The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  Having left Vileyka, my grandfather, perhaps motivated by some extraordinary prescience, had cut all ties with the Jewish world and with his old friends. With the exception of a man named Joseph Katz, a comrade-in-arms during the war who was also from Belarus, and whose face and accent I adored, who visited him in Groutel once or twice, my grandfather saw no one from Paris after he moved, other than his children and grandchildren. When he and Anna wanted to keep something from us, they spoke in some unintelligible language, harsh and guttural with rare soft sounds, a language of secrecy and perhaps shame. This was Yiddish. Of the enormous families they came from, families of twelve and thirteen children, we never met a single member, except once, in Paris, when a red-haired Englishman, a professional boxer, was introduced to us as cousin Harry. Many of these relatives must have died in the Shoah, but not all. Assimilation is another form of annihilation, a triumph of forgetting. One of my real sorrows is losing a letter, sent to me in Israel while I was shooting Shoah, in which a recent emigrant, born in Australia, sent me proof that we were from the same family, that her grandfather and mine had had the same surname and were born in the same shtetl. Her letter was lost in the chaos of shooting the film, I never found it again, nor could I remember my relative’s name. If one day she should read these lines I implore her to contact me.

  That Itzhak Lanzmann had severed all ties with the past to become a French farmer at least five years before the war may perhaps explain why he and my grandmother managed to survive under Nazi rule for five years, without changing their surname, and in the heart of the occupied Zone. Groutel, as I have said, numbered only a handful of farms and, in spite of investigations and incursions by the police and the Germans, the other farmers kept silent and thus saved their ‘Alsatian’ neighbours. They too would be considered ‘Righteous Gentiles’ nowadays, but they cared little about that. The memory of the gargantuan Madame Lebrasseur, who mixed a few drops of calvados into the bottles she prepared for her newborn baby because ‘it’s good for your health’, is indelibly engraved on my memory. I like the Normans.

  Chapter 6

  I am incapable of saying now whether it was my father or I who first opened up to the other. He was walking me back to the train station at Brioude one Sunday afternoon, as I was returning to the Lycée Blaise-Pascal, having spent two days at home. It must have been February 1944. As we walked, each of us learned what the other had been doing. He told me, in strict confidence, that he was head of the MUR for the Haute-Loire, dealing, I think he said, with the parachute drops of weapons, or going out in the dead of night to improvised landing strips in fields to meet small British Lysander planes bringing agents or important people from England or Algeria and spiriting others away. MUR meant de Gaulle, Jean Moulin – by now already dead – all the power of the Allied forces four or five months from D-Day; it meant marshalling Resistance fighters to go up to the maquis, a genuinely free zone as large as Vercors in the high plains of La Margeride, from which convoys of German reinforcements travelling north to the landing sites could be attacked. A trick of memory: though I will not change the first sentence of this chapter, as I write these lines, I realize that my father was the first to speak. When he finished it was my turn, and I told him everything: the Jeunesses communistes, the FUJP, Aglaé, training in the basement of the school, distributing tracts, switching the suitcases, the possibility of having to fight with the FTP (the Francs-tireurs et partisans – the Communist maquis), the nagging problem of the lack of weapons. As I spoke, Papa paled and, by the time we walked into the train station, his face was ashen. He had just enough time to say, ‘Be very careful, please. Come back soon. We need to talk about this.’

  At this point, I should say that by February 1944 the FUJP no longer existed, having been disbanded some weeks earlier in the schoolyard of the Lycée Blaise-Pascal and in the dormitories of our various feeder schools for the Grandes écoles. The bearer of the bad news – or of the truth, since, in accordance with Party instructions, I had concealed the fact – was another Jew whom I knew from Brioude where his family had taken refuge for a while. Marcovici, whose first name was also Claude, appeared one day during the midday break and went from group to group, holding a private conversation with each. Well dressed, self-assured and flashing wads of bills, he introduced himself as an agent of the AS (Armée secrète), the armed wing of the MUR dedicated to shock tactics. But his main aim was to explain that the FUJP had been infiltrated by the Communist Party, something that horrified many of the people we had recruited. You have to imagine another group of young men, myself and the forty young Communists who would remain loyal to me, running from group to group trying to retain our troops, taking issue with Marcovici, his methods, his attempt at poaching, which I found odious, raising the tone of the discussion, maintaining, proving to them that fundamentally I had not lied, that the Communists were the heart and soul of the French Resistance and that their efforts were worth just as much as the hired guns of the AS whose right-wing credentials were well known. What of the sacrifices and the heroism of the Red Army, we asked, what of Stalingrad a year earlier, which we knew was the turning point of the war, the watershed? All this went on with both groups trying to hide from the Vichy supporters, the sons of members of the Milice, themselves future members of the Milice, who were watching, sensing that something major, something unheard-of was taking place. In Venice, in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, every time I see Carpaccio’s painting – one of eight – depicting the companions of St Jerome desperately fleeing, cassocks flying, at the appearance of a lion in their peaceful cloisters, I cannot help but remember – how strange it is! – those two days of breathless, frantic running, the pleas, to prevent everyone deserting us. And yet, with only two exceptions, that is what they did. Our numbers slashed, we closed ranks, leaving only the hard-liners, which I believed was for the best.

  Two weeks later I was back in Brioude, where my father immediately announced that he had a serious offer he wanted to make to me. He had taken it upon himself to speak to his peers and to his superior officers and he proposed, in their name and in his own, that when the time came to rally all Resistance fighters to go up to the maquis, the forty members of my group at Blaise-Pascal should be integrated into the forces of the MUR and fight the Germans with them. We would retain our identity as Jeunesses communistes, retain our freedom of speech and even keep the right to make our own propaganda on condition that we were prepared to accept overall discipline and obey, like everyone else, the orders issued to us. He explained that it had been very difficult for him to secure this agreement, which I could well believe. He was clearly doing this to protect me, preferring to watch out for me himself, to be at my side when danger came.

  Back in Clermont, I reported all this to Aglaé. She listened gravely, questioned me about my father and took notes. The very next day she relayed to me the orders of the Party – not just the orders, but congratulations of senior officials from the Parti communiste français. What I had achieved, thanks to my father, was unprecedented and moreover of the greatest importance, they said, and we should absolutely accept, I had the blessing of the whole Party. As she told me this, Aglaé flushed with pleasure, as though she were conferring a knighthood on me. Incredulous and happy, I shared the news with my comrades and sent a message to Brioude to say that the proposal was accepted, that an unwritten but formal contract had been agreed and we were ready to mobilize as soon as the order came.

  There was the massive bombing of the Michelin factory in Clermont-Ferrand; tensions in the city and at school mounted. Rumours, warnings, advice came to me in a constant stream from the Party: I had to be careful, the Gestapo might arrest me at any moment. They knew who I was and what I was doing. Separately, both the Party and my father decided that we should leave the school as quickly as possible. We did so in small groups, early one Sunday morning, taking the défense passive helmets issued by the Vichy authorities for our protection during bombing raids. At the station, we hung ar
ound, pretending not to know each other as we waited for the first train south, then climbed aboard different carriages. Aglaé was there accompanied by three comrades from the PCF, adults, men with influence, whom she introduced to me by their pseudonyms as high-ranking comrades, and I noticed others whom I didn’t know on the platform, clearly on the alert, responsible for guarding them. I was told they had insisted on coming to convey the Party’s solemn appreciation. One of them, apparently the most senior of the three, said, ‘We must rejoice, comrade, in what you have achieved. Your initiative and your loyalty to the Party will be rewarded.’ I would hear the phrase ‘we must rejoice’ again, many years later, as a constant refrain from Raymond Guyot, a member of the Bureau politique of the PCF and brother-in-law of Artur London, former Czech Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, one of the few accused to survive the Slánský Trial, and the author of an admirable book about it, L’Aveu [The Confession]. Even when things were at their worst, Raymond Guyot invariably began whatever he had to say with ‘we must rejoice’. I did rejoice then: it felt almost like being awarded the Order of Lenin there on the platform of Clermont-Ferrand station.

  I found out later that half an hour after the train moved off, the Gestapo burst into the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in order to arrest me. They searched everywhere, the classrooms, the study halls, the dormitories, but they did not realize – and nor did the school officials who helped with their search, as it was a Sunday – that I had not left alone. Drastic precautions had also been taken in Brioude when we arrived at the station there. My father was waiting for us, in boots but no uniform, yet he already had a military bearing. We hardly spoke. Still moving in small groups, we walked to the wood-gas trucks, which headed via secondary roads towards the main Brioude–Saint-Flour thoroughfare before turning right for Saint-Beauzire, then down into a little valley to the small, tightly packed houses of the village of Saint-Laurent-Chabreuges, which lay sheltered and crushed by the soaring medieval castle, unspoiled, magical, haunted, with its big towers, its squat keep, its crenellations, its huge moat surrounded by deep forests and lush grasslands.

  The lord of the manor, Vicomte Aymery de Pontgibaud, welcomed us with a blustering speech, explaining that our lives up until now had all been fun and games but that from today, as we would discover, things were about to change. We had come to train for war, real war. Vicomte Aymery de Pontgibaud had an ascetic gauntness, with hollow cheeks and deep eye sockets, blazing with a French flame. He was killed on the Rhine some months later. We were billeted in the state rooms, not the attic rooms, in four-poster beds fashioned for marquises and vicomtesses. The Château de Chabreuges had been put at the disposal of the Resistance. But we did not exactly live like kings: Aymery would appear at all hours of the night, a candlestick in his left hand, a revolver in his right, invariably followed by the white goat that trailed everywhere after him. ‘On your feet, you bastards!’ he would yell, brandishing his gun, going from room to room, waking everyone with a start. At which point we would be treated to hellish gymnastics in the damp forest, forced to march, to run, crawl, jump or trek for hours, wading through the turbulent Alagnon with its deep pools and unsuspected rapids. We ate little and we too became an ascetic troop but we never mutinied or complained, for our leader shared our plight.

  The long-awaited day arrived: trucks drove across the drawbridge, offering the astonishing, unforgettable sight of containers filled with weapons parachuted in from England. We opened them with great respect: Sten guns, imposing Bren guns with their curved box-magazines, grenades with their pins and their safety-catches that, when armed, would explode in bursts of shards, the Colt automatic pistols, and Gammon Bombs in the shape of huge black pears designed for blowing up bridges or armoured vehicles. All these were carefully laid out on tarpaulins. But I’m forgetting the most important thing: grease. All of these implements of death gleamed with a thick protective coating of gold or green grease, proof that they were brand new, a coating that had to be cleaned off before they could be used. Our group was allocated only a small part of this arsenal, the remainder was stored away in caches in the castle until the – imminent, we were told – general mobilization heading for La Margeride, where they would be distributed to other units.

  The morning after this historic day, one of my men, who had been posted on sentry duty at the castle gate, which opened on to the rarely used secondary road to Saint-Beauzire, came rushing up, panting for breath, to say there were two men asking for me at the gate, which he had left locked. He seemed worried, so I went up to the far end of the castle grounds along the path leading to the gate and caught a glimpse of the messengers before going to meet them, I on one side of the iron gate, they on the other, and we talked. Or rather, they talked. They were thick-set men, two blocks of stone with the characteristic faces of Communists, insensible to doubt, hardened by conviction: ‘Comrade, we have come to give you orders from the Party, we know the shipment of weapons has arrived. You are to grab as many as you can, load them onto trucks, and you and your group are to go to the FTP maquis of Commandant Raffy at La Chaise-Dieu. You must act tonight or tomorrow at the latest, as soon as you possibly can; the weapons will not be here for long.’ I listened, petrified, unable to believe what I was hearing: this was a clear breach of an agreement, a contract, a pact. I tried to argue, ‘That’s not what I was told at Clermont-Ferrand, when the Party approved my actions and congratulated me. There was never any question of breaking my undertaking with my father.’ ‘The situation has changed, comrade, the struggle has entered a new phase. The Party knows what it is doing and you must obey the Party’s orders.’ This, I pointed out, would be difficult if not impossible to carry out, the vicomte and his men were always around, the weapons had already been stowed somewhere in the castle cellars, I knew not where. Although my men had been trained in physical endurance, they had had no military training, they didn’t know how to use a gun and there was no way we could get our hands on the weapons and leave the castle grounds without a fight; there would be losses. I added that it seemed to me extraordinarily risky to try to make the journey from Chabreuges to La Chaise-Dieu in trucks loaded with weapons, across sixty kilometres of difficult mountain roads, with German contingents stationed in Brioude and in many of the other small villages we would have to drive through. They replied that the Party would put guides at our disposal to lead us to the maquis of Raffy, the hero of the Francs-tireurs et partisans. My only thought was to buy time. To persuade the men to leave, I told them I would have to think about it and that I would do what I could. There was something obdurate, something threatening in their eyes, in their stillness. They went away.

  I had not the least intention of complying with their orders. I was sickened by the thought of betraying my father, the very idea of putting him in such a position horrified me. I didn’t waver for a second: I told him that very day so that every possible measure could be taken to safeguard the weapons. He informed the vicomte, and for a time the castle became a fortress. I also decided to inform the Blaise-Pascal Jeunesses communistes, and I told them, ‘I believe that what the Party is asking me to do is an abuse of power, an act of treachery. It would not only mean tearing up the agreement made with the MUR as an organization, it would also mean deceiving my own father and placing him in serious danger. I have no intention of complying with the order and will keep to my part of the original agreement. Any of you who wish to can leave, but you do so at your own risk, on foot and with no weapons.’ They discussed the matter for a long time, but I withdrew and took no part in the conversation. In the end, half of them left, some heading for La Chaise-Dieu, others returning to Clermont-Ferrand; the remainder stood by me. My father was even more astonished than I was by the cold cynicism of the Party. Like Albert Camus, who condemned the blind terrorism of which his mother might have been a victim during the war in Algeria, saying, ‘I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice’, I too instinctively chose my loyalty to my father over my loyalty to the Party, w
hich refused to keep its word. Some days later, I was informed that the PCF had pronounced my death sentence and the Michelin factory killers had been charged with carrying out the order. This was a threat I could not but take very seriously and the risk grew greater with every day that passed before moving up to the maquis. For me, the maquis would not simply be a place from which to launch attacks on the Germans, it would be a refuge from my executioners. Thus, with mounting impatience, I waited for the signal to depart.

  I was already familiar with La Margeride, a vast massif rising to 1,500 metres on the borders of the departments of Haute-Loire, Cantal and Lozère, all three conducive to raids and ambushes and extending westward into the lush desert of Aubrac. I knew the area because the previous autumn – less than a year earlier – I had been appointed ‘threshing supervisor’ for the Saugues region, by the Ministry or the prefecture, I don’t remember which. I had passed my philosophy baccalauréat at Puy-en-Verlay in June. Propaganda for the STO (the Compulsory Work Service in Germany) was in full spate and being appointed threshing supervisor – a post offered only to those who passed their baccalauréat with distinction – meant that a call-up from the STO could be deferred. In fact, one of the reasons my father had sent me to board at Blaise-Pascal was to keep me out of the STO. One of my closest friends from school, Armand Monnier (whose father was a steam-engine driver at Langeac depot and the spitting image of Julien Carette in Renoir’s La Bête humaine), had also been appointed threshing supervisor in the neighbouring village. Officially, we were agents of the regime and it was our responsibility to ensure that farmers did not divert grain that had been requisitioned by the Germans. The threshing machine was set up for several days in each village and farmers brought their sheaves of grain. We had been given special ledgers and were supposed to monitor the whole process, noting how many sheaves each farmer brought and how much grain he was entitled to take away. We did not exactly get a warm welcome from the farmers at first. The mayor of each village would arrange for us a room or a garret where we could sleep and saw to it that we were fed. However, Monnier and I immediately put at their ease the people under our control: ‘It’s up to you – you give us whatever figures you want us to write down, we have no intention of checking anything.’ After that, everything went smoothly. Monnier and I feasted, we roamed the hills under cloudless skies, basked in the sun, learned poetry by heart, recited it, noodled or tickled for fish in the deep pools of the teeming rivers of the Auvergne. It was for me a glorious end-of-holiday. I was already enrolled in the Jeunesses communistes, Clermont-Ferrand was ahead of me, and meanwhile the grateful farmers loaded provisions on us: exquisite saucissons, sausages, tripe, ham, butter, eggs, and more. We made the long journey down from Saugues to Langeac, Langeac to Brioude on our bicycles, freewheeling as fast as we could, knapsacks stuffed with infinitely precious goods, roaring La Légende des siècles [The Legend of the Ages] or ‘Le Bateau ivre’ [‘The Drunken Boat’] at the tops of our lungs. I was by now a past-master at breaking the rules: early in 1941, the Minister for Education of the Vichy government had come up with the splendid idea of requiring pupils in every school and lycée to write an essay in praise of the Maréchal. The Collège Lafayette was no exception. Unaware of the risk I was running, I sat, arms folded, for the whole period allocated for the essay, then ostentatiously handed in a blank sheet. The headmaster was a good man; he summoned me the following day, along with my father. ‘I am compelled to take disciplinary action against you,’ he said. ‘You must now leave the school, but I’ll find some way of having you readmitted. Don’t say a word about this, it must be just between ourselves.’ He was as good as his word, and within a month I was back at my desk.