Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein was the last president of the Judenrat (Jewish Council) of Theresienstadt. I filmed him for a whole week in Rome in 1975. The case of Theresienstadt was, in my view, a crucial one, both lateral and central in the genesis and development of the Final Solution. But I did not include in the construction of Shoah these long hours of interviews, rich in first-hand revelations. It took me a long time to realize that Benjamin Murmelstein and Theresienstadt required a film of their own.
Sixty kilometers northwest of Prague, Theresienstadt, a fortress town built at the end of the 18th century by Emperor Joseph II in honor of his mother, Maria Theresa of Austria, had been chosen by the Nazis to be the site of what Adolf Eichmann himself called a "model ghetto" - a ghetto for the watch. In March 1938, a year after the annexation of Austria (Anschluss), Germany had dismantled the Czechoslovak Republic, replaced it with the rump state of Slovakia, which it made its ally, and the protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia (Hitler's namesake for the Czech Republic). The decision to create the Theresienstadt ghetto was made in November 1941. As they had done in all the ghettos in Poland since October 1939, the Nazis set up a Council of Elders, composed of twelve members and presided over by a dean, also known as Judenälteste - literally: "the oldest Jew" - a vocabulary of contempt and fear with tribal connotations. In Theresienstadt, during the four years of the ghetto's existence, there were three successive deans of the Jews.
The first, Jacob Edelstein, was from Prague, a Zionist and a lover of youth. After two years of Nazi hell, where everything, absolutely everything, was forbidden to Jews, he welcomed the birth of Theresienstadt with blind optimism, hoping that the difficult life ahead would be like training for their future settlement in Palestine. The Nazis arrested him in Theresienstadt in early 1944, deported him to Auschwitz and shot him in the back of the head (Genickschuss), after murdering his wife and two children in identical fashion before his very eyes. The second dean was Paul Eppstein, from Berlin, who was also shot in the back of the head in Theresienstadt itself, in the Kleine Festung (Little Fortress), which served as prison and place of execution.
Benjamin Murmelstein, the third and last, had been rabbi in Vienna, assistant to Josef Löwenherz, who presided over the Austrian capital's Jewish community.
Murmelstein was spectacularly ugly and brilliantly intelligent, the most intelligent of the three and, in my opinion, the bravest. Unlike Jacob Edelstein, he couldn't stand the suffering of the elderly. Although he succeeded in maintaining the ghetto until the last days of the war, sparing its population the death marches ordered by Hitler, he concentrated the hatred of a number of survivors on himself. As the holder of a diplomatic passport issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross, he could easily have fled. But he refused, preferring to be arrested and imprisoned by the Czechs, to whom he had been accused of collaborating with the enemy. He remained in prison for eighteen months before being acquitted of all charges. He went into exile in Rome, where he led a very harsh existence, never visiting Israel despite his deep desire to do so and his pure love for the land.
All the deans of the Jews met a tragic end, and Benjamin Murmelstein is the only one of them to have remained alive, which makes his testimony infinitely precious. He doesn't lie, he's ironic, sardonic, hard on others and himself. Thinking of the title of André Schwarz-Bart's masterpiece, Le dernier des Justes, he calls himself "The last of the unjust". So it was he who gave his title to the film that is the source of this book. Before our interviews in 1975, he wrote a book in Italian entitled Terezin ,il ghetto-modello di Eichmann (Theresienstadt, Eichmann's model ghetto), published in 1961. The tone of the book and the interviews is very different: the book portrays the victims and their appalling suffering with fraternal compassion and a true writer's gift, whereas in our interviews Murmelstein presents his own defense.
When he first appears in the film, it's 1943, when a "transport" of German Jews from Hamburg arrives, the Nazis having decided to make Germany judenrein (purged of its Jews) and deport to Theresienstadt those whose status had hitherto allowed them to remain at home, even in the worst conditions. But since 1941, Theresienstadt had been populated mainly by Czech and Austrian Jews. Thanks to the former, members of the technical office responsible for drawing up construction plans and outstanding draughtsmen, we have an extraordinary collection of works of art that bear witness to what life was really like in the "model ghetto": built to house 7,000 soldiers at most, Theresienstadt absorbed 50,000 Jews at peak times. Most of these genius painters and draughtsmen, who would rise in the dead of night to clandestinely produce their work and bury it deep in the earth, were murdered in the gas chambers of the extermination camps. But their names are forever inscribed in our memories. Those of the great musicians, actors, writers and directors who passed through Theresienstadt before dying further east too. A final word: Benjamin Murmelstein, appointed by Eichmann to organize the forced emigration of Austrian Jews from Vienna from summer 1938 until the outbreak of war, succeeded in removing more than 120,000 of them.
