us-005578-irn1003871
type: RecordSet
biographical history: Claude Lanzmann was born in Paris to a Jewish family that immigrated to France from Eastern Europe. He attended the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand. His family went into hiding during World War II. He joined the French resistance at the age of 18 and fought in the Auvergne. Lanzmann opposed the French war in Algeria and signed a 1960 antiwar petition. From 1952 to 1959 he lived with Simone de Beauvoir. In 1963 he married French actress Judith Magre. Later, he married Angelika Schrobsdorff, a German-Jewish writer, and then Dominique Petithory in 1995. He is the father of Angélique Lanzmann, born in 1950, and Félix Lanzmann (1993-2017). Lanzmann's most renowned work, Shoah, is widely regarded as the seminal film on the subject of the Holocaust. He began interviewing survivors, historians, witnesses, and perpetrators in 1973 and finished editing the film in 1985. In 2009, Lanzmann published his memoirs under the title"Le lièvre de Patagoni" (The Patagonian Hare). He was chief editor of the journal"Les Temps Modernes" which was founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, until his death on July 5, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/claude-lanzmann-changed-the-history-of-filmmaking-with-shoah From 1974 to 1984, Corinna Coulmas was the assistant director to Claude Lanzmann for his film"Shoah" She was born in Hamburg in 1948. She studied theology, philosophy, and sociology at the Sorbonne and Hebrew language and Jewish culture at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and INALCO in Paris. She now lives in France and publishes about the Five Senses. http://www.corinna-coulmas.eu/english/home-page.html Hersh Smolar (1905-1993) was born in Zambrów, Poland. From a young age, he became involved in revolutionary activities, especially with Yiddish-speaking Communist groups in Moscow. Smolar served as a Comintern agent in Poland from 1928 to 1939; twice arrested, he spent six years in prison. After World War II began, he fled to Bialystok and became editor…
date: September or October 1979
has beginning date: 1985-01-01
has end date: 1985-12-31
has or had holder: us-005578
has or had identifier: 1
has or had identifier: 2
has or had some members with language: deu
has or had some members with language: fra
has or had some members with language: yid
has record set type: Item
identifier: irn1003871
note: Claude Lanzmann spent twelve years locating survivors, perpetrators, and eyewitnesses for his nine and a half hour film Shoah released in 1985. Without archival footage, Shoah weaves together extraordinary testimonies to render the step-by-step machinery of the destruction of European Jewry. Critics have called it"a masterpiec" and a"monument against forgetting" The Claude Lanzmann SHOAH Collection consists of roughly 185 hours of interview outtakes and 35 hours of location filming.
scope and content: Hersh Smolar, was the editor of a Yiddish daily newspaper. After the war began, he became a leading member of the resistance in the Minsk ghetto and the commissar of a partisan group operating in the Belorussian forests. He discusses conditions in the ghetto and resistance activities. FILM ID 3376 -- Camera Rolls #1-3 -- 01:00:07 to 01:30:17 Hersh Smolar was an editor of a Yiddish daily paper in Bialystok and left for Minsk by foot in June/July 1941 to get out. [The Germans advanced into Minsk on June 28, 1941, blocking all roads for evacuation]. He found Minsk abandoned by the Russian government with about 70,000 Jews remaining in the city when the Germans came. He believed that Communism could solve the Jewish problem, and rather than abandoning his"peopl" (the Jews) to take an offer of refuge with an acquaintance, he stayed in the Minsk ghetto. The Germans immediately ordered the establishment of a Jewish ghetto in Minsk on July 19, 1941. CR2 Smolar describes how the head of the Judenrat was selected by the Germans. The Russian government"escaped like coward". Most of the Jews in Minsk did not know what Hitler represented since it was forbidden to write about fascism in the press. There were rumors but no one believed them. They thought they could negotiate with the Germans, or simply live. The first realization came in November 1941 on the Anniversary of the October Revolution when the Germans provoked the Jews and made them hold red flags in order to promote propaganda back in Germany that Jews are Bolsheviks. Some Jews were shot and the first transports were sent away. Smolar and others established an organization in the ghetto to inform people about fascism. Responding to Lanzmann's questioning, he describes the conditions in the ghetto and forced labor of skilled workers. He suggests that there was not a quiet period in the Minsk ghetto. People were murdered daily (shooting in the streets, fighting between the military and the Nazi party, Aktions). CR3 01:19…
title: Hersh Smolar - Minsk ghetto