Lost in Criterion

In addition to Shoah (1985), the Criterion release contains three of the five additional films Claude Lanzmann has made from the footage he shot for his landmark documentary. A Visitor from the Living (1997) is an interview with Maurice Rossel in which Lanzmann swings hard at Rossel's report for the Red Cross on conditions in the "potemkin ghetto" of Theresienstadt. In Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001) Lanzmann speaks with Yehuda Lerner about his participation in the Sobibor revolt. While Jan Karski is interviewed in a significant portion of Shoah, The Karski Report (2010) is day two of that interview, wherein Karski recounts his heroic efforts to inform Allied officials, including FDR, about the Nazis' extermination of the Jewish people of Europe, hoping to force the Allies to act to save them. As Karski said in a later interview with Hannah Rosen in 1995: "The Allies considered it impossible and too costly to rescue the Jews, because they didn't do it." Ending genocidal authoritarianism seems impossible until we act. And we must act, from Cop City to Gaza City we must act.