“How come you’re still alive?”
Benjamin Murmelstein says those were the first words he heard from a war-crimes interrogator.
Claude Lanzmann’s documentary, built around an extensive interview the director conducted in Rome in 1975 while he was filming what became “Shoah,” is a nearly four-hour examination of that question — or rather, accusation.
Murmelstein was a rabbi who eventually became the “Elder of the Jews” — an administrator of sorts in Theresienstadt, the notorious “model ghetto” in then-Czechoslovakia that was really a way station to Auschwitz.
After the war, Murmelstein was acquitted of collaboration. The film asks whether the audience, the interviewer or even the man himself can do the same.
The sections that show Lanzmann, now in his late 80s, roaming present-day sites and reading from a memoir by Murmelstein have a murmurous, repetitive quality.
Murmelstein is the center. Erudite, combative, even blackly witty, his words tumble out as he points out that he could have left (he had a Red Cross passport), but says he stayed for his “mission.”
He says he eradicated typhus from the place, and by cooperating with a Nazi propaganda film about the camp, he made it harder to murder the inmates in such plain sight.
To some extent the film is a thundering riposte to Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem.”
Arendt depicted Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi who Murmelstein calls “a demon,” as a mere bureaucrat, and men like Murmelstein as highly culpable themselves.
Lanzmann, for his part, begins the interview with a sharp, probing manner; by the end, the filmmaker’s questions and body language are conveying something altogether different.