Screening and discussion with the film maker (26.04.2006)

"The Last Witness"

A documentary video by Yael Katz Ben Shalom

The last witness speaks. A man who lived in Hitler's court, working as his telephone operator and bodyguard, tells a Jewish woman from Israel about the final years of Hitler's life, about his last hours.

The Last Witness
directed by Yael Katz Ben Shalom, 59 min., German & English, * English subtitles, 2006

He sifts through hundreds of photos, pulling out this one and that one; here he is with Hitler; and here he is standing guard while Hitler sleeps; and here is Eva Braun; and the Goebbels family. He remembers in great detail the minutiae of daily life.

How human the small details seem. And he speaks on and on, without batting an eye--the telephone operator who "didn't hear," the bodyguard who "didn't know." How were his memories constructed? He had sixty years to build and erase them. Had the war, God forbid, ended differently, of what would these photos remind the man who kept them as a souvenir? What would he say then?

And his devoted housekeeper, who with German precision removes every speck of dust from each corner and object, what does she say? On what is her memory based? And his artist friend who documented the Berlin bunker in his drawings before its destruction and since then has been painting it in oils, nothing else, like an obsession, while being fed the stories of someone who was really there, physically--what does he say? And what does the daughter of the last witness think about her father?

Yael Katz Ben Shalom is one of the most important contemporary artists and curators in Israel. Currently she is the director of "Art-Neuland" in Tel Aviv.