The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  The journey to Poland was like a journey through time. If by 1978 in Western Europe, it was all but impossible to imagine what the countryside and what life in the country had been like in the nineteenth century, the profound socio-economic changes having wiped out virtually all traces of the past, it certainly was not the case in Poland. Here the nineteenth century existed, one could touch it. The persistence and the disfigurement of places coexisted, wrestled with each other, impregnated each other, chiselling perhaps even more finely, more heartrendingly, the presence of what remained of the past. My sense of urgency was suddenly overpowering. As though I were trying to recapture all those wasted years, the years without Poland, I went on asking questions, oblivious to the night drawing in, to the hunger we must surely have felt as we had not eaten since Warsaw, but I was in a trance, spellbound, in thrall to the truth being revealed to me. I left Borowi and, in the mud and the darkness, I talked to people whose faces I could barely make out, aware that they seemed pleased to have found a stranger curious about a past they remembered with extraordinary exactness, yet one that they spoke of as if it were legend – something I understood only too well – a past both incredibly remote and yet very close, a past-present etched forever in their minds. Marina, who was hearing accounts of the massacre for the first time, stared at me, stunned by my relentlessness, thinking it would have been better not to dig up all this, but faithfully, patiently translating every question, every answer. I discovered that an engine driver who had driven the death trains for the duration of the camps’ existence was now living in a village called Małkinia, about ten kilometres from Treblinka. I decided to go there right away, heedless of the lateness of the hour and of common politeness. I could not wait. We left Treblinka by the narrow road that meets the railway line as it crosses the River Bug, which runs parallel by the same bridge. All the trains that had transported victims had clattered in the opposite direction over this bridge, which spanned the wide river whose powerful waters I could sense in the darkness, not knowing that some months later, illuminated by a magnificent sunset, I would be drifting down it on a motorboat with my cameraman, on what would also be the first day of shooting in Poland.

  At eleven o’clock that night Małkinia was asleep. I found Henrik Gawkowski’s small farm only with great difficulty and, as I knocked, the peals of midnight rang out from a church as immense as a cathedral. At first no one answered; I knocked harder, there was a sound of swift feet on stairs and a female voice struck up a conversation with Marina. Then the door was opened by a little woman with a round, kindly face, her hair tied up in a scarf. She turned on the lights, had us sit down and went to wake her husband, who shuffled downstairs rubbing his eyes. I liked him immediately, I liked his child-like blue eyes still heavy with sleep, his air of innocence and loyalty, the lines of pain etched into his forehead, his evident kindness. Though I apologized for showing up so late, he seemed so unsurprised by my urgency that it was as though he shared it. He had neither forgotten nor recovered from the horrifying past in which he had played a role, and he found it entirely just that he should have to answer any demands made on him at any hour. In fact, I was the first person ever to question him; I had arrived in the night like a ghost, no one before me having troubled to hear what he had to say. He went to fetch a bottle of the wonderful vodka drunk by Polish farmers, miraculous, blessed rot-gut, and after we had downed the first shot, I ventured that we were famished. He and his wife bent over backwards, ransacked a mesh-panelled meat-safe like the one my grandmother Anna had had, providing us with a cornucopia of food, of cold meats and bread and the vodka that unlocks mind and memory. Listening to Henrik I knew, just as I had felt that afternoon with Borowi, that the preliminary research was over, that it was now time to act and begin filming as soon as possible. I needed not just to film, but first and foremost to staunch the flood of words my questions had unlocked, these memories, as precious as gold, as blood, that I had rekindled. We talked about how the unloading had operated on the ramp, the chaotic rush, the beating, the truncheons, the screams of people who would be dead within an hour or two. When I said, ‘When you pulled the wagons up to the ramp’ he stopped me dead. ‘No, no, that’s not how it happened, I didn’t pull them, I pushed them,’ and he balled his fist and made a pushing gesture. I was devastated by this detail, floored by this truth, by which I mean that this trivial confirmation told me more, helped me more to imagine, to understand than any pompous reflection on evil doomed to reflect only on itself. It was clear to me that it was vital that I stop questioning Gawkowski: unlike the Jewish protagonists about whom, for reasons I’ve mentioned, I needed to know as much as possible before shooting, in this case it was essential not to sully anything. I was the first person to return to the scene of the crime, to those who had never spoken and, I was beginning to realize, wanted so much to speak, to speak torrentially. It was vital, it was imperative to preserve this purity, this spontaneity; this Poland was a treasure not to be squandered. Already, after one day and one crazy night, I knew that during my stay here I would visit the sites, pace them and survey them as I was later to do at Chełmno, but I needed to say as little, to ask as few questions, as possible; to remain on the surface, to move lightly over the land of extermination. But if I was to wait until filming began before daring to go deeper, I had to act fast. This detail, powerfully moving in every sense of the word, that Henrik Gawkowski had pushed the wagons with his engine rather than pulling them was the occasion of a moral lapse I committed during filming, one I readily admit to, one that shames me every time I think about it. Before the cameras, though I already knew what he would say, I asked him that question and, like an actor, I feigned surprise at his answer. I did so because I thought it was important not only that the audience know such operational details but also that they realize how revealing this discovery had been for me. But I blame myself for deciding to pretend that this was the moment I learned it for the first time.

  What a night I spent with Henrik! He proved to be devastatingly honest, he wept from the emotion, and doubtless the vodka. I myself had tears in my eyes and we hugged each other several times. I make no mention of this in Shoah, but the picture he painted of Treblinka and the surrounding villages during the thirteen months when the gassings were taking place defied any tale. The most voracious prostitutes from Warsaw, regulated by their pimps, had set up shop and did brisk business with camp mercenaries, with the Ukrainian and Latvian guards and with the local farmers, all with the knowledge and complicity of several SS officers. What was at stake in these encounters, which went on every single day, was the money taken from murdered Jews: most of them, not knowing they were about to die but having always prepared themselves for the worst, had brought their money with them, sewn into the lining of their clothes and were to leave it when they stripped off to go into the gas chambers. If they were not concerned to keep count of the number of Jews murdered there, the statisticians of Aktion Reinhardt (the codename given by the Nazis to the extermination in the three camps, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibór) calculated to the last penny the sums – in dollars, drachmas, florins, francs, and currencies of every kind – discovered by the Sonderkommandos that Suchomel, chief of the Goldjuden, was in charge of, as they ripped the linings from the coats, the jackets, the corsets of the victims or ripped the heels off their shoes. Some of the money, however, went unreported to the accountants of the WVHA (Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt, the Economic and Administrative Main Office of the Nazi SS). Instead, it found its way into the pockets of those who laboured in this business of death, the SS, the Ukrainians, the Latvians, or it was buried by Jewish members of the Sonderkommando, to be used in the infinitely unlikely event of an escape. This was the money that the villagers and the prostitutes were given in exchange for vodka, pork and pleasure. Henrik, in tears, confessed to me that in one night, playing poker between trains, he lost $50,000 – a fantastical sum at the time. He added, ‘Ill-gotten gain never prospers.’ I saw him again when I came back to
film, singing at the top of his voice in the church choir. Sometimes even money and jewels were too abstract: again, I make no mention of this in Shoah, but Jan Piwonski, a colonel in the Polish army and former assistant pointsman at Sobibór railway station, told me that while on guard one night, someone knocked loudly on the window, a Ukrainian who looked to him like a giant, demanding a litre of vodka and offering in return a heavy, stinking parcel crudely wrapped in newspaper. He had no choice but to accept, he told me, and as soon as he opened the parcel, he vomited: inside was a bloody jaw complete with gold teeth ripped from a freshly gassed corpse.

  By the time I left Henrik at dawn I had made my irrevocable decision. I had to start filming that year, by summer if possible – this was February – but before I could do so, I needed to get permits from the Communist government. Back in Warsaw and before continuing this first trip, for which I had allocated a month (I was determined to spend time in Chełmno, in Auschwitz and in each of the camps, since none, to my mind, could take the place of any other), I got in touch with the relevant authorities to inquire about permits to film in Poland. I was asked to write a memorandum explaining my intent, the places I wished to visit, the proposed duration of the shoot, and so on. The senior civil servant I dealt with was not unpleasant and I already knew the party line: once dead, those three million Polish Jews had once again become full Polish citizens, taking the total number of Polish victims to six million. The Polish chimera was constantly attempting to match the sacrifice of the Jews. And though it is true that the Poles suffered heavy losses during the Nazi invasion, the deportations, the Soviet massacres such as Katyn, the Polish resistance movement of the Armia Krajowa (the Home Army) and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, such losses never amounted to the three million claimed in patriotic fantasy.3 At the root of this astonishing and macabre feat of accountancy was a determination to negate the singularity and enormity of the extermination of the Jews: six million cancels out six million! At this point, I had not fully realized the extent of Polish anti-Semitism. There was, after all, a large avenue in Warsaw named after Mordechaj Anielewicz, the commander of the Jewish Combat Organization and a hero of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; there was a famous monument built to honour the Ghetto Heroes on one of the huge city squares, and a memorial plaque at Miła 18 beneath which was buried, deep underground, the headquarters of the Jewish Combat Organization, etc. All of these points I stressed in the memorandum I wrote feverishly at the desk in my hotel room before continuing my Polish journey. I remember that it began in this way: ‘Poland is the only country where one can see signs along the road marked “Obóz zagłady” [extermination camps]’. In short, my film was to be a homage to Poland, was to do justice to the country and redress anti-Polish prejudice. I lied as and when it became necessary. I was given permission to film in Poland under supervision: a sort of delegated spy from the Security Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was with me constantly. Or he was at first, since he quickly grew discouraged, tired by the rigours of the shooting, and the whimsical or nocturnal schedules I imposed. Quickly, I discovered that he was rather fond of strong liquor and I constantly dreamed up reasons for him to celebrate, making him an ally. After that, he rarely appeared.

  The other issue I had to deal with urgently was Marina. I liked her a lot, but I quickly saw that she would be an obstacle in my getting to the truth, which would inevitably require ruthless, even aggressive questioning on my part. With brutal frankness, I told her that her beautiful face was too Jewish for Poles to feel able to speak freely in front of her. She agreed. I replaced her with Barbara Janicka of good Catholic stock, a wonderful interpreter who none the less caused me other problems. On more than one occasion she threatened to leave the shoot not only because she knew what was at stake, because what she heard filled her with dread, but also because, given that she could only work for me with government approval, she had to report back to the authorities and she was too honest to lie to them. Each time, in extremis, I managed to persuade her to stay, assured her of the integrity of my intentions. She then took it upon herself to moderate everything, both the forthrightness of my questions and the often incredible violence of the Polish responses. When they talked about the Jews, the Poles almost always used the word ‘Żydki’, a pejorative term meaning ‘little Yid’. Barbara translated this as ‘Jews’, which is pronounced ‘Żydki’, a word that was almost never used. One day, I organized a discussion in the church in Chełmno between the priest with the hooked nose, Srebnik, the child singer and me. Barbara’s distortion of everything that was said – my questions, the priest’s hypocritical pronouncements and Srebnik’s words, a reflection of his shyness and his visceral fear – made the scene unintelligibly comical and, inevitably, unusable. Sometimes – having spent hours on end listening to Polish, in time I was able to understand a little and I was sensitive to the gestures of the people I was interviewing – sometimes I caught her red-handed toning down what was said and immediately confronted her. When this happened, she stopped mistranslating and instead took an almost malicious pleasure in the pitiless details, inflecting every phrase she translated as though to say, ‘You asked for it, you’ve got it!’, as if she agreed with what was being said. It is a constant failing of female interpreters – even the best of them, especially the best – they give in to their fears, their emotions.

  When, in Israel, I managed the amazing feat of getting a few words from ‘Antek’ (Yitzhak Zuckerman), the deputy commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the tragic beauty of his words was mangled by Francine Kaufmann, my well-regarded Hebrew interpreter, something I only realized later during the edit. It happened in Galilee, at the kibbutz Lohamei Ha Geta’o, (the kibbutz of the Ghetto Fighters), where everyone seemed determined that I should neither meet Antek nor get him to talk. Antek, the hero, was a drinker with a puffy drunkard’s face. I respected this man, I liked his face, I understood that he liked to drink and I loathed the bureaucrats of the kibbutz, who were determined to fly in the face of truth in order to preserve their irenic vision of what a ghetto fighter should be like, doing everything they could to conceal Antek’s existence and shut him out. I fought them every inch of the way, promising I would not make him talk but insisting that he be present, even if only in the background of the shot while Simcha Rotem, known as ‘Kazik’, recounted how he had escaped from the ghetto and returned via the sewers. But I had no intention of keeping my word, I knew that I would do everything in my power to get Antek to speak, realizing that once he began it would be impossible to stop him. A terrible storm was raging outside, the electricity went out on several occasions, it was late afternoon just before the beginning of Shabbat and Francine, an observant Jew, wanted to get home before it began. Antek had already interrupted once to say, ‘Claude, if you could lick my heart, it would poison you.’ After a pause, he went on and I listened as the interpreter’s voice translated: ‘I started drinking after the war… It was very difficult…’ But he had said something very different, and I never got over the fact that it does not appear in Shoah: ‘I started drinking after the war when I climbed up onto that huge tomb!’ This, clearly, has a very different ring. During editing, I spent a long time wondering whether I should subtitle the latter part of his sentence in French, even if it meant overruling the interpreter, since we would still hear her say ‘It was very difficult’, which would be impossible to remove without cutting the footage. In the end, I did not do so for ethical reasons, just as I allowed Barbara to translate ‘Żydki’ as ‘Jews’, something for which all Jews of Polish origin who see Shoah invariably reproach me.

  My first trip to Poland had taken place in February 1978. When I got back, I made a brief trip to Israel to see Srebnik again, having now been to Chełmno; then I launched into the complex preparations for the shoot, which was to take place in a number of countries. Shooting began six months later, around 15 July, in Treblinka and from that moment, gripped by the same feeling of urgency, and I spent three years on one shoot after another –
in Corfu, the United States, Israel, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, until late 1981. I returned to film in Poland four times. I still wonder sometimes what Shoah would have been like had I begun my explorations there as logic dictated, instead of first roaming all over the rest of the world. What I do know is that I was obedient to an altogether different law, one that was restricting, obscure to me, and of another order: the law of creation. I am convinced that Poland would have remained a film set, I would never have experienced the explosion that blazed in me that first day which had me imagining the scenes I needed to film and beginning – with stubbornness, conviction and resourcefulness – the difficult process that would allow me to film them. I instinctively knew that Gawkowski, who had not driven a train since the end of the war, would get back into an engine car identical to the one in which he had transported Jews from Warsaw and Białystok to Treblinka, sickened by the pleas he heard coming from the wagons behind him, able to endure it thanks only to the officially sanctioned triple-ration of vodka. In 1978, the country still had steam engines, which had not changed since 1942. Not only did I have to convince him, something I knew I could do, but I also had to persuade Polish Railways – a more difficult enterprise – to rent (for a steep fee) an engine that spat out red-hot grit, to let me keep it as long as necessary, to adapt their timetables and to allow me to film the arrival of the train at Treblinka station as often as I needed. The literal hallucination I was gripped by also spread to the protagonists. Just as, in the mirrors of that hair salon in Israel, Bomba would see himself again cutting women’s hair in the Treblinka gas chambers, so Henrik Gawkowski – who, in one of the wagons he drove to the Treblinka station, had probably transported Bomba, his wife and their baby – is completely hallucinating when, under the eye of the camera, he leans out of the window of his engine and looks onto the fifty imaginary wagons he is shunting to the place of death. There are no wagons, there is only the engine: renting a whole train would have been impossible, futile and exorbitant. It is Henrik, his body wracked with remorse, his eyes wild, repeating a gesture of slitting his throat, his face gaunt, transfixed with pain, who gives life and reality to the phantom train and makes it exist for all those who witness this stupefying scene.