The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  I had felt sure that the week I had insisted Baccot take to consider his options would not change his mind, and I was right. I told Aglaé of his request, he quickly left Blaise-Pascal and we heard nothing more until his suicide four months later. For four months Baccot, a member of a PCF action group, had gunned down Germans and Milice on the streets of Clermont-Ferrand. The arms parachuted in by the Allies were only for the Gaullist Resistance, so there was only one way for the Party to procure guns: from the enemy. Every German killed meant a revolver, a pistol, a machine gun gained. Baccot, in this brief period, showed extraordinary courage, daring, patience, cunning and determination. Finally spotted, identified and hunted down, he was cornered on the place de Jaude, the main square in Clermont-Ferrand: seeing himself surrounded, he took refuge in a vespasienne – one of the old spiral shell urinals with iron panels that give the user privacy from passers-by – and there in the middle of the urinal, he blew his brains out so as not be taken alive. There is a brief mention of Baccot’s death in Marcel Ophüls’ Le Chagrin et la pitié [The Sorrow and the Pity]. In hurried interviews, two retired school monitors who knew nothing about the Resistance movement at Blaise-Pascal, or more generally in Clermont-Ferrand, retained a vague memory of Baccot’s fate. I have spoken about it many times to my friend Ophüls, although he is hardly to blame, since, though he is the director of the film, he did not conduct the preparatory investigation, but to present the town of Clermont-Ferrand, as the film does, as a symbol of collaboration is a sacrilege. Clermont, where Strasbourg University had moved its campus, was, on the contrary, one of the major centres of Resistance in the Auvergne and in France.

  Baccot is unquestionably a hero and I have nothing but admiration for him. But I know that I could never have done what he did, putting a bullet through my brain if I had been captured, and that knowledge has burdened my whole life. What would I have done if Hélène Hoffnung and I had been asked to open those suitcases full of weapons? During the clandestine struggle, I undertook many objectively dangerous operations, but I reproach myself now for having done so without being fully aware of the consequences, because my actions were not accompanied by an acceptance of the ultimate price to be paid if we were caught: death. Would I have done what I did if I had fully evaluated the consequences of my actions? And even if it is plausible to suggest that recklessness is a form of bravery, to act without being inwardly prepared to make the supreme sacrifice is dilettantism, this is what I repeatedly tell myself today.

  The question of courage and cowardice, you will have realized, is the scarlet thread that runs though this book, the thread that runs through my life. Sartre liked to quote a phrase by Michel Leiris, who, describing the suicide of officers who had failed in their missions, referred to ‘military courage’. Among the conspirators in the 20 July assassination attempt on Hitler, there were those whose fellow officers, wishing to spare them the torture, trial and ignominious death on the scaffold, came into their offices and wordlessly handed them revolvers. They stepped outside and immediately there was a gunshot: German officers, loyal to an inviolable code of honour, killed themselves automatically, almost by reflex, without hesitating even for an instant, which is perhaps the best way to proceed. There is a magnificent scene in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film Stalingrad [Enemy at the Gates] in which a Soviet general whose troops retreated under fire when no order had been given to do so, is stripped of his command by a political commissar who then places a loaded pistol on the map table and withdraws. The shot rings out before he even has time to close the door. Such are the codes of ‘courage militaire’ that I cannot evoke this scene without thinking of the final monologue in Sartre’s Les Séquestrés d’Altona [The Condemned of Altona]: ‘Everything will be dead, eyes, judges, time.’ In Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit, the master becomes the master because he has put his life on the line, because he has taken the risk of losing it – the risk of the void – while the slave, attached to his body, his desires, his needs – to what Hegel calls the ‘bodily situation’, an appalling but literal translation – chooses submission over honour, favours the only thing worthy to his eyes: his skin, his life, even humiliated, even mutilated, his life. One of the unforgettable heroes of Shoah, Filip Müller, for three years a member of the ‘special unit’, the Sonderkommando, in Auschwitz, said to me after a gruelling day of filming, ‘I wanted to live, live with every fibre of my being, one minute more, one day more, one month more. You understand? To live!’ How I understood! The other members of the special unit who shared this Calvary with Filip Müller, noble figures, gravediggers of their own people, at once heroes and martyrs, were, like him, simple, intelligent, good men. For the most part, despite the hell of the funeral pyres and the crematoria – that ‘annus mundi’ in the words of the SS doctor Thilo – they never gave up their humanity. It is important to me to name them here: Yossele Warszawski from Warsaw who arrived from Paris; Lajb Panusz from Łomża; Ajzyk Kalniak, also from Łomża; Josef Dersinski from Hrodna; Lajb Langfus from Maków Mazowiecki; Jankiel Handelsman from Radom, who came from Paris; Kaminski, the kapo; Dov Paisikovich from Transylvania; Stanislaw Jankowski, known as Feinsilber from Warsaw, a veteran of the International Brigades, who also arrived from Paris; Zalman Gradowski and Zalman Lewental, the two chroniclers of the Sonderkommando who, night after night – because they believed none of them would survive – compelled themselves to keep the diary of this Gehenna, burying their notes in the clay beneath Crematoria II and II on the eve of the abortive Sonderkommando revolt of 7 October 1944, in which they lost their lives: manuscripts written in Yiddish in a firm, upright hand found foxed and mildewed – one in 1945, the other in 1962 – three-quarters of the pages are illegible and all the more harrowing for that fact. To the obscene questions: ‘How could they? Why did they not kill themselves?’ we must let them answer, and unconditionally respect that answer. To begin with, many of them did do so, many of them took their own lives, leaping into the blazing fire pits or begging to be killed at the first shock. What a shock it was! These are young men, eighteen, twenty, twenty-five, from Poland, from Hungary, from Greece, they arrive in Auschwitz after months or years of living in ghettos, of misery and humiliation, after a terrible journey (eleven days and eleven nights from Salonika to Auschwitz, nineteen from Rhodes or from Corfu by sea and land), they are dying of starvation, of thirst; barely have they stepped onto the ramp than they are ‘selected’; torn from their families, they are shaved, tattooed, beaten senseless; with whips and snapping dogs they are driven through thin copses of silver birch in Birkenau to the stockade of Crematorium V or the Little Farm. And suddenly – but could one ever really be prepared for such a spectacle? – suddenly they see everything: the pits, the roar of the flames, the mass of bluish tangled bodies that spills out as the doors of the gas chambers swing open, twisted bodies they were forced to untangle, among which they recognize the flattened faces of their mothers, their little sisters, their brothers who arrived with them only a few short hours before. This was the first shock. The Jews of the sun-drenched shore of the Ionian Sea, the sweet Jews, the gentle Jews described by Albert Cohen, could not bear it: they threw themselves into the blaze, arms spread wide like divers. Two months later, these same men (by which I mean, those who did not jump) were going about their tedious task: armed with heavy birch rams, on a concrete slab they pounded femurs, tibias, the hard bones that the flames had not completely consumed; they did so singing all day long beneath the white skies of Auschwitz: ‘Mamma, son tanto felice…’ [‘Mamma, I’m so happy…’] But it is Zalman Lewental, the admirable Froissart of the Sonderkommando, who, in his upright handwriting, best answered the obscene question: ‘The truth,’ he wrote, ‘is that you want to live, at any cost. You want to live because you are alive, because the whole world is alive. There is nothing but life…’ No, my brothers, you were not the cadets of the Saumur Cavalry School in 1940 defending the bridges of the Loire, prepared to die in a Hegelian manner, for honour and the war of consciousness
es; no, you hated death and, in its kingdom, you have sanctified life absolutely.

  The war of consciousnesses and the horror it has always inspired in me remind me once more of Goya, of one of the Black Paintings that hang in the Prado, in a room I dread entering every time, such is the terrible fascination this great painter’s Duelo a garrotazos [Duel with Clubs] exerts on me. What is depicted is not a duel, but a fight to the death; you know at a glance there will be no quarter given, nor will the fight be stopped at first blood: it is set in a desolate, forsaken, rocky, lunar landscape at the beginning – or the end – of the world. There is nothing to win, nothing to conquer, just two human creatures fighting with clubs, two men, barely men, entirely men, buried up to their knees in a peat bog or perhaps quicksand. These immovable creatures, these men-trunks, these killer-trunks lash out at one another, gaining momentum from their legs trapped in the bog, a stupefying paralysis that only serves to redouble their murderous rage. Their extraordinary movement is limited to their arms: the gladiator on the left, his face already swollen, has his arm raised high while his opponent’s arms are flung far back – in truth it is not a club he wields but a bludgeon, swollen at one end. The struggle is in their arms but also in their torsos, their backs, their waists, their heads. There is no fancy footwork here, no way to duck or sidestep, only twisting, thrusting and recoiling, extraordinary movements of the chest. But one would be wrong to think these legless men are trying to defend themselves; their chief concern is killing, and the resolve of each consciousness to secure the other’s death is so primal that – and this is the excruciating lesson of the painting – there can be no master, no slave, no victor and no vanquished, but since neither values life over death, only two bloody, battered, twisted corpses lying dead beneath a great dark luminous sky of dread, the sky of Aragon or of Castile with its flashes of turquoise peeping through the dense black clouds. The greatness of Goya is to show his duellists bogged down in the mud, thereby making all pity, all entreaty, all forgiveness, all flight impossible. There is one man too many here. Before they are inexorably swallowed up by the quicksand, in a paroxysm of violence they settle the score of the outrage that is otherness. The painter thus presents us with the war between the consciousnesses at its most pure, the eternal inhuman dawn of all humanity. ‘The century might have been a good one,’ writes Sartre in the final monologue of Les Séquestrés d’Altona, ‘had not man been watched from time immemorial by the by the flesh-eating enemy who had sworn to destroy him, by the hairless, baleful beast, by man.’

  It was over Duelo a garrotazos that I had apagogically envisaged rolling the opening credits for my film Tsahal, about the Israeli army and the wars it was compelled to fight. In this film I tried to show – because this is my firm belief – that the young soldiers in this young army, the sons and grandsons of Filip Müller and his companions in catastrophe, are, deep down, the same men their fathers were. Despite the radical change and the vast conquest begun by the creation ex nihilo of a Jewish army, despite the training in bravery, the teaching of bravery, the constant struggle against the ‘natural’ of which I gave a thousand examples, in spite of what I referred to elsewhere as ‘the reappropriation of violence by the Jews’, Tsahal – the Hebrew abbreviation for IDF, or Israel Defence Forces – is not like other armies and in the Israeli soldiers’ relationship to life, to death, one can hear the powerful, not so distant echo of the words of Zalman Lewental that I just quoted. These soldiers do not have violence in their blood and the privilege they accord to life, which makes their survival a founding principle, is at the root of the military tactics specific to this army and to no other. This choice of life over nothingness has not prevented Jewish soldiers, in each of the wars they have fought, from making great sacrifices; the supreme sacrifice when necessary. So many men, so many officers, for example, fell heroically during the terrible fighting in the Golan Heights in 1973 when the very survival of the nation was at stake, or in the fierce tank battle in the Sinai that became known as the Battle of the Chinese Farm, where Tsahal tanks, ancient British Centurion tanks dating from World War II and modernized by the Israelis, fired at point-blank range at brand new Soviet T-72s shipped by the USSR to Egypt. They do not have violence in their blood, they are willing to lay down their lives, but not risk them for the sake of honour, for the sake of appearances, to remain loyal to some noble deed, some tradition of caste. In an interview I gave when Tsahal was released, after a tear-gas grenade exploded during the first screening making the air in the cinema unbreathable for a week, I added to what I have just written, the better to illustrate it: ‘The Israeli paratroopers are of a different breed to the French paratroopers who took part in Operation Turquoise [which had just taken place in Rwanda]. The proof being, they have their hair.’ This is obvious in a number of powerful sequences in the film before and during the first parachute jump of the recruits. At the beginning of the film there is a long, slow travelling shot along a runway, panning across the soldiers waiting to board the pot-bellied C-130 Hercules planes that will take them up into the heavens, and from which they will shortly have to leap, one after the other, into the void. It is dawn, the sun has barely risen, most of them are asleep, half-dead from exhaustion or from fear. Fear, exhaustion, it’s the same thing: fear is exhausting, exhaustion is a sign of fear. Besides, the armed adolescents of Israel are constantly exhausted. The harshness of the obligatory three-year military service saps their lifeblood: when they hitchhike to and from their bases, barely do they get into a car before they nod off in the passenger seat or in the back seat, falling into a deep sleep. The extraordinary thing is that, with unfailing sureness, they invariably wake up several hundred metres before the crossroads where they had asked to be dropped off. Now, lined up along the runway, sitting, lying down, leaning against each other or sprawled head to tail in poignant positions of innocence, of youth, of friendship, the parachutists of the opening sequence – boy and girls, because it is the girls who will have to jump first – still have their hair and this changes everything: in their faces seriousness vies with tenderness, humanity with asceticism, anxiety with confidence. And we hear the wonderful, warm voice of David Grossman in a voiceover as the camera pans in sure, rhythmic sweeps across the faces of the soldiers who will jump that morning. Grossman, whose twenty-eight-year-old son Uri, I learn as I write these lines, was killed in Lebanon on the last day of the war against Hezbollah. I met Uri – a blond, serious, cheerful boy of about ten – during the shooting of Tsahal when I was interviewing his father, not knowing at that time that I would use a part of this interview over the footage of the parachutists’ first jump. ‘We are born old,’ David said to me, ‘we are born with our history on our backs. We have a huge, troubled past. We have an intense, a harsh present. It requires a renunciation, a commitment to invest in the difficult challenge that is Israel today. But if we envisage the future, it is difficult to find an Israeli who speaks freely of Israel in, say, 2025, about the harvest of 2025. Because we feel that perhaps we do not have so much future. And when I say “Israel in 2025” I feel the icy blade of memory, as though I were violating some taboo. As though the proscription against thinking so far ahead were written in my genes. I think, to tell the truth, that what we feel is fear. The fear of annihilation…’

  By contrast, the globalized, professionalized, mercenarized army rabble crops its hair as closely as possible, presents itself as a skinhead as a sign of strength and virility, of death to fear and to emotion, to make themselves terrifying. And it is terrifying, first and foremost by its ugliness, the desperate uniformity of chins, the backs of heads. Each appears to be a clone of the others, and the shaven head is perhaps the common denominator of the international police dispatched by states to the four corners of the earth in the name of a humanitarian, peaceful new order that is christened ‘le devoir d’ingérence’ [the duty to interfere]. Hair is considered to be a feminine attribute and, as such, is curiously left to conscript armies, which are quickly disappearing from
the face of the earth. Tsahal is one of the last. After my 1994 interview was published, I received an indignant letter from a French general in command of a division of paratroopers who threatened a lawsuit if I did not make a public apology. I was informed, through various channels, that paras from I don’t know which regiment were coming after me to prove just how efficient their buzz-cuts were. I replied that I had in no way intended to hurt or demoralize the general’s regiment but that the issue of haircuts seemed to me an important one; that it was possible to exhibit great courage while preserving the singularity of the living human face, that is to say with hair uncut, rather than the repetitive masks of American marines, of Russian Spetsnaz or the French Foreign Legion (they are impossible to tell apart), which gloomily prefigure the rows of skulls with vacant sockets one finds in their thousands in the crypts of Italian monasteries. In short, I was pleading in favour of life over death and I suggested the general read one of the finest books about war ever written, Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy (titled Falling Through Space in the USA), which recounts how the Battle of Britain was won by the Spitfire pilots of the RAF, those young men of twenty, fresh from Oxford or Cambridge, having been to Shrewsbury School or Eton, who forever went down in history as the ‘long-haired boys’. Between July and October 1940, 415 of these tousled boys lost their lives fighting the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitts and saved Britain: ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,’ Winston Churchill declared on 20 August in a speech to the House of Commons, expressing, in the grand rhetorical style he would use in his memoir, The Second World War, the debt owed to them by the British people. Churchill, like de Gaulle, is one of the great memoirists of the twentieth century. The general, thanks to me, read The Last Enemy, and I made an apology without retracting what I had said; we agreed a ceasefire that has been strictly observed.