The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  The film was, as we know, chosen for the New York Film Festival in October 1973 on the condition, imposed by Richard Roud, the programme director, that I cut it by ten minutes and not a minute less – his way of flaunting and exercising his omnipotence. Honestly, I tried but failed to cut the film even by a minute, to the despair of the producer. I informed Roud that, as he wished, I had cut the running time of the film, convinced he would not notice. I was right. In Israel, the very title of the film put off professional film distributors, who could see no reason to ask what was not a question – there is no question mark in the title Pourquoi Israël – still less to answer it. Its running time was the coup de grâce. I organized a number of private screenings away from the hesitant commercial network and the ordinary Israeli film audiences. My audiences – intellectuals, writers, artists, journalists, politicians, people who managed vast ministries – responded to the film very favourably. To stand at the back of a cinema, to experience the rapt silence, to wait for the laughs that came exactly when I expected them, or to feel the bureaucrats’ shudder of anxiety at certain scenes – because Pourquoi Israël is not remotely a piece of propaganda – and then their relief after a difficult sequence was, one might say, ‘corrected’ by another that complicated matters and revealed the empathy with which the whole film is imbued, all this was a new and exhilarating experience for me. Gershom Scholem’s comment, when he rose to his feet after the three hours and twenty minutes of the screening, turned to the audience and shouted, ‘We’ve never seen anything like it!’, was, for me, the ultimate accolade, the greatest joy. The film critic Moshe Nathan said the same thing in more detail in a long article in the newspaper Maariv, a few short months before he was run over and killed by a bus in Tel Aviv.

  It is here that the adventure of Shoah begins: my friend Alouph Hareven, director-general of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, invited me in and spoke to me with a gravity and a solemnity I had never experienced from him. Having congratulated me on Pourquoi Israël, this in substance is what he said to me: ‘There is no film about the Shoah, no film that takes in what happened in all its magnitude, no film that shows it from our point of view, the viewpoint of the Jews. It’s not a matter of making a film about the Shoah, but a film that is the Shoah. We believe that you are the only person who can make this film. Think about it. We know the problems you had in making Pourquoi Israël. If you agree, we’ll help you out as much as we can.’ So the idea for Shoah is not mine, I had not even thought about it: although the Shoah is central to Pourquoi Israël, I had never thought about tackling such a subject head on. I left that meeting stunned and shaking – the conversation took place at the beginning of 1973 – and went back to Paris, not knowing what to think, weighing up the vastness of such a task, the insuperable obstacles, which seemed to me countless, terrified that I would never be equal to this incredible challenge. And yet something powerful, even violent, inside me urged me to accept: I could not see myself going back to my former profession as a journalist; that period of my life was over. But if I said yes I would be turning my back on prudence and security, committing myself to a project with no fixed term, without knowing how long it might take, stepping into the unknown, perhaps into danger. I felt as though I was standing at the foot of some petrifying, uncharted north face, the summit obscured by thick clouds. I spent a whole night, a night like Pascal’s nuit de feu, roaming through Paris, I steeled myself, telling myself that what was being offered was a unique opportunity, one that would require the greatest courage, and that it would be thankless and cowardly not to seize that opportunity with both hands. I also asked myself what I knew about the Shoah. Nothing, was the truthful answer, I knew nothing, nothing but a statistic, an abstract number: six million of our people had been murdered. And yet like most Jews of my generation, I felt that I innately knew about it, that it was in my blood and hence I did not have to learn about it, to come face to face with the terrifying reality. I had been absolutely contemporary to the Shoah, I could have been among the victims, but the terror it evoked in me whenever I dared to think about it had consigned it to a different time, almost to another world, light years away, beyond human time, to some quasi-legendary illo tempore. This thing could not have happened in my time, terror required distance. I am simplifying now, and I regret it, the confusion of thoughts I struggled with throughout that night so much like Pascal’s. In the morning, exhausted, before sinking into dark and peaceful sleep, I phoned Alouph Hareven to tell him I would do it.

  It took me time to define my subject. I spent the summer of 1973 with Angelika in Jerusalem, waiting for the screening of Pourquoi Israël at the New York Film Festival. We lived in an apartment facing the walls of the old city in Mishkenot Sha’ananim, a foundation for intellectuals and artists from around the world. I divided my time between reading Reitlinger and Hilberg, furiously making notes without knowing where they might lead me, and the archives and the library of Yad Vashem, most of whose staff were survivors – by this I mean the old, simple, unassuming and poignant Yad Vashem that appears in Pourquoi Israël, not the more recent creation, a gigantic Americanized stone city, a triumph of the museum-builders’ art, the result of an arrogant competition between architects from around the world, a multimedia confection that promotes forgetfulness rather than memory. I had hired Irène Steinfeldt, a young student, the daughter of one of Angelika’s friends, to assist me; in addition to speaking Hebrew, she also spoke German, English and French fluently and she proved to have a unique talent for simultaneous interpreting, which was very useful to me during the exploratory work for Shoah, in particular during my German escapades. I had no idea where I was going, I made wild stabs in the dark, took random samples. In the tiny office that Yad Vashem put at my disposal, I gradually made headway in reading The Destruction of the European Jews, Hilberg’s unrelentingly dry book, in the first American edition – 1,000 pages of close print, two columns per page, overviews spanning 1933 until the end that traced, albeit with a rigorously deconstructed chronology, each of the phases of the Final Solution (definition, branding, expulsion, ghettoization, putting to death) with a plethora of notes that seemed important to me as they contained the names of the Nazi protagonists. On whiteboards, I drew up charts, endlessly erasing and redrawing, which I thought might help me to articulate this unthinkable ‘thing’ that I was discovering, this ‘thing’ about which, believing I knew everything, I knew nothing. Hilberg’s sources were primarily German and I already knew, knew very early on, that I would not make this film unless the killers appeared in it.

  I had absolutely no idea how I would proceed, the sheer effrontery I would need to summon, the dangers I would have to expose myself to. I also knew from the start that I would not use archive images. The most powerful and most luminous reason for this refusal did not occur to me immediately, it became obvious only when I understood the nature of the film I had been called to make. But I had already seen films that used archive footage, such as Frédéric Rossif’s Le Temps du ghetto [The Witnesses], which had infuriated me because it did not cite its sources, said nothing about the provenance of the archive footage used, much of it filmed in the Warsaw Ghetto by the PK – Propaganda Kompanien, the Wehrmacht’s propaganda companies – to show the world, and Germany, how good life was there: the PK ‘directors’ had organized sham cabarets, dances featuring Jewish women in outlandish make-up, selected for this farce. No one is denying that in the ghettos, especially at the beginning, there was a class structure – I showed as much in Shoah – but it is reasonable to wonder what the uninformed viewer will make of such footage, which seems to be irrefutable documentary evidence. I remember spending three mad days in London with an obsessive, poignant, haunted Jew named Kissel who had stopped the clock in ghetto time and lived in an apartment, every room of which was filled with black-and-white photographs of all sizes, most of them taken in the Warsaw Ghetto. Strewn over the floors, the tables, the armchairs, the beds, piled in boxes and pinned to walls were not only t
hese fake photographs of ‘happy times’, but also horrifying photographs – since the PK had filmed everything – of corpses in the streets covered with newspapers, carts piled with bodies being dragged by skeletal figures, morgues swarming with enormous black flies, all attesting to the powerful fascination the death and suffering of the Jews exercised over those talented professionals trained in Joseph Goebbels’ schools. Kissel could find his way unerringly through this invaluable, grisly chaos, dashing from one box to another, the meticulous curator of a buried world, the stalwart companion of the agony of his people – all the more so, he told me, as he felt his own days drawing to a close (he was suffering from cancer of the larynx) – capable of proposing such things as I had not even imagined, racing to dig out a print from this or that series, constantly making copies, since this was also his profession: the countless films made around the world about the ghettos all used his archives, each time with a different commentary. People in Jerusalem had talked to me about Kissel and, not knowing which way to turn, I had decided to visit him: ‘It’s very important for your film,’ they told me. They were not wrong: the three days I spent with him were to put me off archive material forever. On the other hand, since I was making a film and was looking for characters, I thought that Kissel might be one of them, that he and his clutter might make an interesting opening scene. It was a bad idea. One that his death spared me having to confirm.

  As my reading progressed, as the months passed, my film, if I can put it this way, was pieced together in the negative, by trial and error. My work was interrupted for several months by the Yom Kippur War of 6 October 1973, which coincided with the screening of Pourquoi Israël in New York, and its release in Paris on 11 October. It was made clear to me by the Israelis that what had almost been a catastrophe for the nation, forcing a change of government and the resignation of a Prime Minister as irremovable as Golda Meir, had inevitably relegated the interest they had expressed some months earlier in a film about the Shoah. This meant that at some point I would have to struggle on alone and that I would not be spared the problems they had hoped to spare me. The day after the New York screening, Angelika took the first plane back to Tel Aviv, unable to bear being elsewhere while Israel was in danger. I joined her a week after the release of the film in France; the fighting was still going on, although the initial stranglehold had been broken. A few hours after the ceasefire, Ariel Sharon, the great victor of the war – who, after the terrible Battle of the Chinese Farm and in spite of intense bombing by Egyptian artillery, ordered armoured units to cross the Suez Canal on pontoon bridges – invited me aboard his military plane. We touched down on a crude landing-strip near the Canal and crossed one of the bridges the tanks had taken, making straight for Suez, then advancing on Cairo, where the armistice hastily requested by the Egyptians had stopped them at Kilometre 101. It was a truly Napoleonic stroke of genius, completely turning the tables, cutting off the Egyptian Third Army and trapping them in Sinai, making it impossible for them to retreat. One of the terms of the ceasefire was that Israel was to allow supplies through to the enemy Third Army and there was something comical in seeing small boats full of Egyptian officers and soldiers shuttling back and forth to their own bank of the Canal to get food and water from ironic but friendly Israeli troops.

  Unlike the special issue of Les Temps modernes, which had benefited from a publication date coinciding with the first day of the Six Day War, the coincidence between the start of the Yom Kippur War and the screening of Pourquoi Israël at the New York Film Festival did not help the film. Despite uniformly excellent reviews, it was a very bad time to distribute the film in the United States: day and night Israel was on every television network. Despite this there were a number of distributors willing to take the risk, but the producer insisted on an advance against receipts that they all considered excessive, and I agreed with them. In France, on the other hand, in spite of similar circumstances and my hasty departure for Israel the day after its release, the film was a critical and commercial success. In addition to reviews by the film critics in the newspapers and weekly magazines, Claude Roy, François Furet, Pierre Nora and Philippe Labro also wrote enthusiastic articles. Truth be told, the film had been ready since the spring and the release had been pushed back because it had been selected for the New York Film Festival in October. There had been a number of private screenings in Paris. After one of them, Philippe Labro called me to say he had given my phone number to Jean-Pierre Melville, who had been enthusiastic about the film and very much wanted to meet me. Melville’s actual surname was Grumbach, and he was a Jew, something I did not know, nor had I seen all his films. It was the beginning of a close friendship, cut short all too soon by Jean-Pierre’s death in August that year. He lived in an astonishing, rather gloomy building in the 13th arrondissement that he had converted into a mansion, installing an editing suite and a state-of-the-art private cinema that seated a hundred people. When I first encountered him, he remained seated, hulking, motionless, a stetson covering the bald pate of his enormous head, his eyes unfathomable behind dark glasses, the room was only softly lit. He spoke little except about the film, which he talked about passionately, the eye of the great cinéaste had noticed everything. I realized he had a Jewish sensitivity, which perhaps explained his need for masks. Pourquoi Israël, I feel sure, liberated him, and he lit up when we talked about Jerusalem. Every time I visited him, it was the same ritual: fraternal conversation punctuated by long silences in his dim study – but then people rarely speak in his films either – then the ceremonial descent into the cavernous basement garage, the showcase for his gleaming, understated Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, an expensive jewel that deeply impressed me. Melville would get behind the wheel, never taking off his sunglasses, not even at night, and drive up the ramp, heading south for the motorway via the Porte d’Italie. We always drove for twenty kilometres or so in the regal silence of the Rolls, without exchanging a word, then we would turn and head back. He would then invite me to dinner at a brasserie in Gobelins, where he was known and worshipped; he was the first man I ever saw pay by credit card – American Express, I think – something that impressed me almost as much as the Silver Shadow. The highlight of these evenings began after dinner in his private cinema, just the two of us. Sitting next to him I watched all of his films, more than once, sometimes two films a night – he slept little – and also Pourquoi Israël, which he insisted on, which pleased me immensely. I told him all about the adventure I had just embarked on and he approved and asked me to be sure to talk to him about it again. His sudden death put paid to all of that. I was told that he died completely penniless, that the Silver Shadow was leased...

  After the Yom Kippur War and before I went back to work, I decided to try to release Pourquoi Israël in the USA by myself. Arthur Krim, chairman of United Artists, organized a screening in the private cinema of his opulent mansion on Long Island Sound. Krim liked and wanted the film very much, but here again the producer asked for too much money. A second screening took place in another palatial mansion on Long Island, the home of New York tycoon Larry Tisch, the owner of the famous Tischman Building at 666 Fifth Avenue. Larry was a tall, very pale, red-headed man and the numerous photographs of him and his wife shaking hands with presidents and ministers, Americans and Israelis, showed they were serious donors and fervent Zionists. We were joined by a couple of their friends, and a remarkably frugal, non-alcoholic snack was served, then we went into the theatre: the armchairs and sofas were so soft and deep you almost disappeared into them, you had to lean forward and crane your neck to see the person next to you. As soon as the screening began with Gert Granach’s Spartacist songs, I realized, trying to sink even deeper into my seat, that this was neither the place nor the audience for my film and that what was about to happen would be torture. The first resonant, unselfconscious snore came within about ten minutes; I turned round, and Larry, mouth hanging open, was fast asleep. He was quickly followed by his wife. Only his friends didn’t sleep or s
nore, and when the lights went on again three hours later, they gave me complicit smiles, their eyes bright and shining, looking at Mr and Mrs Tisch and shrugging their shoulders. Larry must have felt bad because three days later he arranged to meet me in his office on the sixty-sixth floor of 666 Fifth Avenue, which offered a 360° panorama that took one’s breath away. But he did not care about the view, he was engrossed in something else: I watched him for forty-five minutes before he even registered my presence so captivated was he by the dozens of televisions and computer screens listing stock exchanges around the world, by the machines and the telephones and the modern gadgets I could not even name, into which he relentlessly barked orders to sell, to buy. Watching this made up for everything, I completely forgave him: he was a genius. He finally noticed me, smiled, thanked me for coming and congratulated me on my film, as though he had not missed a single second of it. As I sat there, he phoned a business partner, recommending he meet me and even arranging a time and a place for us to meet again. Because Larry – and this was something I had not known – owned chains of cinemas across the entire country. I realized to my astonishment that he was prepared to distribute Pourquoi Israël. But it was the same story all over again with the producer. I’d had enough, I gave up, deciding to go back to Europe, back to work.

  I had seen Nuit et brouillard [Night and Fog], had read Primo Levi, Antelme, Rousset and a hundred other books and monographs, I had spent hours with people who had survived, who had escaped, some of whom I knew, others of whom someone had said ‘You absolutely have to hear what they’ve got to say’, getting them to talk more by putting myself in the position of an attentive listener than by questioning them. I later learned that one needs a vast body of knowledge before questioning someone. At the time I really didn’t know enough. All the stories, all the witness accounts I collected, even the most harrowing, fell silent when it came to something central that I could not quite grasp. The beginnings: the arrests, the roundings up, the traps, the ‘transports’, the overcrowding, the stench, the thirst, the hunger, the deception, the violence, the selection process on arrival at the camps – these were all the same and we quickly came to the horrifying routine that was life in the camps. There could be no question of my film not dealing with these things, but what was most important was missing: the gas chambers, death in the gas chambers, from which no one had returned to report. The day I realized that this was what was missing, I knew that the subject of the film would be death itself, death rather than survival, a radical contradiction since in a sense it attested to the impossibility of the project I was embarking on: the dead could not speak for the dead. But it was also an epiphany of such power that when this obvious fact was revealed to me I immediately knew that I would carry this thought to the end, that nothing would persuade me to give up. My film would have to take up the ultimate challenge; take the place of the non-existent images of death in the gas chambers. Everything had to be created from scratch: not a single photograph exists of Belzec extermination camp where 800,000 Jews were asphyxiated, nor any of Sobibór (250,000 deaths), nor of Chełmno (400,000 victims of the gas vans). Of Treblinka (600,000), there is one image, of a distant bulldozer. The case of Auschwitz, that vast factory, both concentration camp and extermination camp, is not radically different: there are numerous photographs taken before the killings, by SS officers on the ramp, mostly of Hungarian Jews waiting for the selection, but there are none of the frantic struggles to snatch a breath of air, to go on breathing a few seconds longer that took place in the huge gas chambers of Birkenau in which 3,000 men, women and children were asphyxiated at a time.