Shoah: Four Sisters

Holocaust Survivors Tell Their Stories

Starting in 1999, Claude Lanzmann made several films that could be considered satellites of SHOAH, comprised of interviews conducted in the 1970s that didn't make it into the final, monumental work.

In the last years of the late director's life, he decided to devote a film to four women from four different areas of Eastern Europe with four different destinies, each finding herself improbably alive after war's end: Ruth Elias from Ostravia, Czechoslovakia; Paula Biren from Lodz, Poland; Ada Lichtman from further south in Krakow; and Hannah Marton from Cluj, or Kolozsvar, in Transylvania.

Survivors of unimaginable Nazi horrors during the Holocaust, they tell their individual stories and become crucial witnesses to the barbarism they experienced. Each possesses a vivid intelligence and a commitment to candor that make their accounts of what they suffered through both searing and unforgettable.

"The installments... have a cumulative power. Their points of confluence - the deaths of family members, improbable escapes, the hardship of life in ghettos and camps - underscore the horror and, at times, the grim absurdity of surviving extermination." - Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times