I based Un vivant qui passe on an interview Maurice Rossel gave me in 1979, when I was shooting Shoah. For reasons of length and architecture, I had decided not to treat the extraordinary subject of Theresienstadt head-on in my film, as it was both central to the unfolding and genesis of the destruction of the Jews of Europe, and at the same time a side issue. We know that Theresienstadt, a fortress town sixty kilometers northeast of Prague, was chosen by the Nazis to be the site of what Adolf Eichmann himself called a "model ghetto". Emptied of its Czech inhabitants, from November 1941 to April 1945 it was home to the so-called "Prominenten", long integrated into German society, who had either failed to emigrate or, being too old to start a new life, had given up on doing so, believing themselves protected by their very status (decorated veterans of the First World War, leading doctors, lawyers, senior civil servants and politicians from pre-Hitler Germany, representatives of Jewish organizations, artists, intellectuals, etc.).) and to whom it was difficult to immediately apply the "special treatment" given to Jews from Poland, the Baltic states and the Soviet Union. Also arriving in Theresienstadt in 1943 and 1944 were a small number of Jews from Denmark who had failed to escape to Sweden, Holland, Luxembourg, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and even France.
The truth is that this "model ghetto" was a place of transit, the first or last stage, as the case may be, of a journey to death that led most of those who stayed there to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Sobibor, Belzec or Treblinka, sometimes after a detour via the ghettos of Poland, Belarus or the Baltic, which were not "model" ghettos.
Very precise statistics are available on the number of trains and the identity of the victims. The actual living conditions at Theresienstadt were appalling: the majority of the Jewish men and women concentrated there were very old, languishing in misery, promiscuity and malnutrition in the overcrowded barracks of the fortress. In Theresienstadt, as elsewhere, the Nazis deceived and robbed those they were preparing to kill: the Frankfurt Gestapo, for example, offered gullible old women in Frankfurt a choice between a sunny and a northerly apartment before they were deported to Theresienstadt, forcing them to pay rent in advance for phantom accommodation.
The Jews weren't the only ones to be deceived: a ghetto "for the watch" or even a "Potemkin" ghetto (legend has it that Prince Grigori Aleksandrovitch Potemkin had fake villages built along the route that Catherine II, Empress of Russia, was to take on a visit to the Ukraine and Crimea, newly annexed territories), Theresienstadt was to be shown and was shown.
At the head of an ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) delegation, Maurice Rossel inspected the ghetto in June 1944, with the consent of the German authorities.
I would like to thank Maurice Rossel for allowing me to use the interview he gave me in 1979.
" Now in my eighties," he wrote, "I don't remember very well the man I was then. I think I'm wiser or madder, and it's all the same. Please be charitable, don't make me too ridiculous."
I didn't try to.
