The Last of the Unjust

Three decades after his cinematic milestone, Shoah, Claude Lanzmann once again reorients our understanding of the Holocaust. The Last of the Unjust centers on Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Jewish elder of Theresienstadt (the so-called "model" ghetto), a figure despised by many of the ghetto's surviving inhabitants. Intercut with footage of Lanzmann himself revisiting specific sites in Vienna and the Czech Republic, the brilliant Murmelstein—sometimes excitedly but more often calmly—explains his actions and precisely defines his paradoxical role in history.