The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  The friendship Bernard-Henri Lévy has shown me, generously offering me his hospitality so that I could have somewhere to write in peace, needs to be stated and restated here. But it is impossible in three lines to do justice to a man of such talents, he deserves much more, I will talk about him one day. People always forget to mention his courage, his madness, his wisdom, his remarkable intelligence, these are the things about him that matter most to me.

  The further I got in the making of Shoah, the more the mounting financial difficulties began to smooth themselves out. It was possible for me to show scenes already filmed and even an edited section of the work in progress. I have spoken of the debt I owe the Israeli government. The help given to me, especially towards the end, by the French government, thanks to François Mitterrand and to Jack Lang, was also very precious to me. But it is individuals – some of them already friends of mine, others not yet – who made it possible for me to carry on during the lean times, when I surveyed the immensity of what remained to be done and the dire straits I was in. The film was saved many times by my very dear friend André Wormser, whom I first met at the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, and by his brothers, Marcel and Jean-Louis, who, like him, were bankers. (I write these lines only a few short months after André’s death.) I also managed to persuade Alain Gaston-Dreyfus and his wife, Marianne, of the need for such a film, and they brought together a group of donors, many of whom preferred to remain anonymous. To my great sorrow, Alain died from bone cancer. The work was taken up – and how! – by Thérèse, André and Daniel Harari, the latter two brilliant ex-students of the École polytechnique, inventors whose high-tech innovations are famous the world over, men of great humility and generosity, they will never know the extent of my gratitude. Charles Corrin, who had been deported to the camps, rallied the merchants of Le Sentier – I sometimes encounter strangers who tell me, ‘I helped you with your film’ – but his heart, which had known such trials and hardships, suddenly stopped beating; he was sixty-eight years old. Rémy Dreyfus actually went round making collections from impoverished friends – ten francs, fifty francs, the record was a hundred francs – making it possible at the time for me to buy more film stock. I have not forgotten the historian Georgette Elgey, nor my dear friends Gilberte and Adolphe Steg, who supported me from the beginning of my mad project. Nor have I forgotten the men and women who helped at the end, when the film was complete. For finishing the film did not mean that my problems were over: with conviction and generosity, Simone Veil headed up a small group who rallied to help me out of a difficult situation about which I will say a few words.

  Nahum Goldmann, the first president of the World Jewish Congress, a statesman and a man of culture who negotiated German reparations with Chancellor Adenauer, aware of the considerable financial difficulties I faced in trying to complete the film, promised to help me. He would have done so had he remained in power but unfortunately he was forced to leave office and was replaced by Edgar Bronfman of the famous Canadian family of distillers whose founder, Samuel Bronfman, had a reputation as a successful bootlegger during Prohibition. The Bronfman family was impeccably respectable but Edgar, too occupied with his countless business concerns, appointed as his deputy, specifically responsible for Jewish affairs, Rabbi Israel Singer, who was primarily interested in politics. He was a young, sinuous man who seemed to glide when he moved, his eyes were invariably hidden, even at night, behind tinted glasses that added to his air of secrecy, which flourished together with his considerable power. Nahum Goldmann’s friends in the World Jewish Congress had begged Singer to watch the first hour of Shoah. At the time I was at a critical stage in the making of the film: Parafrance, the distributor, had just gone bust. I was in need of money for the post-production work, which would require substantial sums. The French government had helped me as much as it could and I did not dare ask for more funds from the dear friends I have named who had already demonstrated such generosity. An organization as rich and powerful as the World Jewish Congress would surely contribute to ensuring that a film about the destruction of European Jewry could see the light of day. It was its bounden duty. A meeting was arranged and I hired Club 13 on the avenue Hoche so that Singer could see the film at its best. It cost me a lot of money, but I was very hopeful and, together with Nahum Goldmann’s old friends, I invited a number of key figures. When we were due to start, Singer had still not appeared. I asked everyone to wait. By 8.30 he had still not arrived and I could no longer rudely expect my other guests to wait, all the more so since the room had been rented only for an hour and had to be free for another screening at nine. Singer finally arrived at 8.45, slipping along the row like a ghost, his eyes hidden behind his glasses, and slumping into the seat reserved for him, where he crossed and uncrossed his legs impatiently throughout the fifteen minutes he spent watching the film. Failure, humiliation, it was arranged that I meet with him briefly two days later in a hotel bar. He said only one thing: ‘It’s too long. It’s not for the Americans.’ In the summer of 1985, while spending a week with Dan Talbot in Watermill, at his charming Long Island home, the two of us would get together every morning in his study and, in a joyful almost warlike mood, attempt to come up with a strategy for the American release of this strange unidentified object known as Shoah. I learned from Dan that Singer, the august representative of the World Jewish Congress, was already fiercely negotiating with the Polish lobby before the film was even released – backslapping, effusive speeches, kosher banquets, junkets, the restoration of the Yiddish theatre in Warsaw, and more. With the skill of a practised diplomat, he was promoting a veritable policy of reconciliation with the Eastern bloc countries and paradoxically, Shoah – a film he had given no help to, it had been beneath him – deserved some of the credit. Israel Singer’s triumph was yet to come: he became almost a world power in his own right, succeeding in forcing the Swiss banks and others to pay considerable, hard-won and much-deserved reparations to Jewish organizations. But he is no longer with the World Jewish Congress. He and Edgar Bronfman appear to have fallen out. For good, it would seem.

  It is impossible to tell everything at once and I have not been able to talk about it until now, but the death of Sartre cast a terrible pall over the last years of the struggle – 1980 to 1985 – that would finally bring Shoah to completion. Castor’s grief was spectacular and uncontrollable, people will remember the photographs taken of her at Montparnasse cemetery: she had to be held back or she would have fallen into the grave. Death invariably entails much work and I was the one who discussed with the police the route the funeral cortège should take. They did not want it to be a long procession and they did not want Sartre’s remains to pass through the centre of Paris, determined to contain the whole thing within southern Paris, within the 14th arrondissement where he had lived and where he had died at the Hôspital Broussais. The route I was forced to agree to was therefore relatively short: from the rue Didot, the boulevard Brune, along the outskirts of Paris, Porte d’Orléans, Denfert-Rochereau, the boulevard Raspail, the boulevard Montparnasse – from the junction at Raspail to the station, for which I had to argue fiercely since the police feared some sort of public outburst as Sartre passed the pavements he had strolled along so often – finally, the boulevard Edgar-Quinet and Montparnasse cemetery. The route, it is true, was very short, but the people of Paris, inconsolable, knew that with Sartre’s passing they were saying goodbye not simply to a great man, but to a whole era, and thronged into the streets in such numbers that the cortège could move only in fits and starts, its progress blocked in front and to either side by people who did not know how to express their solidarity, their grief. A brief disagreement between those closest to him had occurred the night before the funeral: President Giscard d’Estaing had asked if he might come and pay his respects at the graveside. Some present were vehemently opposed to the idea. I was not. He came.

  With Sartre dead, nobody had any real hopes for Castor’s failing health or thought she would long outliv
e him. The doctors decided that she should be hospitalized and she was admitted to the Hôspital Cochin where she was treated for several weeks and recovered. She moved back to the rue Schoelcher and things returned to normal. Together we wrote an editorial explaining that Les Temps modernes would continue to be published. It was Castor’s wish, our wish, and besides a journal belongs as much to its readers as to its founders. I have already talked about how close I was to her during the last years of her life, the evenings I spent discussing Shoah with her and all the screenings she attended. I remember the period before her death in 1986 as almost a happy time, she was still planning to travel in the far north and was sad when she was forbidden from doing so. In 1986, the doctors ordered that she should urgently be admitted to the intensive care unit of Cochin, where she remained until the end. Her body was too frail, she was kept alive only artificially and it was painful to sit next to her, holding her hand when she could not speak or even move her head since she was intubated. A large tube passed through her mouth into her body, only her eyes were still alive, but they stared fixedly ahead of her and keeping her up to date with what was happening in the world seemed meaningless to me: her enforced silence rendered me mute also. I could only communicate my feelings by squeezing her hand, touching her body. According to the doctors, she was terminally ill, there was no possibility of saving her, but they could not say how long they would be able to keep her alive: if they took her off ventilation she would die. I was in an awkward position: Shoah was a major event in the United States and I had been invited to tour several cities and universities. I had told Dan to decline all invitations, that I could not possibly leave Paris. But a ceremony of great solemnity and importance for Americans had been organized in Los Angeles months earlier: the B’nai B’rith (whose Anti-Defamation League is one of the most powerful and aggressive anti-racist organizations in the United States) was to present me with their Torch of Liberty Award, and the date could not be changed. So as not to be away from Castor too long, I arranged to fly directly from Paris to Los Angeles, arriving on the day of the award ceremony; I planned to write my speech on the plane, and to leave again the following day. The doctors told me, ‘She’ll still be here when you get back.’ When I landed in Los Angeles, the party that had come to meet me were in shock: a telegram had just arrived from Paris to say that Castor was dead. I was in an appalling state, wracked with guilt; heartsick, I attended the banquet in my honour, the organizers were kind enough to inform the guests of the sacrifice I had made to be with them and why – in spite of a thousand requests – I could not stay longer. I read the speech I had written on the plane, passed a sleepless night and flew back the following morning, arriving in Paris at dawn in order to organize Castor’s funeral, just as I had Sartre’s. She was no longer in the intensive care unit, but in the hospital morgue.

  Once again, Les Temps modernes was faced with the decision of whether to wind down or carry on. If we decided to carry on, we needed an editor, the responsibility of which could only fall to the old hands. It was either Jean Pouillon, who had all but founded the journal, or me. I was ten years his junior. Pouillon spoke in favour of me: ten years is nothing, he said. We voted, I was chosen and, though I had never felt a desire to run a journal, to spend all the time necessary to do so, I agreed. One of my unspoken reasons was that the reputation I had made through Shoah would help me to protect the journal and ensure that the publisher, Claude Gallimard – who, six years earlier, after Sartre’s death, had launched another journal, Le Débat, run by Pierre Nora with the considerable support of Les Éditions Gallimard, next to which Les Temps modernes, with no advertising and no modern equipment, looked like an antiquated relic – would support us. I did not know him but asked to meet him then, and he agreed, promising to support Les Temps modernes. I have been the editor now for twenty-two years, we have gone from strength to strength, and Antoine, Claude’s son, now considers Les Temps modernes one of the most important journals that Gallimard publishes.

  *

  Why have I suddenly decided to give my book the curious title The Patagonian Hare? For a long time I had thought of calling it La Jeunesse du Monde – The Youth of the World – with no conflict between the world and myself, between my own youth and my age now. It has never occurred to me, in all the years I have amassed, to dissociate myself from the present, to say, for example, ‘In my time…’ My time is the time I am living right now and even if I like the world less and less – with good reason – it is mine, absolutely. No retirement, no retreat, I don’t know what it means to grow old and it is first and foremost my youth that guarantees the youth of the world. One day, in circumstances I will never know, time stood still for me. This suspension of time was of implacable rigour during the twelve years it took to film Shoah. Or, to put it another way, time has never ceased not to pass. How, if time were passing, could anyone work for twelve years to produce something? This formulation ‘time has never ceased not to pass’ simultaneously denotes the inexorable flow of what Immanuel Kant called ‘inner sense’ as well as its interruption. And although time has started, very slowly, convalescent, to pass again, I still find it difficult to believe.

  Along with capital punishment, incarnation – but is there a contradiction here? – has been the abiding obsession of my life. Though I know how to see, though I am gifted with a rare visual memory, the spectacle of the world, or the world as spectacle, always relates for me to an impoverishing dissociation, an abstract separation that forbids astonishment, enthusiasm, de-realizes both object and subject. When I was twenty, as I said in this book, Milan became true only when, as I crossed the piazza del Duomo, I began to recite the opening lines of La Chartreuse de Parme to myself. It is one example among thousands. There was an incredible shock in Treblinka, with its endless consequences, triggered by the meeting of a name and a place, by the discovery of this accursed name on ordinary road signs and train stations as though, over there, nothing had happened. There were the tears Abraham Bomba held back in the hairdressing salon in Tel Aviv. I have thought about hares every day as I was writing this book: those hares in the extermination camp at Birkenau that slipped under those barbed-wire fences impassable to man; those countless hares in the great forests of Serbia as I drove through the darkness, careful not to kill them. Lastly, the mythic animal that appeared in the beam of my headlights just outside the Patagonian village of El Calafate, piercing my heart with the obvious fact that I was in Patagonia, that at this very moment Patagonia and I were true together. This is incarnation. I was almost seventy years old, but my whole being leapt with a wild joy, as it did when I was twenty.

  A Note on the Author

  Claude Lanzmann, born in 1925, is a French writer and the director of, among others, the classic nine-and-a-half hour film Shoah (1985). Lanzmann is chief editor of the journal Les Temps modernes, which was founded by Jean-Paul Sartre. The Patagonian Hare, a number one bestseller in France and a bestseller in Germany, has also been translated into Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Polish, Dutch, and Portuguese. Hailed by Le Monde, ‘twenty-four years after Shoah... another masterpiece, this time a literary masterpiece’, The Patagonian Hare has been the recipient of numerous prizes, including, in Germany, the prestigious Welt-Literaturpreis.

  ENDNOTES

  1. Deleuze, who was called on to defend and support this repugnant film, wrote that, although he had kept his ‘eyes wide open’, he could not see the shadow of a shadow of anti-Semitism in Shadow of Angels. I replied in the pages of Le Monde – I was working on Shoah at the time – with a page-long article entitled ‘Night and Fog’.

  2. Shoah: le livre (Gallimard), Folio no. 3026, p.224.

  Shoah: The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film (Da Capo Press), pp. 145–6.

  3. Today, a number of Polish historians have revised this figure downwards: 1.5 million Nazi victims and 500,000 Soviet victims.

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