"Lanzmann has devoted his life to one idea: that truth lies in the unmasking, that 'one is responsible for what one does.'"-Washington Post

Twenty years after he conducted the interviews that made up the nine-hour film Shoah, Claude Lanzmann has begun working with the material he did not include in that epic documentary. The story of the concentration camp at Theresienstadt was, as he says, "both central and tangential" to the process of the extermination of the Jews in Europe that Shoah documented. It is the focus of A Visitor from the Living. Theresienstadt was a walled town touted by the Nazis as a "model ghetto" for prominent, assimilated, artistic, and above all high-profile Jews from throughout Europe. Notwithstanding the music, drawings, and poems clandestinely created there, it was a transit point to Auschwitz and Treblinka, and was in fact a concentration camp with its own horrors, and its own ovens. In 1944 Theresienstadt was opened to Red Cross inspectors, but only after a rigorous surface revamping that included the planting of flowers, the training of actors-and a mass deportation to Auschwitz. The question that has always remained about Theresienstadt is, How could the Red Cross have fallen for this ruse, this cynical chicanery? Claude Lanzmann gives us a key to the answer in A Visitor from the Living, a fascinating 1979 interview with Maurice Rossel, the Swiss head of the Red Cross delegation that inspected Theresienstadt and gave this death camp a passing grade, indeed, a clean bill of health. (Previously, Rossel had snuck into Auschwitz, only to produce a tepid report on his findings.) The answer we get is tragically and trenchantly familiar, for it lies in the very will of anti–Semitism that so deviously fuels denial. Rossel, though he was duped, is no fool. Listen to his words–words like "privileged Jews," "docility and passivity." Watch his hesitations, his silences, and glances at Lanzmann, whose interrogative weapons are a passion for details and a broken heart. In order to capture in the imagination something like the Holocaust, Lanzmann has said, "one has to talk and be silent at the same time."