Le rapport Karski

THE KARSKI REPORT is built around Claude Lanzmann's 1978 interview with Jan Karski, the Polish resistance courier who risked his life to inform the Allied governments about the persecution and murder of Europe's Jews during the Second World War. Speaking from his home in Washington, Karski recalls the clandestine missions that took him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Nazi transit camp before carrying his eyewitness account to London and Washington. Rather than reconstructing history through archive footage or narration, Lanzmann lets Karski tell his own story. The film follows his attempts to persuade political leaders of the reality of the genocide and the disbelief that often met his warnings, even among those willing to listen. The interview becomes not only a historical record but also a reflection on the limits of human understanding when confronted with unprecedented violence. Released in 2010, THE KARSKI REPORT presents previously unseen material from the second day of Lanzmann's interview with Karski, most of which had not been included in Shoah. Concentrating on a single witness and a single conversation, the film stands on its own while deepening one of the most important testimonies in Lanzmann's body of work.