Lanzmann died in 2018, at 92, leaving this as the last of the Shoah films assembled by his hand - though there may well be additional worthwhile banks of material in the 200 hours left over to use. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is now in control of the archive, may choose to explore that and build many more films going forward. (In fact, the USHMM has been digitizing the material for public access, unedited, much of which can be watched for free on their website.) What Lanzmann did was be artlessly simple and ethically scrupulous: eschewing the use of Holocaust archive footage (the 32 minutes of Alain Resnais' Night and Fog [1956] pioneered the reassembling of the camp footage and for many was about as much as they could take), Lanzmann simply interviewed the people that were there, in huge swatches of screen time, presenting the lives of survivors and their living memory, which they recount, often with grace and often with agony. The effect, counterintuitively, is that the Shoah films are not about survival, but about death and horror on a cosmic scale, a scale we do not see but are forced to imagine, by way of the aging, weary, tremulous witnesses. They are - perhaps in conjunction with Resnais' indispensable short - imperative cinematic texts and powerful all-fact antidotes to the tear-jerking heroism of the film most Americans think accurately represents the Holocaust, Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993).
Four Sisters is a quartet of such interviews, joined together almost haphazardly - Lanzmann could've used any of the dozens of his interviews, and of course we know well that the stories told are reflective of experiences owned by thousands of survivors. Indeed, the stories are similar, as you'd imagine: invasion, harassment, transport, camp life, the cunning fight for survival as you watch family and friends vanish on the trains or up in smoke, the emotional toll on staying alive as so many die. In the first and longest section, Ruth Elias, a Czech Jew, recalls her time in and out of Auschwitz. After giving birth, she was forbidden by Josef Mengele to feed her baby - "to see how long" it would take to starve to death. It's a tale that dwarfs Sophie's Choice once a prisoner-doctor, after eight days, offers Elias a morphine hypo to kill the wasting child, so she might survive for work detail. What would you do, we think to ourselves, in the classic reflexive response nearly all Holocaust witnessing provokes in us nowadays, and as always the question itself is as far as we dare go. Elias, like all of her brethren in suffering, did decide, and therein lived to tell the tale.
The second section sits with Ada Lichtman, who recounts how her time in the camps was absurdly taken up with refurbishing stolen dolls so that Nazi officers could then take home to their own children. The third section is the most politically complex: Hanna Marton, a Hungarian Jew, was one of the famous 1,684 such Jews the Nazis had allowed to escape to Switzerland thanks to the negotiations between Hungarian activist Rezsö Kasztner (a friend of Marton's husband) and Adolf Eichmann (before the Nazis' invasion of Hungary) in exchange for sizable ransoms. Lichtman is naturally hyperaware of the situation's moral bankruptcy - though Kasztner was doing his Schindler's best to save whomever he could, hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were left behind in the process, most of them often the poorer and less connected. Kasztner was later tried by Israeli courts for collusion and then assassinated, and Marton's subsequent life is fraught with a sense of mortal compromise.
The last story hones in on Paula Biren (who like Elias also appears in the original Shoah), a Polish woman who remembers attending a special high school within the Lodz ghetto and working for a Jewish women's police force there, in which she helped arrest a peddler one night who would likely be deported, thereby structuring her adolescent memory of the war around moments of collaborationism and guilt. Lanzmann's seemingly shrugging filmmaking choices - often cutting to himself, listening and smoking - seems in itself to be a kind of integrity, an act of no-frills preservation, and Four Sisters is simply a frame for stories like all the other stories and yet stories-that-must-not-be-forgotten. You could go the Holocaust Memorial website and view many others just like it - but will we? This is a film project that's bigger than cinema, more vital than culture, burning with its own moral, existential necessity. The least you could say is that Lanzmann's documents should be part of school curriculums in every one of the world's schools - not just Israel's.
By Michael Atkinson
