us-005578-irn1003915
note: Jan Karski is in SHOAH (1985). The parts of his interview in the final release are not available at USHMM. 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: Jan Karski tells of his capture and torture by the Gestapo when he was a courier for the Polish underground. He also describes his clandestine visit to the Warsaw ghetto and his meeting with Szmul Zygielbojm, six months before Zygelbojm's suicide. See pages 491 - 494 of the English translation of Lanzmann's memoir The Patagonian Hare (March 2012) for a description of his interactions with Karski after filming this interview. FILM ID 3133 -- Camera Rolls #1-5 -- 01:00:33 to 01:32:10 Karski tells of his first missions as a courier for the Polish Government in Exile. [No visual until 01:01:56] He was caught by the SS with an incriminating roll of film and beaten severely. The SS soldier told him that he wanted to get in touch with the Polish underground, but Karski did not reveal any information to him. Karski cut both of his wrists and was transported to various hospitals under the supervision of the Gestapo. With help, Karski escaped from a hospital in Warsaw and after a period of recuperation went to Krakow in 1940. In 1942, he resumed his service as a courier and met with major political parties to deliver messages from the delegates of the Polish Government. He explains that the messages were never written down, but were either memorized or on microfilm. Karski was contacted by representatives of the Jewish underground, who he refers to as the Bund leader (Leon Feiner) and the Zionist leader (Bermann), and met with them in a house near but not in the ghetto. In a manner that Karski describes as desperate, the two leaders asked Karski to take messages to London about the extermination of the Jews. Karski was asked to tell the exiled Polish president to contact the Pope. He was also told not to contact non-Polish Jewish leaders in London because they might become too alarmed and"complicat" matters. FILM ID 3134 -- Camera Rolls #7-9 -- 02:00:05 to 02:35:47 The Jewish leaders wanted Karski to go to other government officials with messages. They wanted the Allied gover…
has beginning date: http://lod.ehri-project-test.eu/dates/1985-01-01
has or had identifier: http://lod.ehri-project-test.eu/units/us-005578-irn1003915/alternateIDs/1
has or had holder: us-005578
note: The last ten pages of the transcript are missing from the USHMM files.
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 Some women central to the production of"Shoa" (1985) include Hebrew interpreter, Francine Kaufmann; Polish interpreter, Barbra Janicka; Yiddish interpreter, Mrs. Apflebaum; assistant directors, Corinna Coulmas and Irena Steinfeldt; editors, Ziva Postec and Anna Ruiz; and assistant editor, Yael Perlov.
has or had some members with language: eng
title: Jan Karski
date: 1978 October
note: Staff-curated clips include: Clip 1, Film ID 3136, 04:20:57 - 04:31:55 Clip 2, Film ID 3137, 05:00:47 - 05:11:10 Clip 3, Film ID 3137, 05:14:54 - 05:18:13 Clip 4, Film ID 3142, 10:11:09 - 10:14:56
has end date: http://lod.ehri-project-test.eu/dates/1985-12-31
has record set type: Item
has or had identifier: http://lod.ehri-project-test.eu/units/us-005578-irn1003915/alternateIDs/2
type: RecordSet
identifier: irn1003915