us-005578-irn1004200
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 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. 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
date: May 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: heb
has or had some members with language: yid
has or had some members with language: fra
has record set type: Item
identifier: irn1004200
note: Mordechai Podchlebnik 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.
note: Staff-curated clips include: Clip 1, Film ID 3295, 02:11:23 - 02:20:34 Clip 2, Film ID 3296, 03:06:21 - 03:22:42
scope and content: Mordechai (Michael) Podchlebnik recognized the corpses of his wife and children when unloading bodies from a gas van at Chelmno. He was a witness at many postwar trials, including the Eichmann trial. He tells Lanzmann of his escape from Chelmno and how he tried to inform people about Chelmno, but he was not believed at first, until his story was corroborated by another escaped prisoner. FILM ID 3294 -- Camera Rolls #1-7 -- 01:00:16 to 01:32:27 Lanzmann is seated with Podchlebnik at a table surrounded by windows. Off camera is an interpreter, Fanny Apfelbaum. The tape jumps frequently and the audio is poor. Lanzmann asks about Podchlebnik's past, saying that he looks young. They talk about his experience as an athlete after the war. Lanzmann asks to cut. 01:00:58 Podchlebnik says that before the war, his parents dealt with cattle. The Germans began deporting Jews from his town of Kowo. 01:06:16 Lanzmann asks if Kowo was a Jewish city. Podchlebnik says there were 3,000 Jews there. 01:06:46 Lanzmann asks about Kowo's population. Podchlebnik says that it was an old city, at least 800 years old, populated by about 6,000 people, mostly Jews. The Jews occupied all professions and relations with the Poles were good. Podchlebnik was a cattle tradesman, taking cheap cattle from Kowo to sell in Łódź. 01:11:37 Podchlebnik was married with two children; he was 30 when the Germans invaded. The Germans burned the synagogue, and all men were required to present themselves for work. For a few months, he repaired the bombed out bridges. He says that the Germans did not really create a ghetto but moved some people around to keep Jews in a certain place. After 6 months, they moved half the Jewish population to Loubetski. Podchlebnik worked in a restaurant owned by a Polish friend of his. Meanwhile, he thought the relocation was merely a matter of transferring populations. 01:22:31 Podchlebnik stayed in Kowo with official permission because of his job; everyone else was transported to B…
title: Mordechai Podchlebnik - Chelmno