SHOAH: THE FOUR SISTERS (Masters of Cinema) Blu-ray edition

Zavvi - The Home of Pop CultureEureka Entertainment to release SHOAH: THE FOUR SISTERS, a powerful and poignant 4-part documentary from Claude Lanzmann, as part of The Masters of Cinema Series in DVD & Blu-ray editions from 18 February 2019. Paula Biren, Ruth Elias, Ada Lichtman, Hanna Marton: Four Jewish women, witnesses and survivors of the most insane and pitiless barbarism, and who, for that reason alone, but for many others also, deserve to be inscribed forever into the memory of humankind. What they have in common, beside the specific horrors to which each of them were subjected, is a searingly sharp, almost-physical intelligence, which rejects all pretence or faulty reasoning. In a word, idealism.Filmed by Claude Lanzmann during the preparation of what would become Shoah, each of these four extraordinary women deserved a film in their own right, to fully illustrate their exceptional fibre, and to reveal through their gripping accounts four little-known chapters of the extermination. THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH Ruth Elias was seventeen when the Nazis invaded her native city of Moravska Ostrava, Czechoslovakia where her prosperous family had lived for generations. In April 1942, all were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Elias's parents and sister were deported to Auschwitz and soon murdered, but she was able to remain behind by marrying her boyfriend. By the winter of 1943 she became pregnant, a grave danger since pregnant women were targeted for deportation and Nazi regulations made it impossible to secure an abortion. She was sent to Auschwitz in the Fall of 1943. Interned in the infamous Czech Family Camp in Section B II B at Birkenau, she lived only a few hundred meters from a gas chamber and crematorium complex. When her pregnancy was finally recognized, she was placed under the care of the infamous Josef Mengele, who subjected her to a most cruel medical ordeal, forcing Elias to make the hardest possible decision a mother could face. THE MERRY FLEA On the very day Germany invaded Poland in September, 1939, all the men in Ada Lichtman's town of Wieliczka were rounded up by the SS, taken to a forest and shot. One of them was Lichtman's father, a cobbler. From then on, she was possessed by a single question: how will I be killed? Every day, the Germans selected more victims for execution; the survivors of these massacres, including Ada and her first husband, were driven from village to village to perform forced labour. Eventually those still alive were deported in cattle cars to the extermination camp at Sobibor where more than 250,000 Jews from across Europe would be gassed. Among only three women selected for work in the camp, Lichtman washed laundry and repaired dolls taken from Jewish children for export to Germany. The dolls forever evoked memories of this travesty. NOAH'S ARK Hanna Marton was the wife of a professor who worked with Rezsö (Rudolf) Kasztner, the head of Aid and Rescue Committee for Jewish refugees in Hungary. Once the Nazis occupied Hungary in the Spring of 1944 and began to deport thousands of Jews every day to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kasztner negotiated with Adolf Eichmann for the release of 1,684 Jews in exchange for $1,000 per person. After an odyssey by train through the collapsing Reich, most reached safety in Switzerland. Although Kasztner had saved the largest number of Jews during the Holocaust, his plan scandalized many, because Kasztner had selected many of his family and friends, including Hanna and her husband, as well as those he deemed essential for the future of Zionism, to board the rescue train. Nearly 450,000 Hungarian Jews subsequently died in the gas chambers of Birkenau while the Martons survived. Hanna Marton remained acutely aware that her survival was purchased at the expense of countless others who died. Offered an opportunity to escape, she had taken it, though her sense of guilt about having been among the privileged in Kastner's convoy is deeply felt during her relentlessly painful account. BAŁUTY Bałuty is the name of a slum district in the Polish city of Lodz that the Nazis designated in 1940 as the ghetto for the large Jewish population of the city. The Nazi-appointed president of the Jewish council of elders, Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, decided that part of the community would serve the Germans as a slave labour force. His strategy may have postponed the destruction of the ghetto, but nearly 45,000 Jews died of starvation and disease in Lodz. Paula Biren was just seventeen when she was forced to move with her family into the ghetto in 1940. Upon her graduation and in need of a job to avoid being deported, Biren accepted an administrative position with Rumkowski's Jewish women's police force. It was only after she realized her complicity in sending black marketeers to their deaths that she quit. Biren remained in the ghetto until August of 1944 when the Germans deported everyone, including Rumkowski, to camps. Her mother and sister were gassed upon arrival in Auschwitz, and her father died shortlyFeatures:All four interviews presented across two discsOptional English subtitlesPLUS: A booklet featuring new writing