The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  During a conference in Paris organized to celebrate the launch of Rachel Ertel’s great book on Yiddish poetry written during the Shoah, a woman heckled me with such bitter violence that I was left speechless: ‘What we need,’ she shouted from the floor, ‘is a French Shoah!’ What did she mean? What was Shoah if not that? One need only visit the Mémorial de la Shoah on the rue Geoffroy l’Asnier and slowly walk along the walls on which, reverently engraved into the stone thanks to the tireless efforts of Serge Klarsfeld, are the names of the 76,000 men, women and children gassed, deported from France. Of these, 95 per cent were Polish Jews with names that are difficult to pronounce. Most of them were not French. Thinking about it, she was reproaching me for not talking about Drancy, about Compiègne, about the role of the French in the deportations. What she wanted was not a film but a trial, like those of Barbie or Papon, trials that advocates insist have an educational benefit much greater than that of any film, Shoah being first and foremost. Later, when it was too late, I realized I should have said, ‘You need a Le Pen to direct it.’ In any case, it was a complete misinterpretation of what I had been trying to do: the subject of Shoah is not the raids, the roundups, the arrests (I made no mention of Belgium, or the Netherlands, or Westerbork, or Prague, or Berlin and the German cities); it is not about the point of departure but about the last leg of the journey, the last junction, when it is too late, when what cannot be undone is about to be done. I understand that those who have lost family members might be angry that their deaths are not mentioned in Shoah. They are wrong, they have completely misunderstood: Shoah, in a sense, is entirely about them, even if I make no mention of the responsibility of the policemen who arrested them. Nor do I mention anything about the handful of Polish nuns who hid Jews in their convents. It was the peasants who lived closest to the extermination camps who made it possible for me to understand and to help others understand what had happened.

  But others who should have rejoiced felt, on the contrary, their mandarin prerogatives and their status threatened: a number of professional historians. At the end of a symposium held at the Sorbonne in 1992, Professor Pierre Vidal-Naquet scandalized his colleagues in attendance when he claimed that history was ‘something too serious to be left to historians’. According to Lucette Valensi, herself a historian, commenting on this public statement in the scholarly publication Les Annales, Vidal-Naquet, in order to illustrate his contention, continued by ‘citing three major works that did more to enhance our knowledge of the extermination of the Jews than the work of professional historians: the work of Primo Levi, that of Raul Hilberg, and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’. Comically, barely had she written this than Madame Valensi urged, ‘Let us not dwell on these names.’ This symposium, astonishingly, spread panic among certain historians, as though such works disqualified the professional: ‘We came close to thinking so in front of the power of the witnesses, the truth and the authority of their testimony.’ A Canadian historian, Michael Marrus, felt hounded from his kingdom. Happily, he compensated for it in malice. It was I who gave a speech celebrating Raul Hilberg’s retirement party in Burlington, Vermont. Marrus was at my table at lunch: his dark beady eyes glared poisonously at me throughout the meal. In 1987, another historian, a Frenchman, Henry Rousso, an ambitious young graduate, published a book in which he dismissed Shoah in a few hurried lines full of factual errors, attempting to demolish what he saw as the unwarranted sanctification of a work that, if it were not challenged, would eclipse all others, in particular his own book Le Syndrome de Vichy [The Vichy Syndrome]. In doing so, he seemed to feel he might check the reputation of Shoah. A number of his teachers, including Vidal-Naquet and François Bédarida, condemned his short-sightedness in no uncertain terms. I attacked him myself at every chance I got. And on 30 January 1990, three years after Le Syndrome de Vichy was published, I received a letter of apology from the author, informing me of a forthcoming paperback edition correcting his foolish remarks in the original. In substance, he admitted that he had made a value judgement about Shoah that he later realized was absurd. His criticisms, he acknowledged, were neither explained nor substantiated. He reproached himself for not attempting to stand back and take stock of his negative reaction on first seeing the film. He added – and this was the crux of the letter – that he had been more irritated by the way in which the film had been sanctified on its release than by the film itself. Whether or not there was a new edition, the damage was already done and though his decision to apologize was gracious, however much Rousso agreed that I was right in principle, he nonetheless stubbornly continued to argue for the dangers, according to him, of confusing the Shoah with a single representation of it, even one whose greatness he now recognized. I replied politely, and seven years later he wrote to me again to refine his reservations further. He told me that in his previous letter he had not really understood the nature of the malaise he had felt when he first saw Shoah: the film had made him understand how estranged he was from this tragedy, though at the time he felt he was directly concerned by this ‘memory’, doubly so since he was both a historian and a Jew. Shoah had made him feel ‘repudiated’ by that which mattered most to him. He ended the letter by assuring me that, in hindsight, Shoah had offered him a remarkable opportunity to reflect – and not only as a historian – on memory, on how it is passed on, on the weight of the past, a past, he said, that one has to accept, to come to terms with, including that part of it which is suffering. Even if he had not always agreed with me on incidental things, he agreed on the essential. He concluded by saying that he had learned much from me.

  I am grateful to Henry Rousso for having sent me these letters, especially the second, which, sadly, I cannot quote in its entirety. This is the heart of the matter, we have touched on a crucial issue. Rousso, an Egyptian Jew who was not deported to the camps, nor were any members of his family, felt ‘repudiated’ by Shoah. He is not alone in this: there are those who were deported who felt an identical sense of negation. They are not present, they are not in the film, not as they think they should be or would want to be present. And yet, as I said earlier, Shoah is all about them. I am not speaking here of Belzec, of Treblinka, of Sobibór or Cheømno. In those camps, there was no question as to who would live or die: everyone was condemned to die and knew it; those few survivors, those I refer to in my film as the ‘revenants’, having miraculously survived, were themselves dead men granted a stay of execution. No, I am speaking of Auschwitz, that vast, unique camp that had a double function, being both a concentration camp and an extermination camp. In Auschwitz, when the trains arrived, an Angel of Death – either Mengele or another – was waiting on the ramp and decided who would be sent immediately to the gas chambers, and who would be sent to the concentration camp where, despite the horrors camp prisoners endured, there was a chance, however small, that they would survive. I have been known to say something that has not always been understood and has shocked those whose opinions are cut and dried: ‘No one was in Auschwitz!’ It is true that the phrase is provocative and impossible to accept. And yet it attested to a profound truth, something graven on the paradoxical heart of the tragedy that took place there. One need only look, with tears in one’s eyes – it is impossible to do so otherwise – at the Auschwitz Album made by the Germans themselves, which shows the convoys of Jews, mostly from Hungary and Transylvania, arriving and disembarking on the ramp at Birkenau in the spring of 1944. After days and nights spent in harrowing conditions, they are herded out of the carriages with truncheons and batons and, waiting and screaming, they are lined up to wait for a verdict to be given as to their fate, the faces of the women, the children, of the few men accompanying them frantic with fear and disbelief. They sense the worst, know nothing about this place where they have come, they understand that they will die, do not know how and refuse to believe it. Moments later, whipped on by kapos, escorted by heavily armed Germans and police dogs, their bared fangs goading them on, they jostle each other, rushing down into the underground chamb
ers of Crematoria II and III where they are forced to undress and step naked into an enormous room, 3,000 of them crammed in together, into which the greenish crystals of Zyklon B will be thrown as soon as the doors are closed. The lights are shut off, in the darkness, what Filip Müller calls ‘the struggle for life, the struggle for death’ takes place as each person fights for one more breath of air so they can live one second longer. These scenes were repeated day after day for years and the wretches who were its victims had no knowledge, no intimation of their own deaths: until the last moment, until with whips and clubs and truncheons they were hounded into the death chamber; and even troubled by a terrible sense of foreboding, they knew nothing of Auschwitz, neither the name nor the place, nor even the means by which their lives would be taken. They ended their days in darkness, enclosed by four walls of smooth stone, in a true ‘non-place’ of death.

  But what of the others, those in the concentration camp who also witnessed the convoys arriving, the march to the crematoria, and who watched for hours and hours as wreaths of thick black smoke rose from the squat chimney of the building where mass murder was being committed? There can be no doubt that they were in Auschwitz, they knew everything there was to know about it. Everything, except the gas chambers. Anne-Lise Stern, deported from Paris to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, who, from the first, was one of the most ardent and insightful admirers of Shoah, who never felt herself excluded by the film, understood what I meant when I dared formulate the almost unthinkable paradox of this camp where she survived for a year, this camp whose principles are implacably explained by Rudolf Vrba, in the ‘deuxiéme époque’ of Shoah: ‘The more the conditions in the concentration camp improved, the greater the number of new arrivals were sent to the gas chambers.’ Vrba needs to be seen again, listened to again. Anne-Lise was too intelligent not to agree with what he said and what I made my own in perhaps a more brutal phrase. Over the years, I have sometimes felt Anne-Lise withdraw, come back, come closer, withdraw again. Doubtless the paradox of Auschwitz became too abstract, too theoretical, it did not take account of her personal experience, which needed to be put into words. This she did magnificently in 2004 when she published a book for which she invented the splendid title Le Savoir-Déporté [Deported Knowledge]. I read it with admiration, at times deeply moved, certain passages are forever engraved in my memory. The fundamental argument it presents, the experience it documents, are irreplaceable. For my part, I did not experience ‘deported knowledge’. For twelve years I tried to stare relentlessly into the black sun of the Shoah, I forced myself to get as close as I could. It is a different approach, I do not believe the two approaches to be antagonistic, nor, I know, does Anne-Lise.

  Shoah brought me, and still brings me, many friends both non-Jewish and Jewish, some of whom have become intimates. To make a list of them would be impossible, it would be tedious and would be hurtful to those I would inevitably forget to mention. I am thinking of Didier Sicard, who, in 1985, sent me a long letter that began: ‘Monsieur, you have made the most beautiful film I have ever seen.’ How could we not have become friends, and remained so? Michel Deguy who, in 1990, published Au Sujet de Shoah. Le film de Claude Lanzmann, an anthology of the most powerful articles published around the world about Shoah, including his own. And of course I cannot help but mention the magisterial hundred-page article that Shoshana Felman devoted to Shoah, which I spent a whole summer translating myself, or the seminars she asked me to give at Yale, where she was then a professor. Also I cannot ignore the profound and acutely nuanced pages devoted to Shoah by Gérard Wajcman in his book L’Objet du siècle, where I find myself in the curious and flattering company of Marcel Duchamp and Malevich. Wajcman is someone for whom, in spite of his fickle nature, I feel an unshakeable friendship. I also feel it for Arnaud Desplechin, one of the great younger figures in cinema, who published an admirable article in L’Infini about Shoah and my other films, telling of his shock when he first saw them. In his second term as Minister for Education, Jack Lang asked me if I would agree to a DVD being made for schools, not an abridged version of Shoah but a collection of extracts running to about three hours to be given free to secondary schools. I said yes. The DVD was made up of six sequences – each separated from the next by a black screen – and was accompanied by an ‘educational booklet’ explaining the film as a whole and giving a scene-by-scene commentary on each of the sequences included. Jean-François Forges, professor of history in Lyon, was given the responsibility for the project and did a superb job, something I am struck by every time I am asked to present in person a section from the DVD to a class.

  I omitted to mention that, of all the tributes paid to me, one of the first, the most phenomenal and unquestionably the boldest, was that of Max Gallo, who in 1985 was editor of Le Matin de Paris, a newspaper that no longer exists; while other newspapers serialized witty little thrillers or love stories as summer reading, Le Matin de Paris decided to offer their readers, daily, the unexpurgated text of the film. People said that Max Gallo was crazy. It’s true; he was crazy about Shoah.

  It was through Shoah that I met Bernard Cuau. I employed him on the editorial committee of Les Temps modernes, and his death in 1995 left me inconsolable. He never slept and I could phone him at all hours of the day or night, something I did when I felt anxious; his mellifluous voice was like a drug to me, I will always miss it. Bernard taught film studies at the University of Paris VII and spent a month holding seminars about Shoah. His oeuvre, whether on the page, on film or for the theatre, are among those rare works paid for with one’s life and which are not called part of literature because they are literature itself. When I say ‘oeuvre’, I include the articles he wrote during his ten years at Les Temps modernes and his earlier books – La Politique de la folie [The Politics of Madness], an implacable denunciation of psychiatric brutality, L’Affaire Mirval [The Mirval Case], with a preface by Michel Foucault and Pierre Vidal-Naquet – and his plays and the dozen films of touching power and subtlety he directed. The latter are mostly known only to students since they were directed through and for the university circuit: Bernard had no real interest in reaching a wider public. Power stratagems and media ploys were alien to him, self-effacement was his law. The multifarious works he produced throughout his life were ordained by a single burning locus; a vigil to absolute suffering, Bernard situated himself deliberately on the side of what was irreparable, the incurable, the sole setting for his words and his actions: madness, exclusion, prisons. He gave weekly lessons at the prisons of La Santé, Melun and Fresnes. One day he had the extraordinary idea of suggesting a screening of Shoah for the inmates of La Santé, followed by a seminar, which he would lead. His suggestion was greeted with whistles, jeers and insults, with a brutal and definitive refusal: his students were Arabic and black and wanted nothing to do with Jews. But Bernard, with inflexible gentleness, did not give up and, over a period of weeks, brought them round to the idea. For six months in La Santè he taught a course on Shoah and, at the request of his class, asked me to spend a day there. I arrived at nine in the morning and the discussion proved so intense, their knowledge of the film so precise, their questions so surprising and intelligent, that the inmates asked the wardens if they could skip lunch so we could go on talking. The wardens agreed and the discussion went on until five. I have rarely encountered an audience with such an in-depth knowledge of Shoah, or such an intense understanding of the issues raised by the film. Some of them wrote to me for a long time afterwards.