The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  Two things I read proved to be very important to me: the transcripts of the Treblinka trials held in Frankfurt in 1960, in which I found statements from two people who were to appear in my film, SS officer Franz Suchomel and Richard Glazar, a Czech Jew who survived the uprising in the camp, and also the German state prosecutor, Alfred Spiess, who later agreed to meet me and became himself a protagonist of Shoah; during the same period I also read Into That Darkness by Gitta Sereny, a British journalist of Hungarian origin, who, in addition to Suchomel and Glazar, had interviewed the second commandant of Treblinka, Franz Stangl, at length in his prison cell. Sereny’s subject is undoubtedly death, but her approach seemed to me purely psychological: she wanted to think about evil, to understand how a husband and father can calmly take part in mass murder, the central subject of many later literary-historical works. From the beginning of my own research, by contrast, I was so astonished that I braced myself with all my might against the refusal to understand. Sereny later wrote a book about Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect and, during the war, Minister for Armaments, a defendant at the Nuremberg trials who was sentenced to twenty years. On his release, he wrote a memoir, which went on to be a bestseller. Sereny fell for his charm and that of his family, his wife, his daughters, and, carried along by the niceties proper to psychology as a means of inquiry, wrote her massive tome in tribute to them. She understood everything. She understood too much. I myself met Speer after his memoirs were published; he invited me to his seigniorial manor in Heidelberg near the Schloss on the hill overlooking the Neckar Valley. The conversation began at three in the afternoon and, despite the long years of incarceration that should have liberated him to the truth, from the first he seemed to me incredibly evasive and stilted, more worried about his pose and his posture than about giving honest answers to my questions. I questioned him about architecture, about the Führer’s talents as an architect and the monuments of frozen geometry he built to the Thousand Year Reich. I talked to him about the Éxposition Universelle in Paris in 1937, where Hitler’s pavilions had faced those of the USSR. It was there I had seen my mother for the first time since she left home, she showed me the giant marble statue of an Aryan couple facing an equally gigantic Soviet couple, the woman scything the air with her sickle, the man brandishing a fearsome steel hammer. Speer had not been the architect of the marvel I had mentioned, but he went off and got a portfolio of drawings and I was forced to look at his work as he commented on the cost and the scale of those that had been built. Night drew in as we talked, he sat back down in a large armchair, I sat in another. He did not turn on the lights, made no move to do so, so we went on talking in utter darkness: he did not offer me anything to eat or drink, I left him at midnight with no desire ever to see him again.

  A scientific committee chaired by Yehuda Bauer, professor of contemporary Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, had been set up, to which I was supposed to give a broad overview of my work and a progress report. After a few months, the meetings of the committee became more infrequent and I talked about the difficulties I was facing with Yehuda Bauer alone. It was by now clear to me that the Jewish protagonists in my film had to be either the Sonderkommandos – the Special Units, to use Nazi terminology, who worked at the final stage of the destruction process and hence, with the killers, were the only witnesses to the deaths of their people, the only witnesses to the last moments of the lives about to be lost, asphyxiated in the gas chambers (I have already talked at length, in Chapter 2, about Filip Müller, who was part of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando for almost three years, and who miraculously survived the five Sonderkommando purges) – or those men who, having spent long periods in the camps, ended up holding crucial positions, making them particularly able to describe in detail how the machinery of death functioned. Bauer perfectly understood what I wanted to achieve and agreed with me; he was of Czech extraction and had known the antecedents and the various stages of the Final Solution in Czechoslovakia – of all the Jews in Europe, perhaps because of their geographical proximity to Auschwitz, the Czechs and the Slovaks were the first to be deported there. It is hardly surprising that three of the most important protagonists in Shoah are Czech, like Glazar and Filip Müller, or Slovak, like Rudolf Vrba: it was through Yehuda Bauer that I first heard of these last two. Finding them and persuading them to appear in the film was a very different matter. But there was yet a further reason to include them: aside from the fact that all three were exceptional in their intelligence, in their remarkable survival, their heroism and their ability to articulate their experience, I could only speak to them in a foreign language; this estrangement – another term for the distance I spoke of earlier – was for me, paradoxically, a necessary condition to approach the horror. There was no question of what would have happened had I met a French Filip Müller – it could not have happened, there could never have been such a voice of bronze, with that resonant and reverberating timbre that hung in the air long after each of his frank, dramatic utterances, never such profound intelligence, a unique meditation on life and death forged by three years in hell.

  I met almost all of the surviving members of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, having set about tracking them down as soon as I realized how essential they were to my project. None rivalled Filip Müller, and I knew they would not be in the film, apart from Dov Paisikovitch, a butcher in Hadera, a little town in Israel. He was the most taciturn man I have ever met, a slab of silence. A native of Transylvania, he had been deported to Birkenau with his family in May 1944; the extermination of the Hungarian Jews was at its height: as the furnaces were unable to cope with the thousands of corpses that daily came out of the gas chambers, pits had been hastily dug in which those for whom there was no place in the white-hot maw of Crematoria IV and V were burned. Beaten and whipped as he climbed down from the goods train, separated from his family, Dov, not yet eighteen years old, was forced with truncheon blows and dog bites to one of the pits where, along with others, he had to douse the corpses in petrol, pounding with wood or concrete poles the large bones that did not burn, collecting the boiling Jewish fat in buckets. He carried out his harrowing task for as long as he had to, surviving Auschwitz by a mixture of luck and extraordinary courage. He could not be compared to Filip Müller, but I liked him and visited him at his butcher’s shop several times, convinced that his youth, his absolute silence deserved a place in the tragedy that the film had to incarnate. Silence, too, is an authentic form of speech. The only thing I managed to learn from his own lips was that he liked to fish in the Mediterranean, near Caesarea, at twilight casting ledger lines from a long, heavy fishing rod firmly fixed in the sand and then waiting with infinite patience for the rush of the reel that indicated he had a bite. Since I too had a fondness for fishing, for waiting, for imminence, I thought, ‘We won’t speak, we’ll fish together in silence and I will tell his story in voiceover.’ Dov agreed to my proposal but, sadly, died of a heart attack before I could film the scene. I felt great regret. And grief.

  Just as Shoah is a film impossible to master, offering a thousand ways by which to enter it, so it makes little sense to attempt to recount day by day, year by year, how it came to be made. From the moment I became convinced that there would be no archive footage, no individual stories, that the living would be self-effacing so that the dead might speak through them, that there would be no ‘I’, however fantastical or fascinating or atypical an individual fate might be; that, on the contrary, the film would take a strict form – in German a Gestalt – recounting the fate of the people as a whole, and that those who spoke for them, forgetting themselves and supremely conscious of their duty to pass on their memories, would naturally express themselves in the name of all, considering the question of their own survival almost as anecdotal, of little interest, since they too were fated to die – which is why I consider them as ‘revenants’ rather than as survivors – from the moment I made that decision I began to fight, not randomly, but as I needed to, on each and
every front. A few more words about self-effacement, about the implacable discipline we imposed upon ourselves, the ‘revenants’ and I, because one of my regrets is that I make no mention of it in the film. In the film, there are two survivors from Vilnius, Motke Zaïdl and Itzhak Dugin, members of a commando of young Jewish men who were forced to dig up the immense mass graves in the Ponary forest, to exhume the corpses without the use of tools, with their bare hands; among the thousands of bodies buried there they recognized those closest to them, whom they were forced to refer to as Figuren or Schmattes – puppets or rags. If they dared use the words ‘corpse’ or ‘victim’ they were savagely beaten. What I do not recount in Shoah is the extraordinary escape attempt made by the young men of this commando, among them Zaïdl and Dugin. Digging a long, deep, airless tunnel in the sand that led to the depths of the forest beyond the barbed-wire fence, Dugin and Zaïdl managed to make it to the other side. The SS, having learned of the escape attempt, set their dogs after them. It is Dugin who speaks: ‘We were so exhausted that the dogs caught up with us, and we were convinced they would tear us to pieces. Then suddenly they started to whine, circling around us, whimpering in terror, and trembling, they lay down. We smelled so strongly of death, having had to wade through the pits for weeks, that the stench was enough to frighten off the dogs.’

  Thinking about it today, some of my research methods seem obscure, even incomprehensible. I was obsessed by the last moments of those who were to die, or by their first moments in the death camps – for most of them it was the same thing – by the thirst, the cold – what did it mean to be waiting, naked, in temperatures of –20°C for one’s turn to enter into the gas chamber at Treblinka or at Sobibór? I asked myself these questions over and over, they haunted me, yet it never occurred to me to set out for the places where the extermination had happened, although logic would have dictated that I start precisely with them. I could not bring myself to go to Poland, something deep in me made it impossible. I thought there was nothing to see, nothing to be learned there, that Poland was a non-place, that if the Holocaust – that was the word at the time – existed somewhere, it was in the minds and the memories of the survivors and of the killers, and could therefore be talked about in Jerusalem, in Berlin, Paris, New York, Australia or South America.

  Finding the members of the Sonderkommando was not difficult in itself. There were not many of them, and they were known, some had testified at Eichmann’s trial. The problem was not in knowing how to contact them, but in persuading them to speak, to speak in front of a camera and a film crew. Were they to accept, they would be paying a terrible price, forced to relive it all. It was an almost impossible task. The Eichmann trial would be of no use to me. Reading the transcripts, it became clear to me that the trial had been conducted by ignorant people: the historians at the time had done too little research, the president and the judges were poorly informed; Hausner, the chief prosecutor, thought that pompous moralizing flights of rhetoric compensated for what he lacked in knowledge – he made hundreds of mistakes, for instance confusing Chelm and Chełmno; the tearful witnesses gave a kind of show, making it impossible to recreate what they had truly experienced; and the shocking way in which the trial was directed unjustly put much of the responsibility and the blame for the extermination on the Judenräte. This became the subject of a bitter dispute between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt, who followed the trial and, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, showed a partiality, a lack of compassion, an arrogance and a failure of comprehension for which he was right to reproach her.

  Abraham Bomba, the Barber of Treblinka and one of the heroes of my film, did not give evidence at Eichmann’s trial. But people at Yad Vashem had mentioned him to me, I knew he had been a member of the Treblinka Sonderkommando, that he had cut the hair of women actually inside the gas chambers, that he had managed a daring and extraordinary escape and that when he went back to the ghetto of Częstochowa, the Polish town where he had been born, no one had believed the unbelievable things he told his brothers; instead he was accused of spreading panic, with some wanting to turn him in to the police in order to silence him. Having escaped in the spring of 1943, Bomba had no choice but to return to the ghetto in his home town; he had no chance of surviving alone among the Polish people. It should be said that the Germans never cleared a ghetto in a single ‘action’. The liquidation of the Częstochowa ghetto took months and Bomba astonishingly escaped a second ‘transport’ to Treblinka. Such a man was crucial to me, but all I knew was that he lived in New York, where he still worked as a barber; no one knew his address. Once before on a short visit, I had already tried to locate him when, at my request, I was attending – as an observer, not as a participant – a symposium of specialist historians of the Holocaust, but I could find no mention of him in either the personal or business directories for Manhattan.

  This international symposium took place in early 1975 and it was then that I first met Raul Hilberg. The curtness of his tone, the lack of emphasis and pathos in his voice and his often mordant wit, all this contrasted sharply with the manners of his colleagues. Yehuda Bauer had suggested to him that we meet, and I saw him on his own one evening, talked to him about his books, which I had read and assimilated completely, but also about my film project, asking him if he would be willing to appear in it. I saw him on a number of occasions at his home, in Burlington, Vermont, we became friends, and he agreed to appear in the film. The other contributors at the symposium – many eminent scholars in their fields – struck me by their cheerfulness. The symposium was bursting with life, people congratulating each other, laughing, something that seemed to me to be at odds with the subject of the meeting. For my part, I was so haunted by death that I found it difficult to comprehend the palpable frivolity of the academic approach. I mentioned this to Yehuda Bauer one day, who suggested I try to enjoy myself: ‘It’s impossible to think about this twenty-four hours a day, it would drive you mad.’ Perhaps that is what was happening to me, I was thinking about it increasingly frequently, it became very serious, to the point where I imagined everyone was dead, not just the victims but the killers. Every time I discovered someone still alive, I was absolutely stunned, it felt almost like something unearthed during an archaeological dig, my find appeared to me as a sign, a vestige of the immensity of the catastrophe.

  In the end I found an old address for Abraham Bomba somewhere in the Bronx. On one of my trips to New York, having yet again trawled through the phone directories in vain, I decided to go out there in person. I found a ramshackle building with no lift, the walls black with soot from a recent fire, as were a number of the surrounding buildings. It sometimes happened that the property owners, who lived in more upmarket areas and were often reluctant to carry out necessary repairs, set the fires themselves in order to collect on the insurance. Perhaps Bomba had lived here, but if so, it had been many years earlier. Having checked the mailboxes without finding his name, I took the stairs and knocked on every door; the tenants I encountered were all Hispanic, most of them Puerto Rican. Dismayed but refusing to believe that Bomba, who was crucial to the film, was lost forever, I started walking, wandering in circles for hours around that dreary neighbourhood. Suddenly, I stopped in front of an unlikely cobbler’s shop. Through the window, I saw a man tacking a sole on to a shoe, and from his old-fashioned trade and his facial features I knew at once the cobbler was Jewish. I am rarely mistaken: I would have excelled at facial profiling. Not only was he a Jew, but a Polish Jew with a thick Yiddish accent, an isolated and lonely sentinel of Zion and of Eastern Europe in this utterly Hispanic world. It goes without saying that he too had been in the camps. And of course he had known Bomba who, he told me, had moved to a different part of the Bronx twenty years earlier, to Pelham Parkway, a middle-class neighbourhood whose residents were primarily Jewish. I rushed over there and started wading through the phone directories of Pelham Parkway, but Bomba was not in any of them. Since he was a barber, I thought, I might have better luck asking his com
petitors. So I went from one hairdressing salon to another, stopping off in every barber shop in between. It happened on my fifteenth try, in a salon for women; I don’t know how she overheard me, but all of a sudden one of the customers, like a tortoise, popped her head out from under a hood, her hair bristling with curlers and hairpins from what I believe is called a ‘perm’, and she called out, ‘I know him, I know where he lives. It’s not far.’ She was right, it was not far. Bomba lived in a little suburban house identical to thousands of others. I rang the doorbell. No answer. I decided to wait. It was getting dark, when a teenager arrived. I asked her if Bomba lived in the house. ‘He’s my father,’ she said. ‘What do you want with him?’ As soon as I said the word ‘film’, the young girl’s eyes opened wide: ‘Hollywood...?’ she murmured in curiosity. Her parents, she told me, would be coming back together but not before nine o’clock, so I had at least another two hours to wait. Bomba, she told me, worked as a barber on the lower concourse of Grand Central Station, but even if I hurried I wouldn’t catch him before he closed up. So I decided to stay put, and the charming girl suggested I come inside. The instant, powerful warmth I felt for Bomba the moment I set eyes on him was equalled only by the irritation and later the exasperation I felt for his wife: she clearly meant no harm, but she hardly let the man get a word in edgeways. She anticipated his every answer, making conversation impossible. Deeply annoyed, I took Bomba by the arm and said, ‘Why don’t we go outside? I need a walk.’ There, I told him that I had been looking for him for years; I gave him an overview of the film I was working on and explained why his time at Treblinka was crucial to my project. I needed to spend time with him, I said, just the two of us, we needed to come up with a way to make it work. He immediately understood what I meant; he told me that he had a mountain lodge in upstate New York and that he could be free the following Saturday and Sunday if I could get a car, since he did not have one.