S01E01 The Hippocratic Oath - Ruth Elias
Ruth Elias was 17 when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in March 1939. After three years of hiding on a farm, the family was denounced and deported in to the Theresienstadt camp in April 1942. During...
Shoah: Four Sisters
S01E02: The Merry Flea - Ada Lichtman
Ada Lichtman was faced with absolute horror from the start: the day the Germans invaded Poland, all the men in Wieliczka – a little town near Kracow where she lived – were rounded up by the Germans, driven to a nearby forest and executed. Ada Lichthman explains how, after being transported to Sobibór, one of her tasks included washing and dressing dolls stolen from Jewish children on the transport that could then be passed on to Nazi officers. It’s a small anecdote among many, but one that succinctly locates the trauma of reliving the bizarre meld of cruelty and irrationality that these [Four Sisters] films examine with unshowy virtuosity.
Overview
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.
Episodes
S01E02 The Merry Flea - Ada Lichtman
Ada Lichtman was faced with absolute horror from the start: the day the Germans invaded Poland, all the men in Wieliczka – a little town near Kracow where she lived – were rounded up by...
S01E03 Baluty - Paula Biren
There are still archives, diaries and even some photos of the Lodz ghetto, but very few actual witness accounts from survivors. Paula Biren's is all the more exceptional, with her having been part of the...
S01E04 The Noah's Ark - Hanna Marton
In 1944, when the Nazis started deporting Jews from Hungary, Rudolf Kastner – a Zionist leader of the Aide and Rescue Committee – negotiated with Adolf Eichmann to secure a train boarded by 1684 Jews...
