coincidence

because people in Mährisch-Ostrau were skilled technicians.

It was an industrial region.

And they knew how to build a camp.

You see? They were selected for that.

It was well organized from that point of view.

I reported to Günther...

who wasn't particularly intelligent,

but who first received us, all three of us together,

because I had joined Edelstein, from Prague,

an official from Prague's Jewish Community,

and the head of the Palestine Office who had come with me from Vienna

and who also ran the office for illegal transport...

The head of the transport committee...

Overseas transport. Storfer, yes. Yes.

They were all there. He received us all together.

In addition, I had received the order to report to him personally.

I didn't like that idea.

Something like that always made others talk.

They would say, "God knows what he's planning."

I didn't like it. But it was an order. What could I do?

So I went there and he explained the situation:

a huge Jewish reservation would be created there

that would bring together Polish Jews,

Austrian Jews and German Jews

and any others who could be added to them.

And so on and so forth...

I listened to him and then explained

that it was possible, despite the war, to use Italian and Dutch ports

to leave for America,

that the certificates for Palestine were ready

at the Palestine Office in Trieste

so that emigration to Palestine could continue

and that illegal transport existed as it had always done.

He listened to me for a moment,

then realized that I was diverting his attention towards emigration.

Then he said, "Really,

"you don't care about the fact that you'll be the King of Jews.

"You should, though.

"You're supposed to manage all this. It will all be entrusted to you.

"They'll make you the King of Jews and you don't want that?

"You're refusing?" I replied,

"King of Jews is an inscription on the Cross."

He didn't understand and threw me out.

- He didn't understand? - No, he didn't.

I was referring to the Crucifixion.

He threw me out.

I have an indelible memory of our stop in Krakow.

There were Jews working on the railroad.

I looked out of the window

and what I saw terrified me.

I'll never forget the look of those Jews.

Their eyes could see, yet they were already dead.

Dead eyes!

Already in October?

In October, yes. They looked at us with dead eyes.

Eyes that could see but that were dead.

There's no other way to put it.

- Religious Jews? - Yes, with beards

and Polish caftans.

They were working on the railroad,

on the tracks, adding ballast to them, etc.

They saw right away that we were a train of Jews.

They approached us

but when I looked at them I felt scared.

Did you speak to them?

No, we couldn't. We were with an SS escort.

But we saw and looked at each other.

Everything was said in those looks.

The next day, we arrived in Nisko.

Then we walked for 12 kilometers.

The bridge over the San had been bombed.

From there, we were led to a hill overlooking the valley.

We arrived at a place called Zarzecze.

In Polish, Zarzecze means "beyond the river".

The next morning, there was a roll call and Eichmann spoke to us.

He briefly explained that a camp was going to be set up.

We first had to build the huts for the SS men,

and then those for the camp staff,

for those who would stay.

We had to respect sanitary measures.

Avoid using the water and dig new wells

because there was typhus, cholera, etc., in the area.

Then he said,

"You must provide fresh water at all costs.

"Uncontaminated water.

"Otherwise..."

I still remember how he paused there

to give more weight to his words. He smiled

and then added, "Otherwise, it means dying."

"Otherwise..."

He paused,

smiled and then added, "it means dying."

In three weeks,

thirteen huts were built on this land

by technicians from the convoy dispatched from Mährisch-Ostrau.

70 years have passed.

Zarzecze is still there

with its blue sky

and all the trappings of the modern world,

including even a nightclub.

The Jerusalem tribunal dealt with that speech at length.

The idea was to find out

if Eichmann had really given such a speech.

Eichmann denied it.

They told him he had spoken in Nisko about...

That he had said, "Otherwise, it means dying."

Eichmann replied, "I never gave a speech in Nisko."

And he was right. He spoke in Zarzecze, not Nisko.

And he denied it with such conviction

that he was believed.

But, you see,

I knew Eichmann well.

I was in the front row.

I was standing as close to him as I am to you now.

At the time, I wasn't...

How did the Jews stand? To attention?

No, we formed a circle around him.

We formed a circle. He was in the middle.

I was the first...

How many people?

All the people from my train,

several hundred people.

Imagine it, the tribunal couldn't prove something

that had taken place in front of hundreds of people.

And after that someone wrote

that he was "a banal little man".

That literary gem was presented

in the official indictment in Jerusalem

and it allowed him to appear in such a light.

He was a demon.

Do you know what he said to me

after the...

after his speech when he took us to one side?

I asked, "How are we supposed to do this?

"What do we do?

"There are people living here."

"Just kick the Polish peasant's ass."

Forgive the expression but he spoke like that.

"Then move into his house."

- He said that? - His very words.

His very words. And so we built the camp.

That was how the migrant settlement came about.

The people that were needed to build the camp

stayed in Zarzecze.

The others were taken under escort a few kilometers further away.

They were told, "Just go a little further.

"Find a place where you want to live. Take the houses,

"cross the border, go where you want."

Someone fired into the air, or not into the air, to frighten them.

That solved the problem.

And when the escort made a mistake, a group was chased into a marsh.

Nothing could be done.

This isn't the Final Solution.

It's the Final Solution as a sacrifice,

as the result of appalling disorganization.

The Germans were concealing the truth

from other countries.

Nisko was masquerading as a resettlement operation.

Why was I...

- This was not resettlement? - Certainly not.

If you read the documents that were found

in the Gestapo offices in Mährisch-Ostrau in 1965,

you'll find instructions concerning the press.

The press was to be told that it was a resettlement plan

supported by the Jewish organizations,

with Jewish officials taking part in it.

If possible, the Jews should handle the whole departure process.

It was to take place in such a way that the Jews deported themselves.

It was supposed to be self-deportation.

We didn't know that at the time.

That's clear now from the documents.

Eichmann's speech in Nisko,

or more precisely in Zarzecze,

was of course already a hint of the Final Solution

that would be implemented later.

At that time,

there was one door left open to the Jews

if they were young and in good health.

That was the Russian border.

The Russian army had orders to let them through.

Who gave those orders? I have no idea.

But the fact is that any Jews who wanted to cross the border

encountered no difficulties at all.

The Russians, especially at the beginning,

always helped people.

They welcomed them with understanding.

When Benjamin Murmelstein talks here about the Russian border,

he means the demarcation line

between the area of Poland occupied by the Germans after their invasion

and that taken by the Red Army

when it entered Poland on September 17, 1939,

a division of the territory outlined by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact

of August 23, 1939.

But, for us, there was the problem of the elderly.

Those who could no longer cross the border.

Were there old people?

I don't have the statistics

but there were people who couldn't undertake long marches.

There were people chased off with their luggage

who dropped it because they couldn't carry it.

I saw them lying in the forest.

Exhausted, lying there...

They were left behind.

That image is still with me now.

But something else still with me

is above all the conviction

that old people must never be deported.

In Nisko, there were no death convoys at that time

for those who were in good health and who were young,

who could work and walk a long way.

But it was a death march for the old.

That is why the conviction that old people

must never be deported took root within me.

How long did you stay in Nisko?

If I add it all up...

with the break of 10 days in Lublin, the journey, etc.,

around 25 days.

I returned to Vienna

and no one wanted to believe that the operation was adjourned,

that the operation was adjourned,

because a convoy had just been assembled to go there.

People had been gathered in a holding camp

and they weren't let out.

That was when I got back in November.

The people weren't released until January.

It wasn't until January that they were freed.

The Jews were gathered in a holding camp, in an old school,

in order to be transported to Nisko, whereas I knew that Nisko...

They stayed in holding camps in Vienna and Prague?

In Vienna. I don't know about Prague.

In Vienna, they were in a holding camp

and we were unable to get them released.

I was devastated.

Sturmbannführer Eichmann told me,

"Don't meddle in what doesn't concern you. I have orders."

Perhaps he was still hoping for a power struggle.

In the Mährisch-Ostrau papers, there's a memo where Eichmann says,

"Another convoy must be organized

"to maintain the prestige of the Gestapo."

A new convoy was supposed to maintain the prestige of the Gestapo.

In any case, Nisko vanished.

The Charles Bridge in Prague over the Vltava

The Jewish cemetery in Prague

The Golem's Synagogue

Thomas Fritta Haas...

That's incredible, he's...

He's the son

of that genius,

that genius of an illustrator that we saw in Theresienstadt,

Fritta.

Deported to Auschwitz with another genius, Leo Haas.

But Fritta died

in Auschwitz

shortly after his arrival and Haas survived.

He adopted Fritta's son,

Thomas, who was 3 at the time.

Seeing this here is very...

very overwhelming.

Pasternak...

These are

great names of Ashkenazi Jews.

This is what...

the Nazis destroyed.

It's magnificent,

the Golem's Synagogue.

The Old New Synagogue.

A real jewel.

The walls of the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague.

There are so many names,

here,

pressed up against each other.

We're close to illegibility

in fact.

Then, all of a sudden,

they become legible.

Some names stand out.

The Czech Jews had wanted to believe in the reality of the model ghetto.

Since they above all feared deportation to the East,

Poland, the Baltic States, Belarus, Ukraine,

the fact that Theresienstadt was located in the heart of Bohemia

and just 80 kilometers from Prague, the capital,

where they had lived for centuries,

reassured them, silenced their fears

and filled them with the mad hope that they might see out the war

in the land where they had been born.

They soon lost their illusions and realized in just two months

that Theresienstadt, with its so-called "autonomous administration",

would in fact be nothing more than a concentration camp

of the worst kind.

For all their fine talk of "organization",

their catch-all slogan,

the Nazis never stopped creating its exact opposite:

chaos, which ruled unrivalled

throughout the existence of the ghetto,

with a few periods of remission

that fuelled hopes of a possible return to normality.

Just two months after the inauguration of the "model ghetto",

Eichmann and his men launched the deportations to Auschwitz

and other death camps in the East.

To pre-empt the reactions of the Jews

who realized to which extent they had been lied to,

the Germans installed a systematic reign of terror.

The hangings at the Aussiger Barrack on January 10, 1942,

the day after the first convoy to Riga,

paralyzed the Jews.

Death became the punishment for the most trivial faults.

People were hung for next to nothing.

The noose, or the threat it represented,

appeared as the supreme method for reeducation.

The hangings illustrate, in the clearest

and most revolting way possible,

the true nature of Theresienstadt

where deception and raw violence attained unprecedented heights.

The Jewish Council, presided by the Elder Edelstein,

was forced to attend

the January hangings alongside the Nazis.

Edelstein was given four hours to find a hangman

and threatened with the noose himself if he found no one.

Edelstein obeyed, his knees trembling.

This did not prevent him from being murdered two years later at Auschwitz,

in the manner described in the opening text of this film.

However, his understandable lack of heroism

perhaps sealed the fate of Theresienstadt on that day:

a single ruler would henceforth reign supreme

over the "model ghetto" and all its souls:

fear.

You know,

it's fairly incredible

what is happening here for me.

This place in the Ustecky,

or Aussiger Barrack

or Kazerne in Theresienstadt,

was a dead place

and also a place of death.

Yet it has suddenly come to life...

for me.

So, a gallows was erected here during the night.

Erected by the SS officers.

And a group of prisoners dug the graves

in which they would bury

those who had been hanged.

Let's get to the point now.

For the poor Czech Jews interned here in the Sudeten Barrack,

the place where they had been held

since their arrival in Theresienstadt,

everything was quite simply forbidden.

Passing on a letter, attempting to talk to a wife or daughter,

removing the star to enter a Czech store,

as there were still Czech stores in Theresienstadt,

were subject to the worst punishment, in short the death penalty.

The death penalty was the only penalty.

Since they were afraid of a Jewish revolt

because of the deportation

formulated by the Nazi lie,

they decided to heighten terror with further terror

by hanging men.

So they ordered the Jewish Elder, Jakob Edelstein, the Judenälteste,

to find a hangman,

telling Edelstein at 4 a.m., "If you haven't found someone

"by 8 or 9 o'clock, you will be hanged yourself."

So the poor Edelstein

was even more terrified, understandably,

and decided to turn to butchers.

Why a butcher when there's no blood at a hanging?

Anyhow, he found three and they all refused.

In the end, he found a certain Fischer from the morgue in Brünn

and Fischer agree to do it as long as he was given a glass of rum

and also some chewing tobacco.

So they gave him the rum and the chewing tobacco

and the hanging began.

It began in the presence of the Council,

in the presence of Edelstein who was shaking like a leaf.

He was a good Zionist bureaucrat,

not at all prepared for such horrors.

The executions were motivated in the following manner

and were announced here.

"Order number 21, dated January 8, 1942:

"several inhabitants of the ghetto were arrested

"while trying to deliver letters covertly."

Just imagine it.

"This act is in violation of martial law

"and so the culprits face the death penalty."

The sentence read before execution was the following,

"On the orders of the head of security for Bohemia-Moravia,

"the accused are sentenced to death by hanging

"for endangering the honor of the Reich."

Solely for the honor of the Reich. Such grandiloquence.

Nazi grandiloquence.

Totally abject.

As usual, when bastards and executioners hang men,

they know full well that killing is a very grave and scandalous act.

So they find ways to deal with it. As in the photos taken in Russia.

They make coarse jokes, laugh,

try to mask the horror that they feel at their own deeds

by joking and insulting those that they are about to kill.

The two Nazi chiefs of Theresienstadt at the time

were Siegfried Seidl

and his assistant, an absolute swine, Karl Bergl.

Bergl insulted one of the young men

who was about to climb the ladder

to the gallows to be hanged.

He said to him, "Move it, you coward."

The young man calmly replied,

"No, I'm not a coward, I'm an innocent man."

And he put the noose around his neck himself

and jumped and the rope snapped.

So the hangman, Mr. Fischer, said,

"Listen, pardon him.

"I'm not a professional hangman. But I know that's what's done."

But Mr. Seidl, the Nazi chief at Theresienstadt, refused.

Edelstein knew that if he had opposed

the first hangings, even in a suicidal manner,

the fate of Theresienstadt might have been different

but we can understand that Bergl's threat

carried a great deal of weight when he told him,

"You'll be hanged yourself if you don't find a hangman."

In any case, he showed courage during the second hangings.

He refused to attend them.

But during the following day,

even though the Nazis had imposed a curfew in Terezin,

all the heads of the rooms in the Sudeten Barrack

were brought together and, in front of the Nazi, Bergl,

Edelstein, trembling, told all of them

that the punishment had been carried out

and he begged them all, the heads of the rooms,

to ensure that the German orders were obeyed

in order to avoid further hangings.

And the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, was recited

in all the rooms of the Sudeten Barrack.

There...

It's a sinister place...

of unforgettable beauty.

"Theresienstadt will only ensure its survival

"by embarking upon a radical work effort.

"No talking, only work.

"No speculation.

"It's as if we were on a ship waiting to reach port

"but that cannot enter the bay

"because a barrier of mines is blocking its route.

"Only the ship's captain knows the narrow passageway

"that leads to the harbor.

"He must not pay attention to the misleading lights

"and signals that are sent to him from shore.

"The ship must stay where it is and await orders.

"You must trust your captain

"who does everything humanly possible

"to ensure the safety of our existence.

"Let us begin the new year with seriousness and confidence

"and the strong desire to keep going and to do our duty."

The words that I have just read

beneath the gallows

in front of the long execution wall in the Small Fortress,

the Kleine Festung in Theresienstadt,

are from the speech given by Paul Eppstein,

the second Elder of the Jews

in the ghetto,

on September 18 or 19, 1944,

to celebrate the Jewish New Year.

It is in fact a speech of extreme gravity

and great courage.

Because the Germans were not mistaken.

Eppstein was executed on this very spot

exactly eight days after making this speech,

the last speech that he ever gave.

Not only as the Elder of the Jews

but the very last speech in his whole life.

If we look at these lines in detail

and read between them,

we discover that all the metaphors and the symbols

- the ship, the mines, etc. -

indicate

that he was aware, in a way, of the fate that awaited him.

Let us not forget that this was in September 1944.

The Germans knew that they had lost the war.

The Allies were advancing on all fronts,

in the East and the West.

Paris had been liberated on August 25,

the Red Army had liberated Lublin Majdanek on July 24.

Rebellions were increasingly numerous.

Warsaw in July 1944,

Slovakia in August '44

and two parachutists,

not yet Israeli as the State of Israel didn't exist,

but from the Jewish National Homeland,

Hannah Szenes and Enzo Sereni,

were airdropped over Hungary.

It was a totally crazy operation.

They were arrested and tortured between March and May 1944.

The Nazis eradicated all the ghettos that were still functioning,

including the Lodz ghetto on August 21, 1944,

the last great ghetto to be eradicated.

And so only Theresienstadt was left.

The Germans of Theresienstadt lived in fear of an uprising

and, from the 20,000 to 23,000 people still in the ghetto,

decided to deport 10,000 healthy men capable of leading an uprising.

And all Eppstein did was encourage them on the one hand

and warn them on the other.

The foundation of a new ghetto somewhere near Dresden was announced.

A convoy of 5,000 would leave,

with another convoy of 5,000 two days later, etc.

An SS officer telephoned Eppstein

to ask him to deliver around 30 bags to the Aussiger Barrack.

I don't know what kind of bags

but probably new ones

that they needed for transportation.

He received the order from Scharführer Rudolf Haindl.

What did Eppstein do? By bicycle, he took a road that was off limits.

He had taken it dozens of times before

and no one had bothered to pay any attention to that.

But now he was accused of trying to escape on a bicycle

along a road that was off limits.

He was taken to the office of the ghetto's Nazi commander,

Rahm. Those present were Rahm, Eppstein,

Rahm's second-in-command, Ernst Möhs,

and Benjamin Murmelstein.

Möhs told Eppstein, "You tried to escape.

"An officer arrested you on a bicycle on the main road

"opposite the Aussiger Barrack."

Eppstein replied, "Corporal Haindl had ordered me to go there

"to deliver the bags that he had requested.

"I thought I too had the right to cross the main road,

"like all the Jews who go to the Aussiger Barrack,

"watched by the sentry on duty at the exit from the ghetto."

Möhs, "You're aware of the situation.

"You told me about certain rumors in Terezin.

"We cannot allow a stupid act by you

"to cause panic among the Jews.

"You will stay in the Kommandantur's prison

"until the 5,000 men leave.

"In the meantime, the ghetto will be run by Benjamin Murmelstein."

Murmelstein and Eppstein remained alone together for a moment,

either in Rahm's office or in a sort of antechamber.

And Eppstein said the following words to Murmelstein,

"Last year, it was Edelstein's turn."

He had been deported to Auschwitz

and executed six months later,

after they had killed his wife and son before his eyes.

Eppstein went on, telling Murmelstein,

"I always carry a small bottle of cyanide with me

"and, for once, I left it at home today.

"Get my wife to pass it to me with my linen.

"It's best to get it over with. Did you hear how Möhs spoke to me?"

They both knew what that meant.

After that, Eppstein was taken to the Small Fortress by 2 SS men,

Karl Bergl whom I spoke about while talking about the hangings

and probably Möhs.

He was received

by the second-in-command of the Small Fortress,

Wilhelm Schmidt,

and introduced himself in the regulation manner,

with his thighs and his knees together,

the way a Jew was obliged to do with an SS officer, then said,

"I'm the stinking Jew Eppstein,

"Elder of the Jews in the Theresienstadt ghetto."

And the other man said, "I'll show you.

"I'll make you give up the idea of trying to escape."

They immediately led him away

and shot him right here in the so-called potato field,

for they also grew potatoes.

But they also wanted to camouflage Eppstein's death

so they didn't send for one coffin but for four of them,

the same length as Eppstein's corpse - he wasn't a big man -

and sent the four coffins to the crematorium,

but three of them were nothing but wood

because they wanted to hide Eppstein's death from the Jews.

And, 48 hours later, the first convoy of 5,000 men

left with Otto Zucker.

Murmelstein said goodbye to him in tears.

Then those men were probably gassed immediately.

A second convoy left two days later.

The number of prisoners in the ghetto fell drastically

and an uprising was no longer feared.

If ever they had thought of it, I believe it was far too late.

And Murmelstein would be named Elder of the Jews,

the third Elder that is, in December 1944.

Where Theresienstadt begins, the lie begins too.

People cannot rid themselves of that lie.

It's a curse. The whole town is built on a curse.

A Jew did not live there: it was no life.

A Jew did not dwell there: it was no home.

He imagined he lived there... but it was on a sack of straw

on the fourth level of a bunk.

He imagined that he was working but he didn't work.

He imagined that he was served coffee

but it was black colored water.

He imagined that there was meat

but there was no meat. It was all a lie.

It was all a lie from top to bottom.

A witty cabaret artist

once wrote a song,

"The Town As If", inspired by the famous "as if" philosophy.

The town as if! One acts as if.

"As if" coffee, "as if" meals, "as if" work,

one didn't eat, one didn't work, nothing like that...

It was all made up.

I first arrived there...

I arrived in '43...

- January '43. - January '43. Why?

January '43...

I'm sorry, you accuse me of sidetracking all the time

but one cannot understand things without their context.

January '43

was Stalingrad.

January '43

saw the Allied landings in North Africa.

The Führer was falling back, so to speak.

For the 10th anniversary of his seizure of power,

they wanted to do something special for him.

They wanted to offer him the eradication of the German Jews.

How could they symbolically present the eradication of the German Jews?

By deporting the prominent Jews

- the few that were still left - to Theresienstadt.

That was a lie, of course,

because in Vienna alone 500 very religious Jews remained

but, officially, the Jews had left.

That reminds me of the story

of the pious Jew who sells his khometz on Erev Pesach.

The khometz stays where it is,

but it is sold, it is no longer his.

And so the khometz has been sold.

The prominent Jews went away.

And, poor fellow that I am, I have to be grateful for the fact

that I was considered prominent for only prominent Jews left.

I had to leave, so I was one too.

I was given "A category" prominence,

with all the university professors, generals, ministers, etc.

I found myself in a category that I didn't belong to.

But simply because

I was supposed to be prominent...

And that's how I was sent to Theresienstadt.

- You were "A"? - Category A.

There was no reason to be proud of being category A.

The prominent people of category A were also the...

How many categories were there?

There was category A,

then Eppstein established

category B

for German officials.

The Reich's Jewish German officials from the provinces, that is.

It was also a form of koved (honor), the way in temples

they assign koved.

So there was a category B

that brought nothing, it was just a title.

Without effect.

But category A Jews had certain rights.

We were protected from transports

and we weren't obliged to work.

Löwenherz had to go to Theresienstadt as Eppstein's deputy

and me as an ordinary category A prominent person.

And then, at the last minute, the Gestapo intervened.

Apparently, there was a power struggle...

Brunner probably wanted me to stay

and the Gestapo probably wanted Löwenherz to stay.

Each one wanted to keep the Jew that they were better acquainted with.

To each his Jew, so to speak.

I was working for Brunner,

but the Gestapo couldn't stand me...

I arrived as deputy to the Jewish Elder

and the camp commander knew nothing about it.

I need to explain this.

At the last minute, everything was turned upside down.

At the last minute, I was summoned to the Central Office and held there.

Brunner was on the phone. He wasn't in Vienna.

He had carefully slipped away when I had been arrested.

He didn't want to look me in the eye.

He said I had to go to Theresienstadt as deputy to the Elder of the Jews.

I told him that it wasn't necessary

to have had me arrested for that.

I would have gone there anyway.

How long were you under arrest?

Two days.

"You're leaving as deputy to the Elder of the Jews,

"Löwenherz stays in Vienna."

At that, we set off in a 4th class carriage.

I arrived late that evening in Theresienstadt.

- Where, Bohusovice? - Yes.

We were welcomed at the station by a group of youths,

very well dressed, with leather jackets.

They were yelling like SS men. We didn't know if they were Jews.

My wife said, "They seem to be starving."

But they ate well.

The Czechs were well fed and those who dealt with the trains

always helped themselves copiously from the luggage.

They had nothing to complain about.

Seidl was there too.

He was furious with me. I saw that right away.

He greeted me with moralizing words

that I would never have accepted in normal circumstances.

But, after being deported and all this traveling,

I was tired, hungry and sleepy. I was very disheartened.

They led us off and confiscated our luggage.

I was the only category A person that they did that to.

The others kept their things without any problem.

The next day,

the order came from Seidl.

Löwenherz had to go to see him.

Everything blew up. Löwenherz wasn't there,

so I went instead of him,

not as an anonymous category A person

but as deputy to the Jewish Elder.

On hearing that, Seidl was perplexed

and my two colleagues were equally at a loss.

There were also our old disputes:

transportation to Palestine with Edelstein,

to the camps with Eppstein,

money from Charbin with Eppstein...

They wanted to settle their scores with me but they couldn't;

I was the deputy to the Elder.

The only thing that they could do

was to advise Seidl against speaking to me.

So as soon as he found out that Löwenherz wasn't there,

he withdrew the summons.

He didn't want to see me. Too bad.

Then they started distributing the departments.

I was assigned two departments

from which they knew I could do nothing.

The technical department and the health department.

They told themselves that I wasn't a doctor

and that I wasn't an engineer.

They also turned the heads of other departments against me

so that they wouldn't work with me.

They thought that I'd be neutralized.

They were sure of that.

The first few weeks, I was at a total loss.

I'll give you an example

of the way in which political problems could arise.

Vienna and Cologne brought lice to Theresienstadt.

Why? Some convoys waited for months before leaving.

They brought lice with them.

When someone had lice, he was taken to an old barrack

and he was left to croak there with the others.

I sent for a certain Dr. Pick, an expert in delousing.

He wasn't sure whether to come or not.

But he quickly understood that you don't joke with me.

So he came and I told him, "You're a delousing expert

"and you get rid of them by letting people croak?

"Can't we set up a delousing station?"

He said, "Maybe..."

I told him, "If you can't do it, I'll find someone else."

Dr. Pick explained that the difficulty lay in the fact

that no place had been set aside for delousing.

A sanitary place reserved for that.

Without it, people caught lice again.

So I went to the technical department, my second department.

I asked, "What are we doing with the attics?"

"We're keeping them vacant for now

"to make favored accommodation."

I said, "From today on,

"no more favored accommodation without my authorization.

"If you do that, Edelstein or not Edelstein,

"I'll grab you by the neck, drag you from your desk

"and you'll never come back.

"Without my signature,

"there won't be any favored accommodation."

"What do we do with the attics?"

"I'm going to tell you.

"You don't like it? Then resign.

"I'm in charge here."

Then I drew up the plans with him to prepare the attics

to house old people.

And people...

Were there a lot of old people?

Yes, several thousand old people.

We started by moving the old people with lice

to the attics that had been renovated.

They slept in clean beds and we sent nurses to tend to them.

It became clear that the technical and health departments

were highly political areas.

The delousing facility in the Jägerkaserne

functioned perfectly.

In Theresienstadt, those who weren't indispensable were in danger.

I had a bad reputation. They said I was a bigmouth and mean.

Pick wanted to convince me of his talents,

of which he had many. He knew a lot. He was an expert.

He built a model delousing station.

And it worked.

But I made my first enemies.

Those who were expected to move into the attic apartments

went around complaining about me.

There was also discord and anger, "Machloike" in Yiddish, with Eppstein.

He had allocated attic apartments and I had blocked that.

I had requisitioned them for the old people.

This led to arguments.

But the old were taken care of. They no longer slept on the floor

but in beds with clean sheets, cared for by nurses.

Subsequently, the health department became highly political.

A typhus epidemic broke out.

Eichmann came rushing to Theresienstadt.

But he didn't summon me.

My colleagues made sure that he didn't.

The health department was me.

If anything had to be justified,

I was there to take responsibility.

They kept the honor of speaking to Eichmann for themselves.

They didn't want me to see Eichmann.

They were afraid I would get on with him

and, because of our past relations, would complain about them.

- Past relations? - That's right.

They feared, wrongly, that I would...

I never called Eichmann to settle scores with other Jews.

That was my rule.

They came back and told me, as an order from Eichmann...

- Who? Edelstein? - And Eppstein.

They went together, keeping an eye on each other

so as to be able to testify

once the war would be over.

For them, it was a nightmare that the war would end one day

and that they'd have to say what they had done or not,

what they had said or not.

They were each other's witness.

I went alone because I didn't think of that day.

I thought, "Today's the day when something must occur."

Which would happen...

That's surprising. Only today?

Only today.

Something could only happen to me.

Then, I had to think of the community. That was more important.

We would see what would happen to me.

I was simply thinking of a way to find a solution.

So they went off together, they came back

and they told me, "Eichmann sends word

"that if the typhus epidemic isn't halted,

"the ghetto will be burned. You're considered responsible.

"There are Aryans near here and if the ghetto is a risk,

"it will be burned." They said, "You're responsible."

What solidarity!

I sent for Munk, the head of sanitary services.

"Did you hear that?" "Yes," he said.

I told him, "You haven't come to see me before

"because you had orders not to work with me.

"But I'm warning you, if they hang me

"or send me to Auschwitz..."

At the time, we said Birkenau, we didn't know Auschwitz.

"...because of the typhus epidemic, you'll go two days before me.

"I'm warning you."

He told me, "We need to start a vaccination program.

"But people refuse the shots.

"They're undisciplined."

I told him, "Let me think.

"Come back later or this evening. I'll tell you what to do."

He said, "What do you hope to do? You know what Jews are like.

"They're afraid of vaccination."

I told him to come back and we talked about it again.

We hired a hygiene expert who was there.

And we decided on a very simple thing.

People had ration cards.

Every day, when they came for their meal,

a coupon was torn off their card.

A monthly card with a coupon for each day.

I said, "Anyone who doesn't have a vaccination stamp on their card

"will not get to eat."

- You decided on that? - Together.

Not me personally. The idea came to us all.

And I approved it.

I was accused of trying to starve people.

No, I refused to let them die of typhus.

It had to be eradicated.

I said, "As of tomorrow,

"we declare no more new cases of typhus.

"As of tomorrow, we note: diarrhea."

I halted the reports.

- Diarrhea. - We wrote that down instead.

That was progress.

Yes, we just noted "diarrhea".

Typhus disappeared from the world.

You have to defeat the enemy with his own weapons.

Lies, in Theresienstadt, had more value than elsewhere.

The people had to know that I was following it all closely.

I'd go into the kitchens, I'd watch what was going on.

The cooks were real characters.

But if someone dared

to reprimand them in front of others, they'd soon pipe down.

If they were told they'd be fired

from a job that allowed them to eat,

they'd be scared.

And so the people were obliged to get vaccinated.

And, within three weeks, the epidemic started to die down.

And we discovered that the source of the epidemic

was one of the cooks.

The epidemic was halted.

I had a reputation as a mean man.

I was accused of depriving the people of food.

It's very hard to understand, I think.

Why did you take the decision

to accept the responsibility of embellishing the town?

After all, it was a farce

serving Nazi propaganda, wasn't it?

You're right. You're playing the prosecutor.

I agreed to do it for two reasons.

I thought,

if they give me wood

for beds, cupboards and tables, I'll take it.

If they give me glass for the windows,

I'll take it.

I'll use all that.

If we need to renovate the old people's rooms,

I'll do it.

You read me something about

Adler referring to Falstaff.

I'd compare myself

to another classical literary character.

Neither Roland from Orlando Furioso nor El Cid...

Do you know who?

Sancho Panza!

He's pragmatic and calculating

while others are tilting at windmills.

He's a calculating realist with both feet on the ground.

That was a minor digression.

Say hello to Adler from me. He can correct the third edition.

Personally, I thought the following:

Eichmann wanted to make something of Theresienstadt.

If we could bring him to show Theresienstadt to someone,

that would be an anchor. Theresienstadt could no longer vanish.

That meant we had to prostitute ourselves

and play along with the farce until Theresienstadt was shown.

Then it could no longer vanish. It was a safety factor.

In the ghetto, there was a 2nd aspect to the town's embellishment.

Theatrical performances, film screenings, etc.

I wasn't in charge of all that.

Leisure activities were organized by Eppstein.

He liked to play the part of a sort of "serenissimus",

a prince of the Middle Ages,

a patron of the arts surrounded by his court, artists, etc.

I stayed out of all that.

But I took things in hand where work matters were concerned.

And even after the visit of the Danish Red Cross,

I kept on working on the town's embellishment.

And again after October.

I believe the ghetto kept going above all thanks to embellishment.

But it was all a smokescreen for the Danish Red Cross.

First Danish, then International.

At that time, in Germany,

carriages were closed off with boards because there was no glass.

Yet we obtained 1,000 m2 of glass.

In '44, we had 5,000 m3 of wood

for our work.

We had to renovate the old peoples' rooms,

the young people's hostels...

Yes, it was propaganda

and that suited me because they had to show us.

If they hid us, they could kill us.

If they showed us, they couldn't. Logical!

That was my logic and I hope that my logic was right.

They wanted to show that the Jews were well...

That they were treating us well?

That's what they wanted to show but let me tell you something.

I didn't play along with their comedy.

Embellishment also led to the film that was shot in '44.

After the screening, Günther

asked me what I thought of the film.

I told him, "Very bad.

"It shows Theresienstadt as a town full of singing."

I can see why it didn't show the elderly dying.

But it was absurd to show a camp where all people did was sing.

Who could believe it?

Of course, embellishment

had its good side.

I've already stressed its utilitarian aspect.

But it also resulted in a convoy of people

with tuberculosis to rid Theresienstadt of them.

They didn't fit in with the setting.

That was the price to pay.

The embellishment of the town resulted in a convoy

to evacuate the handicapped, the crippled, etc.

They stuck out. That too was the embellishment of the town.

But that is something that I was not responsible for.

I was not involved in that.

I was in charge of the purely technical side of building.

But I must admit

that in that area, the responsibility is still mine today.

And I must stress,

so that people know what was due to me,

the circus that took place on the occasion of the first visit.

The shepherdess with her flock,

the bread handed out with white gloves and all that fuss.

It was crazy.

I had nothing to do with the staging of all that.

I wasn't responsible for it.

Who was responsible?

Just check who was the Jewish Elder in June '44

to see who was responsible.

- It wasn't me. - Eppstein?

I don't know. You'll have to check.

That's how it was: after the October convoys,

the ghetto was a mass of rubble.

A mass of rubble.

The rooms were lit around the clock,

the streets were full of manure,

the sick fell from their beds,

water dripped from the taps and no one could stop it...

People didn't care about anything.

Everything was falling apart.

I decided to bring some order

so that the Nazis would want to keep the ghetto.

I established a 70-hour week.

I made the people work.

- The women too? - The women too.

There were female sentries.

Imagine hearing sobbing on the main square at 2 a.m.

You go over to the spot where the sobs are coming from

and you find a woman from the ghetto

who is crying near the potatoes because she is afraid.

There was no other solution.

But... one must... People...

That was your policy? Survival through...

Work! Restoring the ghetto.

Because if it wasn't restored...

That was Rumkowski's policy, Gens' policy...

- I don't know... - It was the policy of every Elder.

I don't know. I don't know the other Elders.

I knew that Theresienstadt was a showcase.

If we made it worthy of being seen, we would preserve it.

I don't know what Rumkowski or Gens' policy was.

I don't know if Lodz was visited

or if Vilnius was visited,

but Theresienstadt was visited.

And Theresienstadt was an object of propaganda.

And it had to be presented as an object of propaganda.

You understand? And...

That's why I made the people work.

To restore some order.

The people had lost all desire to live.

I remember

that we burned refuse because we couldn't evacuate it.

One day when I was with Rahm in a yard,

we saw a man getting ready to burn a brand-new coat.

Rahm saw red and wanted to kill the man,

saying it was sabotage.

I said, "No. It's a psychosis. You're the one who led them to this.

"This man is working like an automaton.

"He doesn't realize that the coat is new.

"It's not destructive anger. He doesn't notice a thing.

"He's no longer living."

But those people had to be kept alive.

So I took the responsibility of canceling the hour-long march

and introduced free time.

In short, I gave them their evenings.

I took the responsibility of authorizing

outings from 8 to 10 p.m.

I authorized free time.

I assumed responsibility for births.

I removed that taboo.

At the time when I accompanied Eppstein

to the Kommandantur, when two of us would go

so as to have a witness,

I had observed that the commander, while not expressly

authorizing births, did not forbid them either.

He would say, "You must be aware of your responsibilities."

Eppstein had always taken this to mean

that he should prevent births.

It was highly problematic.

I put an end to that situation

by telling Burger,

"Obersturmführer, we assume responsibility for births."

From that point on people were no longer harassed.

After October '44, there were 13 births in the ghetto.

The rations were abundant...

These people born in the ghetto... did they survive?

Those born after October, yes.

- Before that... - October '44.

For all those born before October '44,

the SS ordered their elimination.

There's one thing that troubles me.

On listening to you talk

about Theresienstadt,

one doesn't have the impression

that it was a place where misfortune reigned,

a place of suffering where thousands of people died,

and a stop on the way to Auschwitz for thousands more.

Anyone would think you feel nothing as you talk about Theresienstadt.

After October...

You focused on the organizational aspects.

- It was the only way... - It was hell.

Listen, I've already told you that.

If, during an operation, a surgeon

starts crying over his patient, he kills him.

You don't get very far by weeping or wavering.

I'll give you an example.

There's no worse memory

than that of cleaning the crematorium.

Not the oven itself, the place where the urns were kept.

After the October convoys...

After the end of the convoys, the order was given

to remove the urns from the place where they were kept.

- So... - What was in those urns?

The ashes of the dead.

All the dead in Theresienstadt ended up there.

That was a very bad sign. The people weren't aware of it.

But I had heard Möhs say,

"As long as the Columbarium..." - where the urns were stored -

"As long as the Columbarium stands, Theresienstadt will stand."

And now they were emptying it.

Why connect the two things?

The Ancient Romans said,

"As long as the Coliseum stands, Rome will stand."

The same for Theresienstadt and its Columbarium.

It was logical: to wipe out Theresienstadt,

they had to wipe out the Columbarium that allowed the dead to be counted.

It was logical.

- One urn was one body? - Yes.

I had to use old women to do this job.

And they spent their time reading the names

in the night, by candlelight.

They were looking for their husband's names.

- One of them... - They knew they were dead.

They wanted to keep the ashes.

To save them.

One day, Haindl brought me a woman who had found her husband's urn.

She wanted to keep the ashes.

That was terrible.

What can you do in such a situation? I focused on the idea

that the ghetto shouldn't disappear,

that everything had to be done to prevent that.

I established the 70-hour week.

With Prochnik, I looked for ways to have the ghetto visited,

for people to take an interest in it.

What good would crying have done?

What became of the ashes?

They were thrown in the Elbe.

By a group of deportees

who had been brought to the Small Fortress for that.

We learned that later...

Those people were eliminated?

Unfortunately, yes.

We learned all that later.

They picked men from the last convoy. We didn't know why.

They were taken to the Small Fortress.

There, they waited until the urns arrived.

They worked all night emptying the urns into the Elbe.

So the Nazis first wanted...

To get rid of the ashes, then the ghetto.

Then, the ghetto.

That's your answer.

I didn't have the right to start crying with those women.

If I had wept, I wouldn't have been there and them neither.

It wasn't megalomania that obliged me to identify with the ghetto.

Saving myself and saving the ghetto was more or less the same thing.

- Everything was... - One implied the other.

- You... - Me and the ghetto.

If it were in their interest to keep the ghetto,

I was saved because I had to show it.

This is a very interesting question.

Were you acting to save the ghetto or to save yourself?

My God, you can't present things in that way.

Of course, I was thinking of saving the ghetto.

At times, they told me, "You're staying here for now."

But I knew that after the visit,

they would get rid of me.

I did my job all the same.

And I didn't think of myself.

That said, I don't claim to have been ready to sacrifice myself

and never to have thought of myself. That would be a lie.

No, I thought of myself. I've already told you that...

Why am I the only Elder who survived?

Because, like Scheherazade, I told stories.

The ghetto needed to be restored so the story could be told.

- You told stories over and over. - That's right.

And when the thread of the stories was broken by the October convoys,

after the first embellishment,

we had to mend it, even if that meant working 70 hours a week.

It was mended and the story could be told.

A new embellishment.

The second.

Do you consider yourself a hero?

I'll tell you how I see it.

I did things that others didn't do

but that doesn't make me a hero. I'm not mad.

The tightrope walker who does his circus act

works with a net that his audience cannot see.

I made some very dangerous moves

but never without a net.

On October 5, '44, I said, "I won't prepare the convoys,

"do it yourselves..."

"I'm not doing the lists."

I told them that I wouldn't draw up lists.

I knew very well that they couldn't do anything to me.

Because I was the last.

Not yet the last of the unjust but the last of the guards.

They had eliminated them all: Eppstein, Edelstein, Zucker.

There was no one left.

If they had eliminated me, they'd have been helpless

and unable to manage the ghetto.

They were obliged to tolerate that.

Of course, there was a risk...

They couldn't have managed alone.

They couldn't have managed alone... This was Theresienstadt,

they could destroy it but that was out of the question.

We were weaving the thread of the story.

I counted on that.

Another secret about the ghetto. Only because it's you.

I won't say, "Keep it to yourself," as your goal is to tell the story.

A few days earlier, I had completed a project.

A speech that could possibly be read during the visit

by the International Red Cross.

The speech had to be presented to Himmler for him to authorize it.

Just imagine it:

an Elder of the Jews who has been prepared, in a way,

for a visit by the International Red Cross,

cannot be killed just like that.

Of course, it was risky all the same.

The position of Jewish Elder was never without danger.

I've always thought

that where I was concerned,

they had two possibilities:

either gas me or present me to the Red Cross.

They had the choice.

It wasn't the one and the other but the one or the other.

In the end, they couldn't decide.

They gave up.

That's quite a choice: the gas chamber or the Red Cross.

That's right.

But you had a taste for power, didn't you?

It wasn't a matter of power.

More a matter of the lack of power!

It's an interesting question. Power and the lack of power.

It was power without power.

The challenge was to accomplish something without any real power.

The questions of power...

Only an outsider

could see the Elder of the Jews

as having any power.

On seeing that he went every day to the Kommandantur perhaps.

As if that was pleasant!

Could you describe your relations

with the ghetto commander?

Rahm.

Were you under his orders?

I'll be very honest

but you must let me speak.

Because... Thank you.

I was practically the only Jew...

- there was one other whom I won't name -

who was allowed to sit in Eichmann's presence.

You're going to say, "That proves it! Traitor! Collaborator!"

"What were your relations?"

The reasons were purely pragmatic, not honorific.

I reported to Eichmann

because he had obliged me

to give him correspondence lessons. (in Vienna, in 1938 and 1939)

I had to stand in front of his desk.

He sat, the Jew stood.

I found myself standing there, looking down at him,

so he stood up.

But that obliged him to spend a long time standing.

So, in the end, he decided to send for a chair for me.

The guard at the door was Scharführer Rahm.

That was his title at the time.

Scharführer Rahm.

"Bring a chair for Murmelstein, Herr Rahm."

"A chair for Murmelstein, Herr Rahm."

The years passed. That was in '38 or '39 in Vienna.

In 1944,

Rahm had become an Obersturmführer

and Murmelstein was the deputy Elder of the Jews

in Theresienstadt, in charge of embellishing the town.

But he never got over the complex

of having had to bring me a chair.

Never.

That was something that remained there between us.

The complex of the chair.

The complex of being allowed to sit.

She's so beautiful.

It's a Czech face.

You have a young Czech girl there.

Yes, but a beauty.

She's ready to leave on the convoy to Auschwitz.

- For the East. - Yes, for the East.

But today we know what Auschwitz was.

Yes, today we know.

Today we know.

And you knew absolutely nothing about...

- Listen... - Chelmno, Sobibor?

About Chelmno and Sobibor, nothing at all.

Auschwitz? We knew Birkenau.

For us, Birkenau was a family ghetto,

I already told you that.

Let's leave it at that. Everything else you mention

was thought out later.

Please, it's true.

When the Bialystok children...

What's that story?

In 1943, there was a plan

to send Jewish children from Poland to England and Palestine

and exchange them for German civilians from the Middle East.

Those children arrived. We weren't told who they were

or where they were from. We had to house them.

We weren't supposed to talk to them.

Those who spoke to them had to be isolated from the ghetto.

The doctor, the nurse and the cooks had to be isolated from the ghetto.

It turned out that they needed washing for reasons of hygiene.

With some difficulty, we obtained permission to wash them.

That was when one child lost her identity card

that was marked "Bialystok".

As we washed them, something happened that we can explain today.

We didn't understand it at the time.

When the children saw the showers, they cried out, "Gas!"

- Gas? - They cried, "Gas!"

It's true, they cried, "Gas!"

The Bialystok children cried "Gas" on seeing the showers.

In Bialystok, they knew.

Apparently, they knew something.

But please...

- In '43? - That was in '43.

Once they had been deloused, the children returned

to the huts.

Several children fell sick with a contagious disease.

I still don't know what disease it was.

The children were isolated in an infirmary ward

with a doctor and a nurse. That was a mistake.

We should have lifted isolation and sent in our doctors

to run tests and analyze the situation

to find out what it was.

Instead of that, a doctor made sure that I couldn't help.

Burger was very strict.

Eppstein made sure we respected Burger's directives.

And Burger solved the problem in his own way.

One fine day, we found the ward empty.

No more sick children, no more nurse, no more doctor.

The next day, some coffins appeared at the crematorium.

The same number of coffins as the number of people missing.

It was obvious what had happened.

Burger had dealt with the epidemic in his own way.

His own way.

The healthy children who were left,

we were told, were supposed to go abroad.

We were supposed to provide them with chaperones.

Personally...

Eppstein didn't want to choose them.

He asked for volunteers.

A Jewish youth worker from Vienna, Aaron Menczer,

volunteered, as did Kafka's sister.

The sister of the writer Kafka, Ottla Kafka, volunteered.

They accompanied the children, supposedly to the West.

We know today that the convoy didn't go west but east.

And that's where the story ended. Another...

And the sister, Ottla Kafka...

Menczer and Ottla Kafka perished with the children in Auschwitz.

The children had only just left when the Danes arrived.

Interestingly, they visited a recently disinfected hut.

When they were led in, you could still smell the disinfection gas.

They too panicked and cried, "Gas!"

They thought they were being led...

From Denmark?

What? No, Danish Jews.

- From Denmark? - Yes.

Apparently, in 1943, they knew something in Denmark.

Edelstein was arrested

and we know what happened.

I needed to figure out

why he had been arrested.

He was arrested because he hadn't dared to say no.

We had to say no,

that we wouldn't pick anyone to make them leave.

That had to be the Jews' principle.

You want to deport the Jews? We can't stop you.

But choose them yourselves.

The Nazis only cared about precise figures.

Previously, the Jewish Elders drew up all the lists.

Therefore, they eased their conscience.

Of course, things degenerated and led to corruption.

Dispensations were granted for friends,

for family reasons, for money,

for sexual needs, for every possible reason.

All kinds of things. But...

- For sexual reasons too? - Yes. All kinds of things.

There's a book by Bashevis Singer, a novel, The Friends.

In it, he writes, "When they say in a hundred years

"that the inhabitants of the ghettos were saints,

"there will be no greater lie."

I would add: they were martyrs,

but not every martyr is a saint.

They were martyrs but not saints.

So... Edelstein

applied this system to excess.

He thus made friends and supporters.

He said yes to everyone.

When a promise wasn't kept, the person he made it to

was simply deported and no one bothered.

But there were transports to the East.

Yes.

The people didn't know at the time...

People knew there was a ghetto for families in Birkenau.

That's all they had been told.

Perhaps you know...

The "Czech families camp?"

The ghetto for Czech families in Birkenau.

You know that the people of the September convoy

were held for six months

just to write cards to their relatives and friends in Theresienstadt.

Everything possible...

With Freddy Hirsch, with Janowitz,

with the goal of spreading the illusion in Theresienstadt

that Birkenau was a subsidiary of Theresienstadt.

So... It's... But...

- I wanted to tell you... - Yes, but...

Just a second, people didn't know what Birkenau was?

No.

But people were afraid of extermination...

They knew that... It was the East. They knew.

It was the East. They knew in Theresienstadt that it was bad

but that in the East it was worse than in Theresienstadt.

They knew.

But all the stories told after,

the man who claimed to know

yet who had learned it all from novels...

I'll tell you this and I swear it's true,

we learned the truth

about Auschwitz from the Slovaks.

Because in '44, in summer '44,

escapees from Auschwitz arrived in Slovakia.

- They... - Rudolf Vrba.

The names... You're young, you can remember names.

They described everything.

We were finally convinced in April '45,

when Auschwitz evacuees arrived among us and confirmed it.

There were signs

but we refused to see them.

All that should have alerted us.

But, I admit it, we didn't take it seriously.

Remember that a Jewish Council was a "democratic body"

where we voted.

Each man voted according to his interests.

Each one had his list of protégés, you understand?

For each child that left, one of the protégés

on the Jewish Council's list stayed. You understand?

And I couldn't... Without any authority,

I was the evil one,

the bad one, the one hated and feared, there was nothing I could do.

The only thing I could do was...

The people who hated and dreaded me

on the departure of the first 5,000 people in October

didn't dare to cause the usual trouble

because I sent for them and told them,

anyone who takes a name off the list will go instead.

You can do that.

You can remove a name. But yours will go in its place.

Otherwise, remove nothing.

Or you go in their place.

Love of one's fellow man didn't go that far.

An Elder of the Jews can be condemned.

In fact, he must be condemned.

But he can't be judged.

Because one cannot take his place.

Condemned, yes.

For an Elder of the Jews is among those executed.

If he doesn't poison himself.

An Elder of the Jews, after the war,

is like a dinosaur on a freeway.

Put a dinosaur on a modern freeway.

All the lights and road signs will be lost.

A Jewish Elder is like that after the war.

He clashes with everyone, with the Germans and the Jews.

The Germans had destroyed all the documents

that contained clues as to their guilt.

The Elder of the Jews knew more than all the documents.

And when one is left...

Yes, but you're the only Jewish Elder who survived.

Don't you see a deep meaning in that...

It's absurd.

Yes, but there are people...

in Israel...

like Gershom Scholem, for example,

who thought and wrote

that Murmelstein deserved to be hanged by the Jewish people.

You see...

You see, a long time ago...

Mrs. Arendt's reply to a letter that I wrote to her

was published in the Neue Züricher Zeitung.

And then I replied to it in the same paper.

Do you want to know what I think of it?

- Yes! - You see, I could...

Is it one of the reasons why you've never been to Israel?

No, it's not that but you see...

No, I told you the reason why.

It was simple because

I considered that Israel wasn't competent to try me.

Israel would have been competent if they had done it right away.

But after they had handed me over to the Czechs,

hoping that they would hang me

and after the Czechs had said that there was nothing against me,

I had no desire to start all over again.

But where Scholem is concerned, my dear friend...

I hope you don't mind me calling you "dear friend".

It's just a manner of speaking.

I hope it's not just a manner of speaking!

That's how it is.

Scholem is a great scholar.

40 years ago, I published a History of the Jews.

At the time, he was still called Gerhard Scholem.

And I wrote in the introduction

that the works of Gerhard Scholem

allowed for an entirely new approach

to certain assessments of Jewish history.

I haven't changed my opinion. He is a very great scholar.

I would even say that I compare him

to... Sigmund Freud.

A flattering comparison.

Sigmund Freud was certainly a great man.

One of the greatest Jews who ever lived.

But Freud, who was such an expert in medicine and psychoanalysis,

ventured into the field of Bible scholarship

and wrote a total stupidity about Moses.

Similarly, Gerhard Scholem, an expert on Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism,

wanted to write on contemporary history

and talked rubbish about Murmelstein.

I could also say that, but I don't.

But I'll say it to you...

A great scholar like him,

with his scientific approach,

owes it to himself to do research.

There's plenty to research on Murmelstein.

The Red Cross archives,

the Rahm trial, the Murmelstein trial,

and, even closer to us, the Eichmann trial.

If one builds up the character of Murmelstein from these documents,

he should have... he would have... Let's say

that Gerhard Scholem should have reconsidered before wanting me hanged.

Moreover, I don't understand why,

when Eichmann was sentenced to death,

Scholem was one of those who protested against his execution.

And he wanted me executed although I was acquitted.

The gentleman is a little capricious with hanging, don't you think?

I'm just thinking that I'm 70 years old now.

70, according to the Bible, is the span of a human life.

Anything over that is no longer the rule but the exception.

Sooner or later, the problem of the Jewish Elder will be solved

and the dinosaur will vanish.

The freeway will be open for cars.

I don't wish that.

In our conversation, I have already told you,

I have the blood of an adventurer.

I have never backed down in my life,

especially when it had to do with my public functions,

I've never backed away from danger.

And you're the final danger to come my way, I hope.

But I'm not afraid of you either.

But you're a tiger.

Subtitling: CNST, Montreal