Date of birth:

November 27th, 1925 (Bois-Colombes/Hauts-de-Seine, France)

Date of death:

July 5th, 2018 (Paris/Île-de-France, France)

Nationality:

French (1870-present, Republic)

Claude Lanzmann was a French cineast and journalist. Although he was in the Resistance as a 17 year old - for which he was decorated with the Médaille de la Résistance-, and in later life a lecturer, he is first and foremost know for creating and producing the film Shoah. This is a nine-and-a-half-hour Holocaust documentary, the result of 11 years research and filming.

He shot 350 hours of testimony for Shoah which footage he later used to produce other Holocaust stories such as 'Sobibor: October 14, 1943: 4pm' (2001) and 'A Visitor from the Living' (1997), in which Lanzmann interviewed Maurice Rossel, head of the Red Cross committee responsible for inspecting Theresienstadt in 1944.
Two other films emerged from the Shoah interviews: 'The Karski Report' (2010), focused on the Polish resister Jan Karski who in 1942 gave some of the first information about the mass murders of Jews to the allies, and 'The Last of the Unjust' (2013), about Benjamin Murmelstein, the Viennese rabbi who was charged as a collaborator in the postwar years.

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