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22
TUESDAY
Claude Lanzmann’s Holocaust documentary, Shoah, runs nine hours, but after making it, the director still had hundreds of hours of footage that didn’t fit. Among the outtakes was a 1979 interview with Maurice Rossel, who in 1944 was one of the International Red Cross workers who visited Theresienstadt, the Nazis’ “model Jewish settlement.” Rossel wrote a favorable report on the place, but as he gradually faces in the course of Lanzmann’s 65-minute film, A Visitor From the Living, he and his colleagues were duped: Theresienstadt had been carefully sanitized for the Red Cross’ benefit. Indeed, 5,000 Jews were sent to their deaths in order to make the glorified concentration camp appear less teeming to the distinguished, if gullible, visitors. Lanzmann will attend this screening, the film’s U.S. premiere, and answer questions afterward, at 7 p.m. at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Meyerhoff Theater, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place SW. Free. For reservations call (800) 400-9373. (Mark Jenkins)