The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  I don’t know how, a week later, on 14 August 1944 (the first ambush took place on 7 August) we found ourselves in the same place, but on the opposite slope, waiting for another German convoy that was also coming from Aurillac. We were probably driven there in trucks taking tortuous routes on secondary roads. But the situation was radically different: the Germans had learned their lesson from our previous ambush. Before allowing the vehicles to move forward, they now meticulously cleared the slopes to the left and the right of the road, attacking before they were attacked, making it impossible for us to do so, deploying small, battle-hardened units equipped with heavy machine guns, mortars and even tractor-drawn heavy artillery in the hills. On our side, things had changed too: the man who had until then been in command of our group, a man respected and loved by his men, had been dismissed from his post (‘transferred’, we were told, although in fact it was a punishment inflicted on him for some obscure reason) and replaced by someone whom none of us knew, imposed on us from on high, even though the very existence and the fighting conditions of the maquisards demanded a spirit of brotherhood between leaders and combatants. We quickly realized that an ambush like the one of 7 August would be impossible. It was a glorious summer day when we received orders to set up a post on a hill overlooking the village of Saint-Jacques-des-Blats, about five kilometres from the western entrance to the tunnel from where, with the naked eye, we could see the Germans calmly watching us through binoculars, unpacking their weaponry, sending out detachments along the hillside in what looked very like a flanking manoeuvre. The enemy seemed to have, and to be taking, all the time in the world. Our new leader was a tall guy with a crew-cut; he stood with rocklike stillness, clearly determined to impress us with his impassivity. What little we knew about him did not make us well disposed towards him: he came from a movement called Jeunesse et Montagne, founded after the defeat in 1940 by a regiment of Chasseurs alpins – the élite French mountain infantry – and a handful of aviators, its aim to revitalize the country through a combination of pure mountain air, farming and physical labour. Headquartered and with an entire bureaucracy in Vichy, very similar to Maréchal Petain’s Chantiers de la jeunesse française, its motto was ‘Faire face’, which meant endure with a steadfast soul, submit to fate without in any way involving the spirit of resistance. They didn’t join forces with the maquisards until very late, infiltrating our ranks by virtue of their past and their military training. What I had been expecting since the beginning finally occurred: the Germans, tired of being taken as harmless tourists, began shelling us with mortars of incredible precision along with bursts of machine-gun fire that seemed to come from all points of the compass. They were clearly determined to flush us out and it was futile for us to remain as we had neither the means to meet them head on, nor to attack them. Our comrade from Jeunesse et Montagne, however, did not see things our way. He ‘faced’ head on the machine-gun fire and mortar attack; his large frame did not tremble and the bullets saluted his stoic endurance by avoiding him while the fear of dying stupidly, pointlessly, began to spread through the veterans of the Resistance, of whom I was one. Twenty metres from the rocky outcrop where our leader hoped to earn his stripes, admiration and a career, was a section of rock that could shelter us from the hellish machine-gun fire. Without a word, we all took cover. Jeunesse et Montagne had no choice but to join us, barking ‘desertion of duty in the face of the enemy’ and other nonsense, but he was forced to lead us on a long retreat over hills and through forests beneath bombs dropped from a determined and effective German plane that wounded several of our men, until we reached a safe haven; never had sky and nature, the murmur of mountain streams, seemed as precious to me as at that moment.

  By the end of August 1944 all of the Auvergne had been liberated. My father entered Brioude at the head of two columns of maquisards. Even now I cannot look at the photo of him taken that day without being moved: he was forty-four years old. As I have said, before they retreated, the Germans burned all the buildings around the small town’s main square, shot a number of prisoners and took others with them to be deported to a concentration camp. Not all of them returned.

  The purge was brutal, equal to everything that had been suffered during the four years of the Occupation: special tribunals, courts-martial hastily convened in the fields followed by swift summary execution. Onlookers jostled, eager to see the executions. I was present at one of them where the condemned man was a young bourgeois of no more than twenty-five, who had signed up with the Milice following an extreme right-wing family tradition; he pleaded, he begged, he did not want to die. The executioner – I’ve forgotten his name, but his feverish eyes, his hollow cheeks, his scrawny frame and the formidable swiftness of his movements are still imprinted on my memory – grabbed him suddenly by the earlobe, dragged him quickly for some twenty metres, stepped back to look at him and shot him down in a vertical spray of machine-gun fire that stitched him with blood from groin to face. The feverish executioner had a great reputation, he was often called upon, sometimes travelling considerable distances.

  The maquisards of the Auvergne were soon integrated into the Forces françaises de l’intérieur, under the command of Général de Lattre de Tassigny. My brother reappeared, having escaped a German firing squad in Provence – he has told his story. By train or on foot, we were sent north-eastward and stationed in a tiny village on the borders of Burgundy that bears the pretty name of Perrigny-sur-l’Ognon. It was at Perrigny that I encountered my first US military truck, driven by a huge, smiling black man who had me climb aboard, offering me a pack of opium-laced Camel cigarettes as he drove like a madman through the lashing rain of a September night. I don’t remember whether I had smoked before, but it was the first time I had tried American cigarettes and I chain-smoked uncontrollably. I indicated to the driver that he should drop me at the next village, then sought shelter in the only café that was still open. I drank wine, then went out into the now pouring rain; I didn’t feel anything. A Military Police patrol found me the next morning lying half-drowned in an overflowing gutter. The Americans dazzled us with the beauty and variety of their weaponry, by the endless parade of tanks, the number and the rich palette of their vehicles as they drove towards Belfort and the front line. We went too, though we were third-tier soldiers, since the Free French of the First Army were much better equipped and the assimilation of the ex-maquisards was far from perfect.

  At Belfort, we were told that we would only be truly integrated if we signed up for the duration of the war, including the war with Japan. This was in November and we were given two weeks to decide. In the meantime, we were entitled to a furlough. Jacques and I leapt at the chance and teamed up with some twenty others who had decided to go up to Paris. We were carrying Soviet rifles stamped with the hammer and sickle, taken from Ukrainian mercenaries in the Vlasov army who had gone over to the enemy side – that is, to the Germans – with bag and baggage, in so doing providing the enemy with the largest contingent of guards for the death camps in Poland. We reached Paris, packed tightly together on the platform of an open truck, shivering beneath our greatcoats; one of the group managed, while cleaning his revolver, to put a bullet in his thigh. Paris, at last. By now, my mother and Monny were living in a little flat near the École militaire. My brother and I showed up unannounced, Paulette-Pauline opened the door and almost keeled over from shock before dissolving into floods of tears. I knew that, for us, the war was over.

  Chapter 7

  For Jacques and me, this two-week furlough in Paris before returning to our unit to announce that, no, we would definitely not be signing up until the end of the war was like discovering a new world. Every minute brought with it fun, festivity or some surprise. Paris had been liberated for barely three months and adjusting to this new-found liberty did not come easily. My mother paled at the sound of a police car siren and it was difficult for me to understand that it was going to take her some time to adjust to all these ‘returns’: of her sons become men, of p
eace, the advent of a new life both private and public, where everything would have to be reinvented from the tabula rasa of the Occupation. Paulette’s first pronouncement was that she could not bear to see us in our badly cut military greatcoats: we needed new clothes. The day after we arrived, Monny was given the task of taking us to Paquito San Miguel, a celebrated tailor on the place Saint-Augustin to whom he had sold some rare first editions the previous year. My mother did not think it excessive that her sons, not yet twenty, should have tailor-made suits, expensive despite the special price offered by Paquito, a charming, vivacious Spaniard, who was clearly dazzled by Monny and of whom he seemed to be fond. Thus Paulette took it upon herself to demob us: how could we go back to war after we had seen ourselves, dressed to the nines like Spanish infantes, reflected in the vast mirrors of Paquito’s showrooms?

  Yet back we went, in our old greatcoats, if only to inform the authorities that we were becoming civilians, that our mother could not bear the idea of being separated from us again and had insisted that I go back to my studies. The Battle of Belfort was about to start, but I was impatient to be done with it all. Paris was calling.

  I discovered everything all at once: Monny’s extraordinary eloquence, his brio, his verve, the surrealistic genius that animated his language and his relationships with people, his generosity towards us, boundless as the love he bore my mother. He might have considered our presence in that little two-room apartment on the rue Alexandre-Cabanel, crammed with books, paintings and precious things, to be the insufferable incursion of a past in which he had no part, forcing him to take on a heavy burden, a responsibility others would have rejected, evaded or begrudgingly accepted. Monny did none of these things, the thought never occurred to him, Paulette’s children were his now, and he would do anything for us. In addition to love, intelligence was what cemented this miraculous harmony, freedom too, and the understanding that beyond these cardinal virtues there would be no taboos either of behaviour or in what was said.

  Paulette had not yet adjusted and was determined to examine her offspring closely, oblivious to our prudishness as young men, hurling herself into a diffident and desperate search of lost time: all those years in which she had not been able to bathe her children, as mothers do, had to be made good. I can still see us that first week in Paris, Monny, Jacques and me, naked as the day we were born, lined up outside the bathroom as though for a recruiting board. We entered in turn: she officiated, washing and soaping us from head to foot, grooming us, currying us and rubbing us down, inspecting us from every angle, her lip curled at the sight of a stooped shoulder, one testicle higher than the other. ‘You get that from le père Lanzmann,’ she grumbled. ‘Le père Lanzmann’ clearly being her unforgivable sodomite of a husband. But our relationship could be as stormy as it was miraculous. Our mother took it upon herself to drag us to a fashionable hair salon, insisting on being present while we had our hair cut, imposing her increasingly stuttering views on the hairdresser, treating us like ten-year-olds to the astonishment of the other clients, mercilessly crushing our vanity, the image we had of ourselves, the one we wanted to project. I was reliving the dark hours we had spent together in Chaussures André but Jacques was the first to crack, grabbing a pair of scissors, brandishing it, gesturing as though to stab her in the back. He stopped himself, but she sensed the blade and started rolling her mad eyes. I seized the weapon from him, made a throat-cutting gesture and shouted to my brother, ‘Come on!’ and we made a run for it, just as I had the day we had gone shopping for boots. Once again, it took time, and Monny’s infinite tact, before we were reconciled.

  In January 1945, I was enrolled as a boarder at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, in Lettres supérieures. To be admitted in the middle of the school year, having missed a whole term, was an achievement: Monny had interceded on my behalf with his friend Ferdinand Alquié, who had taken part with him in the great battles of surrealism and who now held the chair of philosophy teaching khâgne students, those preparing for the École normale supérieure. He had argued that I had just left the Resistance, the maquis, the war and that at Blaise-Pascal I had been an hypokhâgne student whose school year, though not completed, was more than equivalent to a single term at Louis-le-Grand. At the lycée, there were two classes of Lettres supérieures and two of Première supérieur, known as K1 and K2. The study and work rooms were shared by all the boarders for both classes. The night I arrived a spontaneous meeting was held to protest against the trial of Robert Brasillach, which was due to start any day now. To my astonishment, the majority of the senior pupils at Louis-le-Grand, followed, sheep-like, by most of the juniors, proposed naming one of our study halls after Brasillach – the K1 hall, which, as it happened, was mine. The fact that Brasillach, a former pupil of Louis-le-Grand, had sat at the very desks where we now sat, completely eclipsed the appalling calls to murder Jews uttered by this collaborationist writer in Je suis partout and various rags in thrall to the Nazis. This, it seemed, counted for nothing, it didn’t matter, and I immediately realized with a disgust that I have perhaps never entirely lost, that the great ship France had continued on its way, insensible to the catastrophe of others, the destruction of millions of lives, of a whole world.

  That was my first day, I knew no one, I was anxious, intimidated, I could not understand this praise heaped on Brasillach, absolving him of the worst, and I did not dare disagree with this crowd of bourgeois boys whose every pore, every look, every breath oozed authority. The war had passed them by; they had suffered little because of it. France had continued to ‘function’ and they with it. This was what mattered. Then, suddenly, a voice arose: laconic yet lyrical, its Midi accent modulated by a precision of speech and an expressiveness of gesture determined to persuade – gestures of prayer, in fact – imposing silence, demanding to be heard and in so doing, setting mine free. The voice was that of Jean Cau: I can see him still, lean as a wolf in his black student’s dress, his high cheekbones, his sunken cheeks, his wolf-like nostrils, his jug ears. Together we began not to argue or debate, but to defy and insult and very quickly to lash out, throwing anything that came to hand. Several boys were injured, and a stinking, blood-spattered giant, who shall remain nameless, punched me full in the face. Alerted by the ruckus, the surveillant général, a short man by the name of Louvet whose life we would later make difficult, flung open the door. We told him that this khâgne was a pack of traitors and that if the study hall was renamed ‘Brasillach’, we would lodge a complaint and have the ringleaders hauled into court.

  Brasillach’s trial took place on 19 January. As expected, he was condemned to death and, in spite of pleas by celebrated intellectuals, executed by firing squad on 6 February at the Fort de Montrouge. No room at Louis-le-Grand ever bore his name. But, on the subject of his death, de Gaulle wrote something magnificent, something I did not know when I was drafting the first chapter of this book; something that I dare to say – without, I hope, being too shocking – deeply binds the General and me. To a reporter who had criticized him for not granting Brasillach a pardon, Général de Gaulle movingly confided:

  Robert Brasillach was, indeed, the only writer guilty of treason, of those who did not actively serve the enemy, for whom I deviated from the principles I had set down for myself: I did not commute his sentence. If he was executed on that chill, sad, misty morning of 6 February 1945, in spite of pleas from the worthiest of his contemporaries, it is that I considered I owed him to France. It cannot be explained. In literature too talent confers responsibility and I felt obliged to reject this appeal, perhaps, after all, because it appeared to me that Brasillach had completely lost his way […] If I remember that particular morning so well, on the last night of every man I could pardon, I did not sleep. In my own way, I had to go with him. [my italics]

  And so the General did not sleep any more than I did on the night before a capital execution, and so, when I wrote earlier: ‘Mauriac understood that one did not wake de Gaulle and that, besides, it would have made no difference�
��, only the second part of that sentence was true: there would have been no need to wake de Gaulle since he was not asleep. If one tallied – and it would be possible – the number of pardons he refused to grant, one could calculate the minimum number of his sleepless nights.

  It is hardly surprising that Jean Cau became my closest friend. Although he was in K2 and I was in K1, we were inseparable: we slept in the same dormitory, our beds next to each other. The son of a railwayman from Carcassonne and a mother who worked as a cleaner, Cau knew no one in Paris, and since all of the boarders needed a ‘guardian’ in order to be granted weekend leave on Saturday and Sunday – we had to be back by seven o’clock on Sunday – my mother naturally became his guardian. She had furnished a chambre de bonne for me on the sixth floor of her building on the rue Alexandre-Cabanel, and since Cau did not have a penny to his name, I offered him my meagre hospitality: one of us slept in the bed, the other on the floor on a mattress provided for the purpose, alternating each weekend. Paulette took to Cau right away and he returned the favour with a radical act of naming, having a habit of giving nicknames to everyone. My mother became ‘the Mother’, a generic creature, Alma Mater, not simply mine but that of all of my friends, the boys from the provinces who came to study at Louis-le-Grand in September 1946, whom she loved like sons, differently and perhaps even more than she did her real sons since, as we have seen, her relationship with us was less than indulgent. Following Cau’s example, they all called her ‘the Mother’, never feeling threatened by her, never suffering from her Jewish nose or her stammer, sensitive instead to her extraordinary curiosity for life, for their past, their loves, the way she drew all of them out, teasing them to confide in her with astonishing fervour. She fascinated them by her keen intelligence, flushing out compromise, pretence and self-deception; by her culture, deepened every night as she read until dawn, the book propped between Monny’s shoulder blades, which served as a book-rest; her humour, her vitality. As often as not she greeted them wearing a dressing gown, moving about the apartment with the agility and speed of a tiger. Never, in Carcassonne, in Luçon, in Mâcon, in their home towns, had René Guyonnet or Maurice Bouvet, whose father had been shot by the Milice in front of him, had the opportunity of meeting a ‘mother’ of such calibre. Every one of them remained faithful to her; their relationships with her proved indestructible long after their ties to me had weakened.