Four female Holocaust survivors whose stories are finally being shared.
By Savannah Ramirez
In 1985, a nine-hour documentary film called “Shoah” was released to the public to critical acclaim. “Shoah,” which means “Holocaust” in Hebrew, was directed by French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann and featured cinematically groundbreaking interviews with survivors and witnesses, who described their experiences during the Nazi genocide of Jews in Europe.
Now, almost 25 years later, Regina Longo, an archivist and historian in the department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, has restored and reconstructed four interviews by women Holocaust survivors whose interviews never made it to Lanzmann’s original film. Longo is an alumna of UC Santa Barbara who spent six years working to salvage these interviews from the cutting room floor to honor and remember a tragic part of history.
Hosted by the Carsey-Wolf Center and the Religious Studies department at UC Santa Barbara, Longo screened and spoke about her film “Shoah: Four Sisters” at an event recently at the Pollock Theatre.
“These films are points of confluence — death of family members and harshness of ghettos or concentration camps,” she told an audience of campus and community members.
It was not long into the footage when members of the audience were overcome with emotion as Hannah Marton, one of the women Holocaust survivors, described in a shaky voice her last day in her quaint hometown of Cluj (Kolozsvar), Transylvannia before the Nazis took her and her husband into a wagon.
Marton refers to her husband’s diary to recall the events. She refers to the small brown leather journal throughout the interview as it contains exact dates and numbers written by her husband. The Martons were both lawyers who quickly became acquainted with Dr. Rudolf Kasztner, a fellow Jew who was later accused of collaborating with Adolf Eichmann to spare 1,600 Jewish lives. Marton was one of those whose life was spared as a result of Kasztner’s negotiations.
When Lanzmann asked her if she felt guilty, she responded, “Everyday.” When asked if her husband had ever felt guilty, she said, “He believed in fate.”
Marton’s husband had died just a year and a half prior to the 1970 interview. Her interview uncomfortably highlighted her privilege as Lanzmann pushed her to realize that it was because of connections to the ‘elite’ that she was spared. Kasztner believed in saving those who were dedicated to their religion, came from wealth, or were highly educated, in hopes that they’d be able to represent the Jewish community appropriately. But Marton remained ambivalent about how she survived and instead credits Dr. Kasztner for saving her life.
Ada Lichtman describes the scarcity of food for Jewish people being transported during the Holocaust, many going two or three days without food or water.
Ada Lichtman was also a Holocaust survivor, although her survival was a result of her working directly for the Nazis as a housemaid. She remembers washing the clothing of newly transported Jewish victims and that of those who had been killed.
But the most troublesome memory for Lichtman was hearing children being tortured. What she thought were geese were children wailing as they were being thrown from a rail car. She goes on to describe instances where she and others were also tortured in the rail car, including being forced to strip down and dance with one another next to day-old corpses.
She briefly recalls the instances in which young women were forced into sex to survive. “The Germans often took pretty women for their services,” Lichtman says in the film.
Of the estimated 100 others in the rail car with her, she recalled seeing only three people survive. As Lichtman described the events onscreen, her husband was sitting next to her and could be seen with his head buried in his hand for a large part of the interview; he lost both his first wife and their kids.
Longo’s three-hour documentary contrasts the lives of two women from two different social classes. Marton was a former lawyer and Lichtman’s father polished shoes for a living. Although both were survivors, their journeys narrate different realities about the chances for survival during the Holocaust. But both experienced similar traumas. As the final minutes of Lichtman’s interview closes, sniffling could be heard in the audience.
“It was just really hard to watch,” said Kye Hansen, a Santa Barbara resident who attended the screening. “They [history lessons] don’t tell you that there was some man deciding which Jewish people were worth saving or were better than other Jewish people. That really bothered me.”
Savannah Ramirez is a fourth-year philosophy major at UC Santa Barbara.