Shoah: Four Sisters

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 ghetto's Jewish women police at the time. Her sharp eye for detail as well as her dazzling intelligence underscores her incredible testimony. Of the hundred ghettos that dotted the Polish countryside, the one in Lodz had existed for the longest. It was ruled with an iron fist by the president of the Jewish council of elders, Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, known as "King Chaim" – a man convinced he could save part of the community by turning them into manpower to serve the Germans.

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 to leave for a neutral country in exchange for payment. Hanna Marton was one of the passengers. Hanna Marton is from Cluj (now Romania), formerly the capital of Transylvania. Both Hanna Marton and her husband were lawyers and Zionists. Marton was aboard the train organized by Rudolf (Rezso) Kasztner, carrying 1684 'privileged' Jews that left Hungary for Germany, eventually bringing them to Bergen-Belsen on 9 July 1944. Claude Lanzmann asks questions in French, which Hanna Marton understands, although she replies in Hebrew.