The list of a hundred film people who are defending director Roman Polanski is what you might expect. A cross section of morally bankrupt people in the entertainment industry. One might suspect many of them, like Woody Allen, or Terry Gilliam, are thinking about the behavior of people at some of the parties they have attended, and hoping no one will tell about some of the less lovely exploits that go on at hard partying entertainers’ bashes. The notion that the only thing that matters is the quality of the art produced, and great art equates to a pass for boorish behavior is common among the elites. That applies equally to intellectual and political elites, as well as entertainment stars. So it is no surprise to see most of the names on the list. Very few are known for anything except being effective entertainers.

There is, however, one exception. Claude Lanzmann. Seeing his name on the list brought me genuine sorrow and pain. Lanzmann is a film maker who is probably better known in Europe than in North America. (That’s true of most of the names on the list of 100). But what hurts so much in Lanzmann’s case is that many of us who know him primarily for his film “Showa” would probably not have expected to see him among the supporters of rape and child abuse. “Showa,” Lanzmann’s nine hour motion picture oral history of the Holocaust, is one of the most harrowing, searing films I have sat through. No Ken Burns like production full of archival stills and grainy movie footage of corpses appears in “Showa.” The voices and facial expressions of the interviewees was more than enough to convey the horror of the Holocaust. So there’s the ultimate sickening tragedy: A careful documentary film maker, who unsparingly brought the brutality of Man’s Inhumanity to Man into our lives, proves to be no different than the ordinary people who looked the other way while the trains rolled to Treblinka. Like the Polish and German citizens who ignored the one way traffic of victims, Lanzmann ignores the ordinary movie maker Roman Polanski who rapes and sodomizes little girls. Lanzmann’s signature on the petition to free Polanski says that he doesn’t think what Roman Polanski did was anything bad enough to send him to prison. Which makes Mr. Lanzmann a lot like the ordinary folks who watched the trains go by.