"Paula Biren, Ruth Elias, Ada Lichtman and Hanna Marton - these four women, their faces, their voices, their stories, have never left me. And in a way, you can already see their importance in the rest of my work. Paula Biren and Ruth Elias appear briefly in Shoah, even though my decision to focus on the heart of the extermination forced me to concentrate on the few survivors of the all-male sonderkommandos.
Ada Lichtman and her husband are quoted by Yehuda Lerner, in Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. As for Hanna Marton, she was very much on my mind during my preparatory work on The Last of the Unjust, so much so that I had thought of including her in it, but the detour via the Kasztner train would have taken us away from Benjamin Murmelstein's dense subject matter. The more I thought about these four women, the more imperative it seemed to me to resurrect the female faces of the Holocaust. The power of their presence on screen, their beauty, their voices, each different, alive at times, dead at others, filled with ghosts and dread and vibrating with such profound intelligence, shed unprecedented light on the fate of the women engulfed in the Nazi machinery of annihilation of the Jewish people.
Each of them brings a unique point of view to little-known chapters of the extermination.
Ruth Elias, so wonderful and moving, so radically accurate and trenchant in her words, so beautiful when she plays the accordion, unveils one of the most appalling stories ever told, from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz.
Paula Biren, a brilliant intelligence with extreme charm, appointed member of the Jewish Women's Ghetto Police by Rumkowski, the "King Khaim", dean of the Lodz Ghetto, gives us an insight into the terrible and singular history of this ghetto. The first to be set up and the last to be liquidated, the Lodz ghetto was held with an iron fist by Rumkowski, who was convinced that by turning the ghetto's population into a slave labor force in the service of the Reich, he could save it.
Ada Lichtman, who witnessed the atrocious murder of her entire family in Krakow in the first week of the war, tells the story of the daily life of a slave in the Sobibor extermination camp, whose duties included refurbishing the dolls of the exterminated children so that the Nazi officers could give them to their own children.
Hanna Marton, wracked by unbearable remorse, recounts the odyssey of the "Kasztner train", Noah's Ark, which, thanks to a deal struck with Eichmann, enabled 1,600 Hungarian Jews to embark for Bergen-Belsen and Switzerland, while at the same time several hundred thousand of their compatriots were being savagely gassed en masse in Auschwitz".
Claude Lanzmann
