The opening sequence of the documentary – testimony that director László Csibi dedicated to Laszlo Nussbaum, one of the last Holocaust survivors living in the city of Cluj in Romania today, reminded me of my first encounter at Buchenwald with one of those terrible places that were the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Mr. Nussbaum recounts the moments of the liberation of the camp and the days after liberation, when the inhabitants of the quiet and ultra-civilized German city of Weimar were brought in front of graves and crematoria, evidences of the crimes that had taken place during six years a few kilometers from the city of Goethe. Perhaps these were same sequences of the confrontation between civilization and death, between indifference and horror, that I had seen 40 years ago, in the camp museum. The difference is that I watched them in a documentary filmed by American liberators. Laszlo Nussbaum had lived them. In the ten months of his life between deportation and release, the 15- or 16-year-old boy had been prisoner 95736, had seen his parents and brother sent to death, had endured hunger, cold, forced labor and especially fear. He had acquired an intense hatred of his oppressors, which only time would alleviate and rationalize. For only they, the survivors, have the right to forgive. We, the others, have a duty not to forget. Part of fulfilling this duty, films like ‘Nussbaum 95736‘ by László Csibi are also needed.
What and how can be talk about the Holocaust in movies? The director from Cluj, passionate about the history of the city and of Transylvania, approaches a documentary genre for which there are many precedents. And yet ‘Nussbaum 95736‘ proves that there is still much to be said, and that the means of expression can also be used intelligently and effectively to gain and retain the attention of spectators. From a documentary point of view, we are at a time when we have the chance to gather the testimonies of the last survivors who are still alive. Laszlo Nussbaum’s perspective is interesting and less known in Romania. His family had settled in Turda, and as in many Jewish families in Transylvania after the First World War, the predominant language and culture at home remained Hungarian, so at the time of the Vienna Dictate, his parents decided to move to Cluj, in the area ceded to Hungary. The decision would prove fateful in 1944, but even before, as we learn from the accounts of Laszlo Nussbaum, the family faced racial laws and persecutions very similar to those suffered by the Jewish population in Romania: restictions of traffic, trade, exercising of professions; confiscation of businesses and their transfer to ‘Aryan’ ownership; exclusion of students from schools. At the beginning of the summer of 1944, the 17,000 Jews from Cluj were imprisoned for a few weeks in the ghetto at the brick factory, and then sent to Auschwitz. The 15-16-year-old would live ten months of hell, in which he would be forced to separate from his parents, fight for physical survival, and make decisions that meant the difference between life and death. On his return, he lives the abyss of misunderstanding on the part of those who had not gone through the terrible trials. It is a short and very intense moment in his testimony that reveals one of the keys to the silence in which many of the survivors were enveloped. We, the second generation, also lived it, confronted with parents who often preferred to be silent, maybe because they had not overcome their traumas, maybe to protect us. Like many others, Laszlo Nussbaum would be silent for many decades until he gathered the strength to share the horrors he had gone through.
Director László Csibi is interested in oral history and to decipher it he uses the technique of interviews with survivors that was also used by Claude Lanzmann in ‘Shoah’, and the Spielberg archives. He adds documentary elements to the interviews, scenes filmed in Turda and Cluj accompanying the biography of the pre-war child and adolescent and the survivor on his return, as well as scenes filmed in Birkenau and Buchenwald. The combination not only makes the film interesting to watch, and Laszlo Nussbaum’s stories gain visual consistency, but also adds dimension to the remarkable personality of the man we get to know in the 50 minutes of screening. It is visible that Csibi documented himself thoroughly, but he also psychologically prepared the film hero’s dialogue with his viewers through the camera, gaining his trust and helping him not only to penetrate the sometimes dark corners of his memory, but also to open his soul by sharing and recording the experiences it has gone through. Laszlo Nussbaum is part of the generation of survivors who are aware of their responsibility as witnesses and the importance of keeping documented information about the crimes committed by the Nazis and their accomplices. However, Csibi‘s documentary also brings us closer to the human dimensions of the personal tragedy that Laszlo Nussbaum went through, and to the lessons that he learned and can pass on. One of the most important is that hatred of those who have committed atrocities must not be applied indiscriminately and must not be generalized to their respective nations. Viewers of the film will long remember the facts but especially the personality of Mr. Laszlo Nussbaum, the Jewish teenager deported to Auschwitz, who at the age of dawn shares his memories clearly about the facts, with nostalgia and longing for those who have been torn from his life, with no mercy for criminals, and with compassion, wisdom, and reconciliation for those who listen to him. The Nazis and their accomplices wanted to destroy all those who belonged to the Jewish people and other categories that their murderous ideology did not consider worthy of life. The criminals wanted to deprive the deportees of dignity and identity, to turn them into numbers. László Csibi‘s film places the number 95736 in history and brings to light the story, life and personality of Mr. Laszlo Nussbaum.