Benjamin Murmelstein, a man from the "town as if" : a discussion of Claude Landzmann's film The Last of the Unjust (France/Austria, 2013)

Claude Lanzmann's film The Last of the Unjust (2013) presents the director's extended interviews with Rabbi Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein, the only survivor of the Jewish Council of the Elders of Theresienstadt. Lanzmann had shelved his 1975 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.