Starting in 1999, Lanzmann made several films comprised of interviews conducted in the 1970s that did not make it into the final work. In the last years of the director’s life, he decided to devote a film to four women from four different areas of Eastern Europe with four different destinies.
Each woman improbably survived after war: Ruth Elias from Ostravia, Czechoslovakia (The Hippocratic Oath); Paula Biren from Lodz, Poland (Baluty); Ada Lichtman from further south in Krakow (The Merry Flea) and Hannah Marton from Cluj, or Kolozsvár, in Transylvania (Noah’s Ark).
As survivors of Nazi horrors, they tell their individual stories as crucial witnesses to the barbarism they had experienced. “What they have in common,” wrote Lanzmann, “apart from the specific horrors that each one of them was subjected to, is their intelligence, an incisive, sharp and carnal intelligence that rejects all pretense and false reasons-in a word-idealism.”
