Starting in 1999, Claude Lanzmann made several films that could be considered satellites of Shoah, comprised of interviews conducted in the 1970s that didn’t fit into the final, monumental work. In the last years of the late filmmaker’s life, he devoted a film to four women from four different areas of Eastern Europe with four different destinies, each finding herself improbably alive after war’s end: Ruth Elias from Ostravia, Czechoslovakia; Paula Biren from Lodz, Poland; Ada Lichtman from further south in Krakow; and Hanna Marton from Cluj, Romania.
Survivors of unimaginable horrors during the Holocaust, they tell their individual stories as crucial witnesses to the barbarism they experienced, possessing a vivid intelligence and a candor that make their accounts both searing and unforgettable. “What they have in common,” wrote Lanzmann, “apart from the specific horrors each of them was subjected to, is their intelligence, an incisive, sharp and carnal intelligence that rejects all pretense and false reasons—in a word—idealism.” A Cohen Media Group release
“Has the emotional impact and cinematic prowess of great drama.”—The Hollywood Reporter