The Cohen Media Group will release on Blu-ray directror Claude Lanzmann's (
Shoah) latest project
The Last of the Unjust a.k.a.
Le dernier des injustes (2013). The release will be available for purchase on September 23rd.
Official synopsis: 1975. In Rome, Claude Lanzmann filmed a series of interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, the last
President of the Jewish Council in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, the only "Elder of the Jews"
not to have been killed during the war. A rabbi in Vienna, following the annexation of Austria by Germany in
1938, Murmelstein fought bitterly with Adolf Eichmann, week after week for seven years, managing to help
around 121,000 Jews leave the country, and preventing the liquidation of the ghetto.
2012. Claude Lanzmann, at 87 – without masking anything of the passage of time on men, but showing the
incredible permanence of the locations involved – exhumes these interviews shot in Rome, returning to
Theresienstadt, the town "given to the Jews by Hitler", a so-called model ghetto, but a ghetto of deceit
chosen by Adolf Eichmann to dupe the world. We discover the extraordinary personality of Benjamin
Murmelstein: a man blessed with a dazzling intelligence and a true courage, which, along with an unrivaled
memory, makes him a wonderfully wry, sardonic and authentic storyteller.
Through these three periods, from Nisko in Poland to Theresienstadt, and from Vienna to Rome, the film
provides an unprecedented insight into the genesis of the Final Solution. It reveals the true face of
Eichmann, and exposes without artifice the savage contradictions of the Jewish Councils.
Note: Director Lanzmann's acclaimed documentary film
Shoah is already out on Blu-ray, courtesy of The Criterion Collection. You can see our listing and review of this release
here.