What does the witness see, what does the spectator see? What is seeing? Nicolas Bouchaud gives us the opportunity to hear this disturbing interview which seems to pose questions that are still relevant today.

In 1942, Maurice Rossel was a 25-year-old Swiss officer who joined the International Committee of the Red Cross. He was soon sent to Berlin to inspect the concentration camps. More than three decades later, while preparing his film Shoah, Claude Lanzmann requested to meet him because he had authored a controversial report on the Theresienstadt ghetto. In front of the filmmaker's camera, Dr Rossel recounts his visit to the Auschwitz camp. He expresses the sense of horror he felt and points out the ambiguity of his position as a humanitarian with a more than limited scope of action. He claims, however, that he saw nothing that could have alerted him to what was really happening there. Claude Lanzmann then invites him to describe his visit to Theresienstadt, a town in which Jewish people had to act out everyday life on pain of death: a 'model' ghetto set up by the Nazi regime for propaganda purposes, to show the world how well they were treating deportees - even though it was only a stopover on the way to the extermination camps. His visit was staged to the nearest metre and second, and Maurice Rossel agreed to be the spectator of the play presented to him.

Claude Lanzmann's film was released in 1997 and has rarely been shown in Switzerland.

Nicolas Bouchaud is a dazzling actor who uses words and breath as his medium. With Un vivant qui passe, he continues his series of performances on key speeches of the 20th century, which he has designed in collaboration with the director Eric Didry and the dramaturg Véronique Timsit. This is an actor-led project, in which the performance of non-theatrical texts leads to the re-examination of the stage as a place of sharing and transmission. What do we see, what do we watch? How do we become spectators, or witnesses? Dr Rossel did not know – or did not want to know – the part he was playing in this story. To listen to him without judgment is to wait for a word, a sentence – not of guilt, but of responsibility. A sentence that we are perhaps also waiting for from ourselves, the living of today. Nicolas Bouchaud returns to the rushes of Lanzmann's film, listening to this dialogue in which questions of reality and truth begin to emerge. He invites history to appear on the stage, in front of us and with us, in the theatre of a history that is also our own.