The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  I hired a car, extricated him from his terrible wife early on Saturday morning, and we crossed the Hudson River and its primeval banks at Tarrytown and headed north towards Albany. I had no means of recording our conversations, no camera, not even a tape recorder, barely a pen and a notebook. My hands were empty but my intuition was that it had to be so. I spent Saturday afternoon, most of the night, and all of Sunday with Bomba, before driving him back to Pelham Parkway. Those two days proved critical, not simply because of what he told me, things I didn’t know, that nobody knew, things that made him a unique witness, but because what he told me then gave me the key to how I was to deal with the Jewish protagonists in my film. In his rough, imperfect English, Bomba the barber was a magnificent speaker and during the forty-eight hours we spent together he spoke to me as I believe he had never spoken to anyone; as though he were doing so for the first time. No one else had ever listened to him, shown him such thoughtful and companionable attention, which, as I encouraged him to rack his brain for every detail, forced him to plunge ever deeper into the unspeakable moments he had spent inside the gas chambers. I realized that in order to be able to film him, and people like him, I had to know everything about them in advance, or to know as much as possible – one can never know everything. Because to trigger such a reawakening meant being able at any moment to come to their aid, by which I don’t mean offering some sort of compassion and support, but having the necessary confidence and the knowledge to dare to interrogate, interrupt, get the speaker back on track, ask the right questions at the right time. By the time I left Bomba, one of those questions had been resolved: the matter of confidence. He knew that he could count on me, knew to whom he would be talking. On the way back, I asked if he would be willing to be filmed, although I couldn’t say whether that would be in a year or two or even three, since the financial problems had not yet been resolved. He consented solemnly and I think joyfully, having understood the need to bear witness. I told him I would get in touch with him again as soon as I could set a date.

  This I was in a position to do two years later. I phoned for days without getting an answer, I wrote, but the letters were returned to sender. But I could not postpone the American shooting schedule, as I had already arranged to film others, such as Vrba and Jan Karski. Once in New York I decided to visit Pelham Parkway just to check. I rang the doorbell, and someone other than Bomba answered, a new tenant or perhaps the owner, I don’t know. In answer to my questions, the man could only say that Bomba and his family, whom he had never met, had left the United States and were now living in Israel. He had moved without giving a forwarding address, without contacting me, although I had given him my details in case he needed to get in touch. But it was most likely my fault. I had left him too long without any news and he probably thought the film would never get made. In the summer of 1979, I arrived in Israel. A shooting schedule was planned, but my first priority was to find Bomba. I set about it by the simplest and most obvious means: since, in Israel, every Polish town has its own Survivors’ Association and since Abraham came from Częstochowa, the home of the famous Black Madonna visited by so many popes, I simply presented myself to the association of the town’s elders. Bomba, I discovered, had recently joined. And so I found him; he had come to think the film was a mirage; now, the fact that I had searched for him around the world was to him another indication of my determination and of his importance to my project. He was living in Holon, a suburb of Tel Aviv, where once again I met his daughter and his wife, who seemed calmer now. But, being afraid he might disappear again and fearful of the difficulties I would encounter while filming him, I decided to change my plans completely and start the shooting schedule with him. I filmed him facing the Mediterranean, on the beautiful terrace of an apartment in Jaffa that Théo Klein had loaned me. Once again, as Abraham Bomba described his deportation from Częstochowa, the hellish thirst suffered during the journey by his first wife and their baby, both of whom were sent to the gas chambers as soon as they arrived in Treblinka, he displayed the oratorical talent, the capacity to embody his account that had so captivated and seduced me in the mountains of upstate New York. The sun was setting quickly, as it invariably does in the eastern Mediterranean, and Dominique Chapuis, my cinematographer, said, ‘We have to stop, I don’t have enough light.’ But I didn’t care about the light, I was so caught up by the scope and the magic of the barber’s words, I said, ‘No, let’s keep going, his face will fade away and he will go on talking in the dark.’ It was stupid of me, the film was unusable, and in fact we did not use it. I mention this to show how captivated the whole crew was by this man.

  But as filming continued, I sensed a nervousness overcome Bomba that echoed my own anxiety. We both knew that the hardest part was still ahead of us and that soon we would have to speak about the cutting of Jewish women’s hair inside the gas chamber, the culmination of the horror, and the essential reason for our undertaking. On several occasions, on the days leading up to it, he took me to one side: ‘This is going to be very hard,’ he warned, ‘I don’t know if I can do it.’ I wanted to help him, to help myself. There could be no question of having him talk about this on that sunny terrace facing the blue sea. It was I who thought of using a barber shop. Bomba was no longer a barber, he had retired and his retirement had been the main reason for his aliyah, his ‘ascent’ to Israel. But the idea appealed to him and he set about finding a salon himself. This immediately posed an ethical problem: it couldn’t be a ladies’ hairdressing salon. We both realized that would be horrendous and obscene. So he found a genuine barber shop with an owner surrounded by a staff of young men who worked without uttering a word as customers came and went. Abraham wore the yellow jacket from his life at Grand Central Station, a proud relic of a profession he loved. The Israeli barbers, who spoke only Hebrew and worked around him in their usual blue-and-white check shirts, did not cast a single glance at the crucial scene of which he was the focus. It was Abraham, too, who chose his customer, a friend of his, probably from Częstochowa, whose hair he cut, working away with his scissors for almost the whole sequence, that is to say, at least twenty minutes. Or rather, he pretended to cut the man’s hair: if he had really been cutting, the ‘patient’ would have ended up completely bald. But Abraham, on his own initiative and without receiving from me any other indication than ‘Just make it look as though you are cutting his hair’, became an actor and succeeded in giving the illusion of a genuine haircut, ensuring we heard the constant clicking of the blades, now and then actually snipping a hair, stepping back to inspect his work, then returning to perfect it while recounting his hell, compelled by my questions to describe every little detail. Why the barber shop? The familiar motions, I thought, might serve as a support, a crutch to the feelings, easing the task of speech and actions he needed to perform before the camera. Of course, they were not the same actions, a barber shop is not a gas chamber, pretending to cut one man’s hair is nothing like the tale he had told me in the mountains of New York: how, naked, terrified after having been whipped by the Ukrainian guards, the Jewish women were forced into the gas chamber, in batches of seventy at a time, where the seventeen professional hairdressers waiting had them sit on long wooden benches and, in three or four snips of their scissors, cut off all their hair. When, while filming, I ask Abraham to re-enact the actions of the barbers in the gas chambers, he grabs the head of his friend, his fictitious client, brandishes the scissors and, moving quickly around his skull, demonstrates what he did: ‘We just cut like this... here and there... and there... this side and this side... and it was all finished.’ Two minutes per woman, no more. Without the scissors, the scene would have been a hundred times less evocative, a hundred times less powerful. And perhaps it might not have been filmed at all: the scissors allow him to incarnate what he is saying and to carry on, but also to catch his breath and gather the strength to tell his impossible and harrowing story.

  In fact, there are two moments in that long sequence: as he begins his
account, Abraham adopts a neutral, detached, objective tone, as though what he is recounting does not concern him, as though the horror might emerge without his involvement, almost harmoniously. My questions make it impossible for him to carry on as he would wish; initially, these are topographical, demanding details relating to logistics. I ask a question that is incongruous, absurd: ‘There were no mirrors [in the gas-chambers], no?’ – knowing perfectly well, since I had seen the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Majdanek, that there was nothing but bare walls. However, the walls of the barber shop in which we are filming are lined with mirrors and his movements are infinitely reflected in them. These questions make it possible to recreate as precisely as possible the place, the situation, but they also allow me to engage in the most difficult interrogation, which triggers the second moment in the sequence: ‘What was your impression the first time you saw arriving these naked women with children, what did you feel?’ Abraham avoids, dodges the question, the conversation continues with other details about the process of cutting the hair, designed to deceive these women in the last minutes of their lives, making them think, by the use of scissors and combs rather than clippers, of a man’s haircut as it would be performed by an ordinary barber. At that moment, I became aware of something in Bomba’s face, in his voice, in the silence between his words: a visible, palpable tension welled up in the room, I did not know what or when, I was not sure, but I sensed that something was about to occur, that something might happen, something crucial.

  I was standing just behind the cameraman and could see the counter indicating how much film stock was still in the magazine: five minutes. It is a lot, it is so little. Following a brutal intuition, I said to Chapuis in a low voice, ‘Let’s cut there and reload now.’ With the Aaton 16mm camera, magazines had to be changed every eleven minutes. We had full magazines ready, the reload was done instantly and the conversation continued as though no interruption had occurred. Bomba hadn’t noticed. After a moment, I repeated the question he had left unanswered. His answer was magnificent and overwhelming, he made no attempt to sidestep the issue: ‘I tell you something... to have a feeling over there was very hard, to feel anything or to have a feeling, because working there day and night, between the people, between the bodies, man and woman... your feeling disappeared, you were dead, with your feeling, you had no feeling at all.’ Then he added, ‘A matter of fact, I want to tell you something that happened at the gas-chamber, when I was chosen in, over there to work as a barber, some of woman that came in from a transport from my town from Częstochowa, and from the woman, from the number of woman, I know a lot of people...’ At that precise moment, this man dead to feeling was submerged by such intense feeling that he could not go on, indicating by a little gesture of the hand both the pointlessness and the impossibility of continuing to speak, and also the impossibility, the futility, of understanding. The scene is famous. Abraham wipes away the tears welling in his eyes with the corner of a napkin, lapses into silence, still clicking his scissors around his friend’s head, trying to recover his composure, chatting in a low voice to his friend in Yiddish; he and I begin to talk, a conversation between two supplicants, he pleading with me to stop, me gently urging him to continue because I believe it is our common task, our shared duty. All of this happens at precisely the moment when, had I not reloaded the camera when I did, there would have been no film left. And the loss would have been irreparable: I could never have asked Bomba to start crying again as one might if rehearsing a play. The camera kept turning, Abraham’s tears were as precious to me as blood, the seal of truth, its very incarnation. Some people have suggested some sort of sadism on my part in this perilous scene, while on the contrary I consider it to be the epitome of reverence and supportiveness, which is not to tiptoe away in the face of suffering, but to obey the categorical imperative of the search for and the transmission of truth. Bomba hugged me for a long time after we finished shooting, and again after he had seen the film: we spent several days together in Paris, and he knew that he would forever remain an unforgettable hero.

  From Chełmno, where 400,000 Jews had been murdered with carbon monoxide emitted by the Saurer truck engines, there were two ‘revenants’: Michael Podchlebnik and Simon Srebnik. Both were living in Israel, the former in Tel Aviv, the latter in Ness Ziona near Rehovot and the Weizmann Institute, both equally unforgettable protagonists of Shoah. I went to see Srebnik first, the younger of the two, who had survived the second period of extermination at Chełmno (extermination there took place in two periods: between January 1941 and the summer of 1942, then, after a ‘dead season’, between July 1944 and January 1945). He was forty-four years old – in Chełmno he had been thirteen and a half. We talked, or rather tried to talk, since I barely understood anything he said. Every time he uttered the name of one of the SS officers in Chełmno, he preceded it with the title Meister, ‘master’. It seemed to me that, though now over forty, he was still the terrified child he had surely been back then. I forgot to mention that his father had been butchered before his eyes in the Łódź Ghetto, that his mother, with whom he had been deported to Chełmno, eighty kilometres north-east of Łódź, had been gassed as soon as they arrived, and that he himself had been executed with a bullet through the back of the head on the night of 18 January 1945, two days before the Red Army arrived to liberate that area of Poland. By some miracle the bullet missed his vital brain centres and he survived. We talked in rudimentary German, and as he spoke, I could make out words such as Kirche [church], Schloss [castle], and proper names such as Narva [the River Ner], but I could not understand the sense, nor could I connect them to one another. I left Srebnik filled with doubts about the way I was going about things, feeling I lacked the objective knowledge necessary to question him. And besides, it seemed to me thoughtless to pretend to understand how extermination using gas vans in Chełmno had worked without ever having seen the place. In my mind, it was becoming increasingly important that I make a trip to Poland: I could not understand Srebnik or make myself understood until I had seen Chełmno. When Bomba had talked to me about Treblinka in his mountain cabin, I had completely understood what he was telling me, and the idea of comparing his account with the place itself had never occurred to me: he brought the place to life with his words. The snatches of conversation I had recorded with Srebnik were disjointed memories of a world that was exploded, both literally and in the terror it had instilled in him. It was only much later that I realized how accurate my sense of an exploded world was: nothing was more difficult than the filming of Chełmno, with two periods of killing and the destruction of the sites where it took place. But there could be no question of abandoning Srebnik, of sidelining him: he was to play a crucial role in my film, and it was up to me to work and to adapt in order to be able to understand him.

  With the first of the two ‘revenants’, Michael Podchlebnik, there was no such problem: everything could be read in his face, a splendid face of smiles and tears, his face is the site of the Shoah. And every time I see him on the screen, sensing my hand pressing on his shoulder to help him to find a voice for his most gruelling account – that of discovering his wife and children among the corpses when he opened the doors of the first gas van – the moment when his face changes, his courageous smile giving way to discreet tears, I can do nothing but weep with him. Heroic and rigorous, Michael Podchlebnik who, in his first appearance in the film says, ‘Let’s not talk about that,’ just after Srebnik’s words, ‘No one can represent to oneself what happened here’; the heroic Podchlebnik, who says nothing about his extraordinary escape because, according to him, his personal story is not important. Nor does he say anything about the courage and the cunning he had to marshal, the suffering he endured: he escaped at the beginning of the first period of extermination in Chełmno and was forced to survive in German-occupied Poland for almost four years.