The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  Thus, with the help of Corinna, I made him one last offer: I agreed not to film him, but I wanted to record an exhaustive oral statement; on the matter of money, the arrangement was as before, he would get the sum proposed. We needed to arrange a time and a place, since clearly we could not record at his home. I still have all of Suchomel’s letters – I received about one a month for a year. Each time, he made a new suggestion as to where we might meet, each time something cropped up with his health or his family preventing him from honouring his commitment. His letters are a mixture of fear, an inability to deliver, and a staggering obsequiousness. He wanted the money with all his heart, but there were times when I did not have a penny, when I did not know if I would be able to go on with the film. In one of his letters he complains that I cancelled a meeting because I had to go to the United States. This was true; the Israeli government, having given up funding me, had organized several fundraising tours to visit rich Jewish-Americans. This, however, proved to be a complete disaster: I flew from Baltimore to Chicago, Chicago to Los Angeles, making speeches to businessmen, to local versions of Larry Tisch, then on to Boston, to El Paso, to Miami, to Denver, and every time it was the same dreary conversation. I would persuasively outline the reasons why such a film should exist, I presented the extent of my knowledge and the work I had already done. When I had finished, the questions began, and inevitably in every city I visited, everywhere I went, from the mouths of a hundred different people, came the same question, one that meant OK, we’ve listened to you, now let’s get down to the facts: ‘Mr Lanzmann, what is your message?’ Each time, I remained silent, I was incapable of answering such a question; I still am. I don’t know what the ‘message’ of Shoah is. I never thought of it in those terms. If I had said, ‘My message is: Never again!’ or perhaps ‘Love one another’, wallets would probably have sprung open, but I was a sorry fundraiser: of the budget for Shoah, not one single dollar came from the USA.

  My proposal to Suchomel – that I wanted his oral testimony – was serious. At the time I did not know how I would proceed, thinking I would have to make do with second-best, editing it as a voiceover, over footage of Treblinka as it is today. This was not really a satisfying solution, but what he had to say was so important that the question of form was secondary. We continued to write to each other; he made a further request that I had no intention of respecting, even as I told him that I would: he wanted to remain anonymous.

  Mankind, Marx says, sets itself only such problems as it is able to resolve. While I was grappling with impossibilities on every front, an engineer from Grenoble, Jean-Pierre Beauviala, the inventor of the Aaton camera, had created a small wonder that was to change radically the conditions under which I could film in Germany and led me to choose the path of deception, subterfuge, secrecy and maximum risk. Adalbert Rückerl had been right when he looked at me pityingly. Frankness and honesty had been repaid with resounding failure; I had to learn to deceive the deceivers, it was my bounden duty. The ‘Paluche’ was a cylindrical camera about thirty centimetres long and not very wide that could be pointed by hand (hence the name, meaning ‘paw’) without needing to look through a viewfinder. It worked using a high-frequency video system; there was no film or tape inside, instead it transmitted a signal that could be received within a limited radius – by a VCR that recorded and stored the footage. I demonstrated in Shoah how the footage was received by a minivan parked on the street in front of the house or the apartment building of the person I was surreptitiously filming. We tested the process in Paris from the upper floors of high-rise buildings, with the van parked at the foot of the building. When the system worked, it was truly miraculous, and considerably opened up the field of the possibles, to put it in Leibnizian terms. But this was not always the case. If there was a television transmitter nearby, or if there were too many powerful electrical devices in the apartment itself, the footage was blurred and unusable. In addition, it was essential that the Paluche be directly in line with the minivan. If the minivan was parked on one side of the building, and I was forced to interview on the other, the footage was not received. Sometimes I would arrive in a house or an apartment entirely unknown to me, only to be brought into a living room at the back of the building while the minivan was parked in the street by the kitchen – in such cases, I had to work out the layout of the apartment and come up with an idea on the spot, taking my interviewee firmly by the arm and leading him, for instance, into the kitchen, as though I had decided on a quick, informal conversation, wanting to avoid disturbing anyone. Sometimes it worked. Not always.

  Once I became confident with the Paluche, I completely changed tack, and started everything again from scratch. The most pressing thing now was to equip myself with a new identity. I hope I will be forgiven for not divulging the names of the people involved, but I promised secrecy: I acquired a fake passport, which I promised to return as soon as filming was completed. Now I was Claude-Marie Sorel, born in Caen – all records in that Norman city having been destroyed during bombing raids. My second decisive step was the creation of a ‘Centre d’études et de recherches sur l’histoire contemporaine’ – a Research Centre for the Study of Contemporary History – attached to the University of Paris. I housed my Institute at 26 rue de Condé, Paris, the address, then and now, of Les Temps modernes, where I could easily receive mail. A printer in Évreux made up some letterhead paper and envelopes, on stock of an impressive weight and texture, clear signs of authenticity.

  Aside from Suchomel and Perry Broad, I drew up a list of about thirty people whom I knew to be still alive, a mix of criminals and Nazi bureaucrats whom I knew I could question effectively because I had read widely about them. Hence, for example, Professor Laborde, the director of the Centre d’études et de recherches sur l’histoire contemporaine, wrote a long letter to Walter Stier, the head of Büro 33 of the Reichsbahn (the German Reich Railways), which had been specifically responsible for the ‘transport’ of the Jews to the death camps. A number of attempts had been made to indict Stier but he had always managed to disappear, escaping to live with his daughter who had married a Syrian and was living in Damascus. When I tracked him down, he was living in Frankfurt; no one bothered him any more. I had read a number of books glorifying the Reich Railways, justifiably proud of its achievements; in spite of bombings, the destruction of tracks, stations and installations, the Reichsbahn tirelessly continued to convey troops and provisions to all fronts, promptly, selflessly and with great discipline, repairing and restoring the lines. And it had transported not just troops, but also civilians. For all these many reasons for justifiable pride, the books are notably silent on the subject of transport of the Jews. This is an injustice since, even in the most difficult military periods, these transports were often given priority over all other tasks the Reichsbahn had to handle. But it should be said that, in the case of the Jews, such trains made a profit, since, like ordinary holidaymakers, they were transported on a ‘group fare’ basis and were responsible for paying for their last journeys themselves. So Professor Laborde contacted Stier to inform him that a research assistant from his Institute, Claude-Marie Sorel, Ph.D., was to be in Germany from such-and-such to such-and-such a date and would telephone him to try to arrange a meeting, the reason given being that Dr Sorel was making a study of the extraordinary way in which the Reichsbahn managed to carry out its mission during the war, a subject about which little was known in France. Professor Laborde elucidated the premises of Dr Sorel’s research in terms that would gratify a self-important Nazi, adding that Walter Stier, a decorated, high-ranking former official of the Reichsbahn, seemed admirably qualified to assist Dr Sorel with his research, and offering a sizeable sum of money to compensate him fairly for his time. The word ‘Jew’ obviously did not appear in the letter.

  In response to the thirty letters I sent, requiring much effort, a great deal of reading, mental contortion and spiritual exertion, I received ten replies: five positive, five negative. Stier, as one can see from
Shoah, was among the former. Of the twenty who did not reply, the greatest loss to me were the members of the Einsatzgruppen. I knew everything about them, had read everything, studied the diagrams and the detailed organization charts published by Hilberg, their biographies, their adherence, and the theatres where their bloody crimes were committed. I had also read the transcripts of the Einsatzgruppen trial held in Nuremberg after the main Nuremberg trials. Three had been sentenced to death: Otto Ohlendorf, their leader; Paul Blobel, who, over three days, had had 50,000 Jews from Kiev machine-gunned in the ravine at Babi Yar; and Heinz Schubert (related to the composer), who had been responsible for the massacres in the Crimea. Ohlendorf and Blobel were hanged, Schubert’s sentence was commuted at the eleventh hour by John McCloy, US High Commissioner in Germany. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, managed to get me an interview with McCloy during my investigations in America. In his office on the top floor of a skyscraper on Wall Street, he greeted me with these words of rare elegance: ‘Ah! You’ve come about this Jewish business!’ I could only nod. Nowadays, people refer to the killings committed by the Einsatzgruppen in the Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic countries as the ‘Shoah by bullet’, suddenly ‘discovering’ what has been known for more than sixty years.

  During my various trips to Germany before I had acquired the Paluche, in my period of innocence, I had managed to meet with three members of the Einsatzgruppen and also with Bruno Streckenbach, who had trained the first commandos in Pretzsch and in Düben, readying them for action from the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the massive invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. They had agreed to speak with me, attracted by the breadth of my knowledge and the accuracy of my information about them, but the moment the word ‘film’ was mentioned, they became tongue-tied. Those who received subsequent letters from Professor Laborde were, naturally, not those who had met me as Claude Lanzmann. A long letter was addressed to Schubert, who had been condemned to death and then pardoned. This letter remained unanswered.

  The Paluche had its first outing with Suchomel in late March 1976, two years before the actual shooting of the film began. He was ready, we had exchanged I don’t know how many letters, and I didn’t want him to go back on his word again. Besides, he was complaining of heart problems and I was afraid that if I waited too long he might die. (In fact, he did die four years before Shoah was released.) He had the surprising idea of meeting me, not in Germany, but in Austria, on the other bank of the River Inn, at Braunau am Inn more precisely, the birthplace of one Adolf Hitler. From Alfred Spiess, the prosecutor at the Treblinka trial, I had managed to obtain a plan of the extermination camp, which I had had enlarged by a specialist company in Paris to the size of a school blackboard. William Lubtchansky, my cinematographer, was to pose as the sound-engineer. We had commissioned a large leather bag with two side pockets. When opening the bag, one could see only a Nagra, the standard professional sound-recording equipment. The Paluche lay in one of the pockets, with a hole cut in the leather for the lens. However, William had made a foam cover to make the lens look like a microphone. In the other pocket was a tiny video monitor, allowing him to frame the shot. We left for Braunau two days before the scheduled meeting; I rented rooms at the Hotel Post, one of which we converted into a recording studio, pinning the map of Treblinka to the wall, choosing where William would sit – at some distance from Suchomel so that he wouldn’t suspect anything. In his last letter, Suchomel had informed me that he and his wife would arrive at nine o’clock at Simbach, the small German border town opposite Braunau – one had only to cross the river. He also added, ‘I am delighted that you have not gone back on the promised amount of Schmerzensgeld [pain money]. I have one last request: that it be paid to me in German currency. Please forgive this request. I am not doing this deliberately.’ On the eve of their arrival, I bought a fishing rod, which I cut in half to create a baguette de magister – a schoolmaster’s pointer.

  When Suchomel, whom I had fetched from the station at Simbach, stepped into the studio and found himself face to face with the huge map of Treblinka and saw William with all his equipment at the other side of the room, he took a step back. I calmed him down, gave him the pointer, and said, ‘I am your pupil, you are my teacher, you will instruct me.’ We broke for lunch, to which I had also invited his wife; I remember they stuffed themselves with duck, followed by whipped cream, while William, whose father had been gassed at Auschwitz, shot me murderous looks. By the time we began again, my ‘teacher’ had been completely won over, twice I persuaded him to sing the song the Jews of the Sonderkommando were forcibly taught the moment they arrived; and the cruelty in his eyes at that moment shows how completely he was caught up in the grip of his past as an SS-Unterscharführer, and what a ruthless man he had been when he held the power over life and death. It was a gruelling and exhausting day. I was horrified by what I learned, and yet I knew that this was extraordinary testimony since no one had ever described in such a detailed manner – urged on by my precise questions, which sounded purely technical and devoid of all moral implications – the killing process of Treblinka extermination camp. And during the long hours of complex and concentrated shooting, I feared that at any moment he might discover the subterfuge, that he might see, as I did, the sunlight glinting on the lens of the Paluche. When we had finished, I counted the 100 Deutschmark notes slowly in front of him and his wife, the price for his ‘pain’. He was so happy, so sure of himself and of me by now, that he suggested we might do it again: he had, he claimed, many more things to reveal. I said yes, but I never followed up; it was he who pestered me with more letters, he was clearly interested in my money. In Treblinka, he had been the head of the Goldjuden, the Gold Jews, a commando responsible for finding any money, gold or jewellery hidden in the clothes, for pulling the gold teeth from the jaws of those who had just been gassed. That same evening, in a Munich restaurant, William and I had a fierce argument. He was at the end of his tether, as shocked as I was by the risks we had run and the horrors we had heard, but what he could not accept was my extending a lunch invitation to Suchomel, my lack of emotion and, worst of all, my paying him. I understood William’s point of view, he was right, but without my self-imposed iron discipline there would not have been a single Nazi in the film. My coldness and my calm were an integral part of my deception.

  Like Suchomel, Perry Broad didn’t know Dr Sorel, since I had introduced myself to him under my own name back when I still had faith in mankind. Now that I had the Paluche, I phoned him one day in 1979, in the middle of a hectic shooting schedule in Germany, and told him that I would be coming to see him with Corinna, my German assistant: I hadn’t given up hope of persuading him. The approach was different this time. William, who was working on another film, was not my cinematographer at this point; Dominique Chapuis had replaced him and together we worked out a more efficient and less obvious way of using the Paluche. In any case, the approach we had taken with Suchomel could not work since I could not explain to Perry Broad that I was just going to record his voice, and there could be no possible reason for me to be accompanied by a so-called sound-engineer. It was here that I made a qualitative leap in my deception. We bought an ordinary linen bag, the sort any woman might carry, and decorated both sides with little stars and circles of silver paper. The bag had two pockets, one on either side, in which we placed open packs of cigarettes, ready to be smoked. The Paluche lay at the bottom of the bag in a foam cradle, and where the lens was, we cut a circular hole in the linen and replaced it with a disc of a silver paper that allows light to pass through. Once the Paluche, the transmitter and the antenna were in place, we filled the bag with a variety of items – newspapers, books – that were all readily visible. I had already been to Perry Broad’s apartment so even before we arrived I knew the position of the armchair where he usually sat, and the sofa facing it where he would seat Corinna and myself. I also remembered a low table between us where Corinna could put her bag, with the lens of the Paluche poi
nted at Perry Broad. The sound-recording was done as it would have been for any television recording; I had a high-frequency transmitter in my pocket and an ultrasensitive microphone clipped under my tie, meaning I had to wear a suit and tie and a thick shirt even in the sweltering heat. But we needed to make sure that this system would work, by which I mean that the minivan would receive both sound and image. So, shortly after we arrived, I pretended to rummage through the bag for a document I couldn’t find, turned to Corinna and said, ‘I must have left it in the car, could you get it for me?’ The minivan had tinted windows so that from the outside nothing could be seen, neither the recording equipment, nor the engineers fiddling with monitors and recorders as a covert interview was going on. But we had agreed a code: a piece of green cardboard on the windscreen meant the signal was coming through loud and clear, red meant that it wasn’t working. When Corinna came back, she winked to let me know that everything was fine, and I began to speak to Perry using the conditional mood: ‘If you should agree to be filmed some day, this is what I would ask you.’ I read out excerpts of his celebrated report, formulated certain objections, asked him to clarify certain things, expressed my astonishment. He was reticent in his answers, but he replied, having no idea of the trap I had set. I carried on, but my triumph was short-lived. To make things look natural, as I’ve said, the bag had been stuffed full of papers and files. Too full as it turned out: suddenly, as Perry Broad was speaking, wisps of white smoke began to rise from the bag as in a fairy tale, or at the election of a pope. Perry saw the smoke too, of course, but his astonishment, and his Teutonic slowness, meant his reactions were not as quick as mine. I leapt to my feet, snatched up the bag, shouted to Corinna, ‘Come on!’, grabbed her hand and we dashed down the stairs before he caught up with us. And he never did catch us. We jumped into the minivan and took off in a screech of tyres, like in a cop film. But the Paluche was completely fried. This was a catastrophic setback that compromised the entire German shooting schedule. It also represented a financial loss as the Paluche was an expensive piece of equipment. Still, two weeks later I managed to get a brand new Paluche. Dr Sorel would finally be able to go to work.