The editing took two years.
The interview with Benjamin Murmelstein was the very first one that director Claude Lanzmann recorded for Shoah (1985), but he never found an appropriate place for it in that project.
The question-and-answer session with Benjamin Murmelstein went on for an entire week in 1975 in Rome, Italy.
The title of Claude Lanzmann's documentary is a playful reference to André Schwarz-Bart's classic French novel "The Last of the Just", first published in 1959. Schwarz-Bart was the son of a Polish Jewish family murdered by the Nazis. It was Schwarz-Bart's first book and won the Prix de Goncourt, France's highest literary prize.