For his fifth feature, the 75-year-old war hero has returned to the same theme, but from a different perspective. His subject here is an uprising at the Nazi death camp in Sobibor on 14 October, 1943 at 4pm, in which the Jewish interns successfully fought their captors, shattering the image of the Jews as weak victims who were simply shepherded to their death.

"The Sobibor uprising could not be a mere moment in Shoah," says the director. "It deserved a film of its own, demanded to be treated individually. It is in fact a paradigmatic example of what I have referred to elsewhere as the 'reappropriation' of power and violence by the Jews. The Shoah was not only a massacre of innocents but more specifically a massacre of defenceless people, tricked at every stage in the process of destruction, up to the very doors of the death chambers.

"Justice must be done to a dual legend, the one claiming that the Jews allowed themselves to be led to the gas chambers without any premonitions or suspicions and that their death was 'comfortable'; the other claiming that they put up no resistance to their executions."

Steve Grayson