Benjamin Murmelstein, a man from the “Town ‘as if’”: a discussion of Claude Lanzmann’s film The Last of the Unjust (France/Austria, 2013)^†

Claude Lanzmann’s film The Last of the Just (2013) presents the director’s extended interview with Rabbi Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein, the only survivor of the Jewish Council of the Elders of Theresienstadt. Lanzmann had shelved his1975 footage until 2013 for perspective, and now supplemented it with historical material and filmed sequences of the landscapes of “Ghetto Terezin,” Vienna and other locations. The current article treats the interview as a visual document of first-person court testimony delivered by an eyewitness, examines the interviewer-interviewee relationship and the moral implications of Murmelstein’s actions in the context of the chaos in which he acted.