“The Four Sisters”, moving stories of four survivors of the Jewish genocide

Claude Lanzmann spoke with them at length for his film “Shoah”. Shortly before his death, he made a tetralogy.

Ce that it took strength, health, courage, helping hands, strokes of luck and timely reflexes to escape the Nazi death machine, survive and testify many years later in front of the camera of Claude Lanzmann of what they saw, heard and experienced like millions of other women who have not come back. About thirty years later Shoah, Claude Lanzmann plunged back into the story, partially removed from the editing, of four survivors, whose words he restores today. The four films he offers us highlight their four unique trajectories. Which makes them “sisters”, so to speak, to each other, but also to us, as their individual stories are part of the collective history of the destruction of the Jews of Europe.

The first of these four episodes focuses on the story of Ruth Elias, a Czechoslovak deported to Theresienstadt, then to Auschwitz, where her situation as a pregnant woman brought her into contact with Dr. Mengele. The second gives the floor to Ada Lichtman, a survivor of the Sobibor camp, where she arranged dolls taken from Jewish children and intended for little Nazi girls. Filmed in their familiar environment, where the background noise of life resonates – one grabs her accordion to sing songs which help her to keep going, the other sits behind a pile of dolls which still accompany her -, these women anchored in the present of the filming oppose the logic of death with the voice of memory, that of survival.

Broadcast of episodes 3 and 4 on 22/1, at 0.00 and 0.55.