The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  In Poland, reactions to the Oxford debate were, as one might expect, a tissue of contradictions, but Shoah had started out on a long road and it would take another fifteen years – and many contracts brutally cancelled at the last moment with no reason given – before the film was broadcast there on a cable channel in October 1997 and on Polish national television in February 2003.

  During all that time, one man prospered. When, in a private screening room in Paris, I watched the première of Schindler’s List, I discovered that the Polish co-producer – in capital letters in the credits – was none other than Lew Rywin. He had gone far; providence moves in mysterious ways. In 1996, thanks to Brigitte Jacques, I was invited to a symposium in Vilnius, Lithuania. Shoah was to be screened there in full for the first time and I was asked to respond to the address by the President of Lithuania in a large university lecture hall. When I arrived, my heart was thumping. I had spent so many sleepless nights reading and rereading so much about Vilnius, about the Ponary massacre, about the appalling things that took place in Lietūkis Garage during the Kaunas (Kovno) pogrom where Lithuanians, their white shirts stained red with blood – this was during the heatwave of June 1941 – battered Jewish women and children to death while German soldiers stood by laughing, that it kept me awake at night. Moreover, Vilnius and the two heroes of the exhumation of the Ponary mass grave, Motke Zaïdl and Itzhak Dugin, appeared in the first minutes of Shoah. Since I had been asked to speak, I had no intention of remaining silent about these things and was wondering how best to go about it. I glanced around the huge lecture hall and suddenly I saw, sitting in the centre of the stage, surrounded by an entourage, Lew Rywin. He had put on a lot of weight, his face was jowly, he had a paunch and his moustache was blacker than ever. My heart skipped a beat, I walked up the steps and, as I drew alongside him, I said, ‘You owe me reparation.’ He nodded and suggested doing something about it the following week: ‘I’m the head of Canal+ Poland, and I will broadcast Shoah on my station.’ Canal+ certainly knew how to pick its employees. I said, ‘Why should I believe you?’ ‘I will be in Paris next week,’ he replied, ‘one of my assistants will get in touch and arrange a meeting and together we will work out how the film should be broadcast.’ I wasn’t sure whether or not to trust this new proposal from such a shark. As it turned out, the following week I did indeed receive a call in Paris from a very polite Frenchman to arrange a meeting with the Polish TV tycoon. He was determined that Canal+ Poland would broadcast Shoah as soon as practicable, a contract was drawn up and signed and I stipulated only one condition: that there should be a press conference in Warsaw before the screening so that I could explain myself to those Poles who wished to listen, and answer their questions. This condition I made a sine qua non. Yet two days before the broadcast, the polite Frenchman rang once more to explain that the press conference would not take place and that the film would be broadcast with no special announcement, like any other programme.

  To chronicle the later episodes in the struggle for Shoah to exist in Poland would be tedious. Only one event warrants comment. Four or five years later I received a very official, very charming letter from Polish National Television, advising me that their programming adviser had finally decided to broadcast Shoah on one of the two national networks. They would send a team of their finest technicians and the journalist who was to interview me, so that each of the proposed four segments (the film was to be broadcast over four consecutive nights) would be preceded by a discussion in which Poles could explain their long hostility to Shoah. For my part, I was offered the opportunity to make an inaugural speech, explaining what I had hoped to achieve in making the film and how unjust I found it that my work was considered anti-Polish. I accepted.

  The journalist was a man called Ludwig Stomma. The moment I opened my door and he saw me, he broke down in tears, threw his arms around me and, hugging me long and hard, told me how much Shoah had moved him when he first saw it, and how it still did every time he watched it again. Compared to him, the director and the technicians had classic, slightly pinched Polish faces, but their work was sincere and was completed within a day. After that, everything happened with almost magical simplicity. The first day of the broadcast was set and the Polish press announced it as a major event. A few hours before it was due to go out, with extraordinary harshness, I got a call to say the broadcast would not be going ahead. I called Warsaw but could not get hold of any of my contacts, only the cruel voice of some female bureaucrat who said, ‘A television station is never obliged to broadcast a programme, even one it has paid for.’ I forgot to mention that they paid very little for the rights – I didn’t care.

  I have no proof of what I am about to suggest, but at the time, another scandal was at its height: a Polish-American historian by the name of Jan Gross had just published a book about the Jedwabne pogrom of 1941 in which the Polish population had massacred their Jewish neighbours. This caused uproar in Poland between pro- and anti-Semitic groups, the mayor of Jedwabne fell to his knees as a sign of repentance, the wounds were savage and deep. The occasion would have been an ideal opportunity to broadcast Shoah, but all my requests went unanswered. Having to travel again to Poland in 2001 for the shooting of my film Sobibór, 14 octobre 1943, 16h, I turned to Adam Michnik, himself a Jew, editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, a well-known newspaper in Poland, whom I had met several times. Several weeks later, Michnik told me that he had made inquiries: according to him, the organized Jewish community in Poland had itself intervened to request that the broadcast of Shoah be cancelled. They feared a new surge of anti-Semitism and demonstrated scant courage. I don’t think Michnik was lying. Because Shoah never compromises with truth, it is in a sense the epitome of transgression.

  In 1986, I had experienced something similar without realizing all the implications during the four screenings of Shoah at the Berlin Film Festival. Leaders of the Jewish community had been officially invited, not only to the screenings, but to a meeting with the mayor of Berlin and members of the government. Not one of them showed up. My pigeonhole at the hotel desk was stuffed with letters from Germans who had seen the film, many of their comments profound, some of them heart-wrenching, but I had not one word of apology from the dignitaries representing the Jewish community. Clearly, if the Shoah happened, there can be no Jews in Germany, and if there are Jews in Germany, the Shoah cannot have occurred. Things, happily, have changed since then but that was the shameful reality that prevailed at the time.

  Chapter 21

  The question of what title I should give the film arose right at the end of those twelve years of work, in April 1985, a few short weeks before the première took place in the vast Théâtre de l’Empire on the avenue de Wagram – attended, as we know, by the President of the Republic, François Mitterrand. In all those years I did not have a title, constantly postponing the moment when I would give the matter serious thought. Given its sacrificial connotation, Holocaust was unacceptable; moreover it had already been used. The truth is that there was no name for what, at the time, I did not even dare call ‘the event’. To myself, almost in secret, I said ‘the Thing’. It was a way of naming the unnameable. How could there be a name for something that was utterly without precedent in the history of mankind? If it had been possible not to give the film a title, I would have done so. The word ‘Shoah’ occurred to me one night as self-evident because, not speaking Hebrew, I did not understand its meaning, which was another way of not naming it. But for those who speak Hebrew, ‘Shoah’ is just as inadequate. The term occurs several times in the Bible. It means ‘catastrophe’, ‘destruction’, ‘annihilation’; it can refer to an earthquake, a flood, a hurricane. After the war, rabbis arbitrarily decreed that it would designate ‘the Thing’. For me, ‘Shoah’ was a signifier with no signified, a brief, opaque utterance, an impenetrable, unbreakable word. When Georges Cravenne, who took it upon himself to organize the première, wanted to print the invitations and asked me for the title and I said Shoah, he asked, ‘What does t
hat mean?’ ‘I don’t know, it means “Shoah”.’ ‘But you have to translate, no one would understand.’ ‘That’s exactly what I want, for no one to understand.’ I fought to impose the title Shoah, not knowing that in doing so I was performing a radical act of naming, because almost as soon as it had been named the title of the film became, in many languages, not just in Hebrew, the name for the event in its utter singularity. From the first, the film was an eponym, people began to use the word ‘Shoah’, the word supplanting ‘Holocaust’, ‘genocide’, ‘the Final Solution’ and others. These have become common nouns, while Shoah is now a proper noun, the only one, and hence untranslatable.

  The screening at the Théâtre de l’Empire, which, with necessary breaks, ran from 1 p.m. until 2 a.m., made everything worthwhile. No one, not a single person, left the packed cinema, even when it got late, as though they all wanted to support each other, to see through to the bitter end this terrible journey, which I prefaced with a few words that quavered with emotion. Actually, I’m mistaken, at the end of the section ‘Première époque’, the chief rabbi, René-Samuel Sirat, leapt to his feet, caught sight of me and shouted, ‘This is appalling,’ before rushing out. I remember his broad-brimmed hat flying down the aisle towards the exit; I remember thinking, ‘I wonder if he’ll come back to watch the “Deuxième époque”?’ He never came back, never saw it: Shoah, the Shoah, was over for him. I have long felt a great respect and admiration for Sirat, who was born in Algeria. He is a scholar deeply committed to Judeo-Christian inter-institutional relations. I realized that for him, as for many others, I had committed a serious transgression: this film, with no corpses, no individual story, whose sole subject is the extermination of a people rather than their survival, is probably an outrage. The Shoah should remain entombed in a deathly silence for all eternity. Even if we constantly commemorate it, we cannot make death speak. Shortly after the release of Shoah in Paris, solemn symposia were organized to which I was invited. I went to the first one, my conscience clear, unaware of the trap I was about to fall into: bearded intellectuals, thirty-somethings in yarmulkes quickly paid tribute to Shoah – because I was present – only to dismiss it, on the pretext that it was art, so they could get to the heart of the matter. It was time to stop this unhealthy fixation with the past, time to forget these Jews mired in negativity, obsessed by misery – as they undoubtedly considered me – and move on to what was important: study, Jewish culture, observance. They puffed themselves up in their conceited certainties, proud of their conviction, they were brutal in their attacks, with no respect for basic decency. I stayed only for the initial bout. Though I am not religious – something of which I am neither proud nor ashamed, it is simply how I am, the path my life has taken – I have always felt an almost philosophical astonishment and an unfailing admiration for the Jewish religion. I understand the horror Rabbi Sirat felt, I am grateful to him for having dared – unlike others – to brave Shoah, I know many people who so dreaded the pain that seeing the film would cause them that they decided never to see it. The story of Rabbi Sirat should not be generalized. There were other reactions. Having stared in disbelief at the endless queue on the corner of Broadway and 68th Street in front of the studio cinema at Lincoln Center where Shoah played for months, I went to the cinema myself where Dan Talbot, the owner and the film’s US distributor, asked me to wait with him in the foyer until the audience came out and the next showing started. Every one of them – not just those from Manhattan, but those from far-flung suburbs in New Jersey and from New York state, where there would be no chance the film would ever be shown – everyone rushed over to me the moment they recognized me, hugged me, kissed me. Then suddenly, while the cinema was being cleaned between showings, a tall beanpole of a man, the rabbi of a thriving congregation in Orange County, New Jersey, asked a curious favour of Dan, one that he found impossible to refuse. And so the rabbi and a number of his congregation went back into the cinema and began to say Kaddish, transforming the cinema into a house of prayer.

  In Paris, I got a call one day from Radio Nôtre-Dame – a station I did not even know existed – asking for an interview. I was happy to agree and asked, ‘Have you seen Shoah?’ ‘Um, no…’ ‘See it, there’s no point interviewing me until you’ve seen it.’ ‘We’ll get back to you.’ They called back a week later and we had the identical conversation. I was a little angry and said, ‘Don’t call back until you’ve been to a screening, otherwise it’s pointless’. Determined – it was a different voice this time – they called back again and I realized that seeing Shoah was an impossible task for them. They were merely obeying their superiors. Then there was the newly appointed Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, Monsignor Jean-Marie Lustiger, himself a Jew, whose story we know. I had met him twice, having been invited to lunch with him at the home of Théo Klein, an eminent lawyer and president of the Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France who organized official talks with the Prime Minister and held an annual dinner that brought together members of government and senior Jewish representatives in France. Théo was beaming, thrilled to have the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris at his table, imagining in his heart of hearts that the man would soon be Pope and he himself would be Cardinal Secretary of State or maybe Camerlengo at the Vatican. He is a sweet man who has always been enamoured of politics and glory. For my part, I liked the look of the new cardinal, we were of similar ages and had in common many memories of France recent and ancient, and those of Germany and Poland. I talked to him a little about Shoah, which I was editing at the time, and told him I would invite him to the premiére, if he would do me the honour of attending. We promised to keep in touch.

  In 1987, in Le Choix de Dieu, a book of interviews with the cardinal – a fascinating book in many respects – I discovered the key to Radio Nôtre-Dame’s contradictory stance. I had received a copy of the book inscribed in the monsignor’s elegant hand:

  For Claude Lanzmann

  Fraternally

  † Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger

  In it, one of the interviewers, Jean-Louis Missika, asks the cardinal, ‘Even Lanzmann’s film, Shoah, you don’t want to see it?’ to which he replies, ‘I cannot see it! Lanzmann talked to me about it when he was finishing work on the film. He invited me to the première… I declined. It’s not possible. No, I can’t do it. Although I promised him I would see it one day.’ ‘Is this work really necessary?’ ‘He did it, and it is good that someone did it. Yes, someone had to do it. I don’t know whether he did it well, whether it’s fair, whether it’s partisan, I don’t know […]’ Let us not forget that Pope John-Paul II was Polish. But, astonishingly, Jean-Marie kept his promise. He phoned me one day, years later, and invited me to dinner at the Archbishop’s Palace on the rue Barbet-de-Jouy. I arrived, my heart beating a little faster, and a young Vietnamese girl led me through the dark archway to be relayed by a black teenage boy, showing me upstairs to the first floor, where he opened the door to a small drawing room and said, ‘The Cardinal sends his apologies, he will be a little late.’ The reason for his lateness was blatantly obvious, I could hardly believe it – the floor, the tables, the two sofas were all littered with videos of Shoah, a chaos that betrayed both the viewer’s urgency and his inability to make sense of the film. I was attempting to reconstruct the order of the film in my mind when the cardinal threw the door open, pointing his finger with such vehemence at the corpus delicti that I could not even kiss his ring, as I had been advised to do. ‘I’ve watched it, you see? I’ve watched it!’ he repeated over and over, extremely agitated. I felt I had to believe him, and we were led down to the basement, this time by a young black girl, to a small dining room where a table had been laid. The conversation was effortless, we had so much in common, we discovered that we agreed on many things. At one point, we argued about the difference – crucial to him – between Christian anti-Semitism, whose perversity and capacity to harm he staunchly denied, and Nazi anti-Jewishness, which was, he claimed, a product of the Enlightenment. I r
eplied, ‘And the scene at the church?’ He didn’t know what I was talking about. I dared to press him and then I realized that, despite the videos scattered around the drawing room on the first floor, he had not seen Shoah at all, and he confessed: ‘I can’t do it, I just can’t, I’ve managed to watch about a minute of it a day. Please forgive me…’ I forgave him. Later, when Sollers republished in L’Infini the article I had written in 1958 for Les Temps modernes, ‘The Curate of Uruffe and the Church Interest’, that atrocious story that the future cardinal was only too familiar with since it had occurred in ‘his time’, I sent it to him with a very kind note. He made the same tireless and tiresome reply: ‘I can’t read this.’ What is the relationship between faith and truth? The reactions of Rabbi Sirat and of the cardinal are strangely similar: evil does not exist.

  These are only examples of the thousands of questions that were raised when Shoah began its career. I had not thought about it, I had not imagined how such a film, which to my eyes should unite people, would instead create so many enemies among the very people for whom I had made it: the Jews, my own people. Even some of those who had been in the camps violently threw themselves at me: ‘I don’t need to see your film, I know it all by heart, I was in seven different camps, Monsieur!’ To which I replied, ‘Bravo, you were lucky. If you had been in only one you would not be here to tell me so.’ Others, young people, publicly complained in the newspapers. I remember a certain Pierre-Oscar Lévy in Libération: ‘Monsieur Lanzmann has said all there is to say, shown all there is to show, left nothing for us. What are we supposed to do?’ he wrote with as much resentment as admiration. He was wrong, I have not done all there is to do, but it is true there will not be two Shoahs. Happily – and this is the law of time – Pierre-Oscar Lévy later went on to make a film, forgetting about the existence of Shoah, which was the best thing to do. I acknowledge his pioneering courage. This is the source of the stupid, persistent myth that Lanzmann somehow considers that he owns the Shoah. I remember Michel Polac asking me for permission to show on one of his television programmes ten minutes from Shoah alongside Nuit et brouillard, which he intended to screen in its entirety. Polac, who had lost one of his parents in the catastrophe, was reacting just like the cardinal, but he had the honesty to say to me, ‘I haven’t seen Shoah, I will never see it, it is impossible.’ Nuit et brouillard is a very important film, Resnais is a great filmmaker and Jean Cayrol’s commentary is very beautiful. But I have never understood how those, like Polac, who have shed bitter cathartic tears watching the thirty-five minutes of the carts piled with corpses, of the lines of latrines in Birkenau in Nuit et brouillard can claim, in all good conscience, that they cannot bring themselves to watch Shoah. Is it a mystery; am I incapable of thinking about, of contemplating evil? There are piles of bodies of those who died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen that, when the camps were opened, were filmed by the Allied news services, footage that appears in Nuit et brouillard, but there were no gas chambers in Bergen-Belsen, in Dachau, in Sachsenhausen or in Buchenwald. Nuit et brouillard is a beautiful, idealistic film about the deportations, the word ‘Jew’ is mentioned only once during its long litany, and the tears it elicits are the sign of its formidable powers of consolation. Yes, Nuit et brouillard, in spite of the corpses, of the horrifying conditions of the camps suggested by the images, is a film about the living, about the survivors, a film that makes it possible for life to go on as it must after great grief, when tears have dried. I have said this on more than one occasion and I am grateful to Alain Resnais, when his film was recently issued on DVD, for asking that my observations be included.