Lanzmann - Shoah and My Life. a Conversation With Paul Holdengräber (NYPL, 2012.03.21) Transcript

CLAUDE LANZMANN:

Shoah and My Life, a conversation with Paul Holdengräber

March 21, 2012

LIVE from the New York Public Library

www.nypl.org/live

Celeste Bartos Forum

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Good evening. In case you didn’t hear me, good evening.

My name is Paul Holdengräber, and I’m the Director of LIVE from the New York Public

Library. As all of you know here, quite simply my role at the Library, my role here, is to

make the lions roar, to make a heavy institution dance, and, when I’m successful, to make

it levitate.

Very briefly, I would like to encourage you all to become members of the Library, to

come afterwards and have Claude Lanzmann sign his book for you. 192 Books, our

LIVE Lanzmann_3.21Transcript QUERIES 1

independent bookstore, is here as every LIVE night. And, as you know, for the last two or

three years I haven’t been asking the various guests I invite to give me long biographies

that then I will read. They are mostly very accomplished. What I do ask them now is to

give me a seven-word description of their life. Seven words, a haiku, or if you want to be

very modern, a tweet (laughter), and these are Claude Lanzmann’s seven words, he gave

them to me in French and I’ll translate afterwards: “Juif, trace, puer, mort, vie, honneur,

amor,” which translates as “Jew, trace, fear, death, life, honor, love.”

Now, to provide us with a proper introduction I’m going to ask Antonin Baudry, who is

Cultural Counselor, I’m reading this to get this absolutely right, the sometimes with these

official titles, I can get things absolutely wrong, Antonin Baudry is the Cultural

Counselor, Permanent Representative of French Universities in the United States,

Cultural Services, Embassy of France. Antonin Baudry.

(applause)

ANTONIN BAUDRY: Good evening. Thank you, Paul. Paul is a very dangerous guy.

Not only does he make the lions roar, but he even makes the French bureaucrats work.

(laughter) And I can testify, as a typical French bureaucrat, who, while working on this

event with my dear friend Paul, received a total amount of 1,777 e-mails from him.

(laughter) Well, Paul, thank you for making the lions roar and my staff scream.

(laughter)


But speaking of lions, we have here in this arena one of the fiercest lions on earth, Claude

Lanzmann. (applause) We all heard Claude’s seven words. These are lion’s words: life,

death, fear, traces, honor, so Paul is very tricky. He asked me to introduce the lion, which

is of course dangerous, and this lion is a real carnivore, I can attest to that. And even if

Claude Lanzmann is my best friend since the very first day we met, several years ago,

and I won’t say the exact number, because it’s not a multiple of seven, so I’m not allowed

by Paul to pronounce it. But after these several years, here is my declaration of love to

Claude Lanzmann and, in order to be redeemed by Paul, who is literally obsessed by the

number seven, I will tell you the seven reasons why I love Claude Lanzmann.

Because of his resilience. Claude’s life is a fight against death and destiny. Everything he

accomplishes is difficult. He is a lion who never climbs the small hills—he always

attacks the highest mountains. We all can imagine how difficult making Shoah was.

Because of the subject of the film, of course, because of the absence of the people who

are the center of the film, the six million Jews that were killed in the extermination

camps, because of the twelve years of work it took to make the film with nearly no

support. But it was necessary to do this film. It was necessary for Claude Lanzmann as an

inner necessity and it was necessary for the world and this film is still and even more

necessary today. We feel it in our flesh and blood as France is in mourning following the

horrific tragedy in Toulouse.

Another example of Claude’s resilience is his ability to write at the age of eighty-four, a

first book, The Patagonian Hare, which is a real masterpiece, and I insist on that. The


Patagonian Hare is not a biography, or it is a biography if one considers that Marcel

Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is a biography. But both are much more. They are

literary monuments.

The second reason is Claude’s humor, which becomes in his universe a wonderful

weapon against death. The Patagonian Hare starts with the obsession of the guillotine

and capital punishment. Claude imagines the way he would himself be guillotined. And

suddenly he realizes, “I have no neck. I have often wondered during nocturnal moments

of acute bodily awareness when anticipating the worse, where the blade would have to

fall to behead me cleanly.” And it’s not Claude’s lack of neck but his enduring humor

which sends away any kind of guillotines, blades, and even death itself.

The third reason is his capacity for survival and rebirth. Claude started as a Resistance

fighter because, as he says, that was the only way to survive for him, a young Jewish

teenager in occupied France. When Shoah was launched it sent waves across the globe.

This was a shock, this was a tsunami, and for the world it was the work of a lifetime, and,

of course, this work defines Claude, but with his book The Patagonian Hare he redefines

himself once again. Nobody expected the author of Shoah to be also a great writer, a man

defined by his quest for happiness, for pleasure, for life.

The fourth reason is that Claude is a real poet. His presence here negates all dark

prophecies, the so-called death of French culture, the so-called absence of French

authors. Behind the pages of The Patagonian Hare, dictated to his friend Juliette Simont,


we hear the echoes of another hunter who aims for happiness, the echoes of Stendhal

dictating The Charterhouse of Parma, the echoes of a man writing for posterity, a man

that people will remember centuries later. And, yes, people will remember Claude

Lanzmann centuries later.

I love Claude because he is a philosopher, a man who knows that he doesn’t know the

truth, a man who knows that there is no ultimate truth, that you have to dig and dig,

deeper and deeper, relentlessly. I love Claude because he is an adventurer. When I met

Claude I discovered we had two things in common, a passion for the great philosopher

Leibnitz and a passion for flying military jets. That’s the kind of adventurer he is. I never

really understood whether Claude loves Leibnitz or hates Leibnitz, because Leibnitz is

the man who defined the incompulsibles. The incompulsibles means the things which are

possible but not possible together. You have to choose, one or the other, and Claude

always wants both.

The seventh reason why I love Claude so much is because he will always be much

younger than I am. Above and beyond everything, he is a twenty years old boy. I think

that talking with him will be a unique experience for us all, the experience of talking with

a man who has the strength of a lion, who has the knowledge and the wisdom of an old

mountain, but who has the gaze of a child.


Paul, thanks to you Claude is here for the New Yorkers. Thank you, Paul. Please

welcome Paul Holdengräber and the author of The Patagonian Hare, Claude Lanzmann.

Thank you.

(applause)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Well, thank you very much, Antonin, for having said it all.

Look at me, that way you won’t be blinded. You won’t be blinded, we can bring them

down slightly. Claude Lanzmann, a great pleasure to have you here tonight. Let’s start

with something that—Antonin mentioned many things which we will be talking about.

But let’s start with your obsession, I mean you call it that way, your obsession with the

guillotine. Your obsession, you say in the book, “the guillotine, more generally capital

punishment, and the various methods of meeting our death, has been the abiding

obsession of my life.” I’d like us to see an image, please, if we could. This image struck

me when I were thinking and reading your book. This image was drawn by Victor Hugo,

you probably know it, and I’d like you to develop a little bit where this obsession comes

from and how it started to haunt you.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: That is not the guillotine.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: This is not, more generally. La pendaison, you know, there

is, I don’t know if there is a picture of Hugo of the guillotine. There is a picture I was


looking for of a head that is floating in air, but I couldn’t find it. But talk to me a little bit

about your obsession with a cut.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I will try, I am not sure to be able, because among the seven

words that you asked me to choose and Antonin Baudry enumerates them this evening

there is only one which wins over all the others, which pardon me, forgive me, because I

am in front of you, it is fear, I am sweating with fear. It’s absolutely true, and it is not

very good, these are not very good conditions to have a deep discussion.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: At least I started with something light.

(laughter)

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I try to answer you. I says this in my book, it happened to me

I was very, very young. When I was—My maid took me to the cinema, and this was a

film called “L'Affaire du courrier de Lyon”, the man who can see absolutely clearly the

guillotine and the blade of the guillotine falling on the neck of the man who was

innocent. And I was always scared very much, terrorized. I cannot—even now it’s

difficult for me to—If I see in a book or in a newspaper the image of a guillotine it’s

difficult for me to look, at this image’s sight, I have pain it’s difficult. The real question is

how death can be inflicted as a pain, as a punishment. How do you say capital

punishment. It’s a question I have no real answer for this but I was haunted all my life by

this question.


There is a beautiful story which has not much to do with me. But it’s a true story. During

the French Revolution, during the Reign of Terror, one aristocrat was leaded to the

guillotine in order to be beheaded and he was on the cart with pulled by horses but I don’t

know how this happened but the—generally they had their hands tied in the back but not

this man, I don’t know by which generosity or the grace, and he was reading a book, and

he didn’t stop to read the book during all the way, it was a long way to the place of the

execution and when he arrived just at the foot of the échafaud or the guillotine and when

the hanger, wanted to tie his hands, he said “one second,” and he just took the book like

this and he took the corner of the page (laughter) and he did this, as if beheaded he

would go on with this lecture.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: This story’s extraordinary partly because it speaks of a—

CLAUDE LANZMANN: It’s a beautiful story.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It speaks of a future. But you know it’s, interestingly

enough.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Stop the Gestapo projector.

(laughter)


PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let’s bring it down one degree if we could. It’s an

interesting story also, since it reminds me of something that was done in literature. Since

we were looking at an image of Victor Hugo. You probably know Le Dernier Jour d'un

Condamné a text that Hugo wrote when he was twenty-nine years old, where he has the

main character, le condamné, the condemned man, write up to the moment that he comes

on the échafaud. And Dostoevsky, who read the book, said that it was the most realist

description ever written of capital punishment. Realist because in some way he had been

like the stenograph, the stenographer of human emotion, he had gotten into the brain of

the condemned man. Now, the obsession with the guillotine is also woven in in the book

with your interest in the last glances, le dernier regard, and I’d like you to say something

about these last glances, the fact that in some way you are leaving people.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Yes, of course, I was always haunted by this. When I started

to work on Shoah, I had not so many ideas at the moment and I did not know how I

would cope with such a subject. But there were some obsessions, personal obsessions that

I had. You are right. The first moment of the arrival of Jews in the extermination camp

and the first moments were the last, it was the—

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Collapsed into one.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: It was a most, a very violent death, too, and I think there are

only violent deaths. So-called natural deaths I don’t believe in this. Death is always


violent, even if you die in your own bed, it is violent for the person who dies and violent

for the people who remain.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: At the very beginning of the book you talk about torture

and courage and cowardice and you say, “How many times have I wondered how I would

react under torture? And every time my answer has been that I would be incapable of

taking my own life.” Then you say, “The question of courage and cowardice is the scarlet

thread that runs through this book, the thread that runs through my life.”

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Absolutely. I have to say this because if you write such a book

you have to be clear and sincere, and I think I was. In this book I am. It is true, it was a

real question on—sometimes it happens to me to think what I did because I took very

serious risks. I put myself really in danger. And but I didn’t face the real question. And

the real question was precisely what you said. How would I behave if I had been caught

by the Germans and tortured? Under torture the Gestapo was something very serious.

They didn’t take picture, it was not Abu Ghraib. And there are people who were really

heroes and I knew some of them, who being nobody can say, nobody can predict but who

didn’t want to go through this test, will it be possible for me to stand all the torture

without talking? They were not sure and they killed themselves before. I am absolutely

not sure I would have had the real courage to do this. It is a reason why if I am clear with

me and sincere all what I have learned is I am not sure. Amateurism, in English, this

exists? Nothing to be proud of.


PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Something to be ashamed of?

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Maybe it’s going a little bit too far, but why not? (laughter)

Why not? I’ll accept that. Because this is a real test and I talk in this book about the so-

called—Sartre liked very much this expression, the courage militaire, the military

courage, the people who killed immediately themselves. But it is—you are right, it is a

red thread in this book all along because this was a—it is at the core of a film like Shoah

for instance, the whole question of the people of the Jews of the Sonderkommando who

were working between brackets because it was not a work, in the last stage of the

destruction process I choose only these people because they had been only witnesses of

the death of the Jewish people with the killers of course because they used to work in the

crematorium of the corpses, who watched the people when they undressed themselves

before going and those who went inside the gas chambers and there are people who ask

absolutely obscene questions. Why did they accept it? Why didn’t they commit suicide?

Preferably.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Well, you have passages in this book where you say the

will to life—

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I consider that these people, the Jews of the

Sonderkommando, most of them were very decent, honest, good, good men there were

only men, there were no women and they were simple, intelligent, good, but they

privileged life. The value of life, of their own life, because there is only life. There is a


film which has been shot about me two years ago in France for the French television.

They asked me, I asked, do you have a title for this film? And I took as a title one of the

sentence of the man who was a Sonderkommando, Salmen Lewenhtal, before the

uprising of the Sonderkommando in October 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau they buried in

the mud around the, the commandos they buried what they have written, they have told

the chronicle of the hell or the inferno and one of them wrote, it was Salmen Lewenthal,

“One wants to live because everybody lives, one wants to live because there is only life.”

And it is the title I have asked to the people who made this film about me. “There is only

life.”

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I mean, the lines here read, “but it is Salmen Lewenthal,

the admirable Froissart of the Sonderkommando who, in his upright handwriting, best

answered the obscene question. ‘The truth is,’ he wrote, ‘is that you want to live at any

cost You want to live because you are alive, because the whole world is alive. There is

nothing but life. No my brothers you are not the cadets of the Saumur Cavalry School in

1940, defending the bridges of the Loire, prepared to die in the Hegelian manner for the

honor and the war of consciousness. No, you hated death and in its kingdom you have

sanctified life absolutely.’”

CLAUDE LANZMANN: It’s the kingdom of death.


PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You were talking a minute ago about the honesty that you

were striving towards. This book it’s a small question but you can give a big answer. This

book was dictated.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: You ask me why did I dictate this book?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yes, this book was dictated. I’m wondering what the

process of dictation versus the process of writing.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I will try—One has to make a—to give a topographical

explanation. I was not working like in a romantic film on dictating the thing nonstop, no,

no, it was not like this.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So tell me.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I was sitting at two place. Here was a table and on the table

there was a computer. Near the computer there was a second screen, larger, connected

with the computer and I was sitting here. And Juliette Simont, to whom I dictated the

book, was sitting there. We were sitting next to each other. Between the first page of this

book and the second one, one year passed, (laughter) one year elapsed, because I was not

in a hurry to—(laughter) and I hesitated, I would not—


PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No, because one is struck in the book by various moments

where you say, “but I am discovering something new, I digress.”

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I try to explain you. I had other things to do to deal with my

films, with the Les Temps Modernes, I am the director of this magazine, created by Jean-

Paul Sartre and life, simply life, requires time, for me anyhow. There is a very simple fact

to live and the requisites of life for me takes me a lot of time, and I think it is worthwhile.

Okay, but she was very patient, because sometimes I stopped for one minute, two

minutes, one hour, six hours, or several days.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And she was still sitting there.

(laughter)

CLAUDE LANZMANN: In order to go on, in order to go on, I have to be sure that it is

perfect. I have to have my back against the wall of the perfection.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: We’ll come back to that later, but I think this image of

being patient and having one’s back on the wall is something that we might talk about

when we talk about your methods in Shoah. It’s very interesting.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Don’t be too intelligent.


(laughter)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Well—Okay, let’s talk for a moment.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I did not finish to explain you why I dictated this book.

(laughter) I didn’t make a plan, you know, I did not know where I was going.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You did not.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: There are many things in this book I did not know that I

would integrate them in the book. Things which are very personal, and very private, but

the more I was writing, or dictating, it is exactly the same for me, I dictated many things

during my life. There is another book of me which was just released in France, a book of

articles I wrote or I dictated during my life. It was nothing new for me to dictate, but I

did. I don’t work like this. I am sitting on the seat. I was offered, I never learned to type,

you know, and I was offered a computer after Shoah and I discovered the marvelous

possibilities of this tool and what was important for me is to see immediately my

thoughts inscribed on the screen, objectively. I was very often fed up with my own

handwriting and there is a sentence of Jean-Paul Sartre.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: He talks about the stickiness.


CLAUDE LANZMANN: My handwriting, when I am anguished, like now, when I

anguished, or when I am in fear, which happens very often, or when I am tense or tired,

my handwriting changes. Sartre wrote this about himself, that he was disgusted with his

own handwriting, which was really very beautiful he says in French, gluante de tous mes

sucs translate me this please—

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I invoked the notion of stickiness. Yeah, it’s more or less

that.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: It was beautiful for me to see what I dictated immediately

printed like in a book but I was—since I did not learn to type I was using the computer in

a too slow manner. I had the objectivation of my thoughts but I lost momentum because I

would like a cop in the former—the first time they type with one finger. Today they

master completely the computer, the people of the police, they learned it. It is a reason

why Juliette Simont, she give me her hands, her fingers, and she has a wonderful

presence. Inspiring. It was the more I wrote, or the more I dictated, as you wish. I prefer

to say I wrote, because it is the same, the more I had pleasure to write this book and I

decided that many things which I didn’t plan to integrate should be in the book.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Maybe it’s natural for me to ask you to give me one

example of something that came about that you didn’t—

CLAUDE LANZMANN: The death of my sister, for instance, the suicide of my sister.


PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Évelyne.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: It was a very difficult chapter because I was obliged to tell her

life. She committed suicide at the age of thirty-six, to gather all this and to write a

complete chapter only about my sister, her life and her death, I didn’t foresee this, but I

was pushed to do it.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Did you foresee writing about the discovery you made

about your father?

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Which discovery?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The discovery that he too was in the La Résistance?

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Yes, but I think it was absolutely important to relate this.

Maybe I did not foresee but it was sure that I would have to write about this. It’s very

important.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: At one moment in the book you talk about your

relationship with your father and you talk about not betraying your father and you have a

line which is quite extraordinary from Camus where you say, “Like Albert Camus who

condemned the blind terrorism of which his mother might have been a victim during the


war in Algeria saying, ‘I believe in justice and I will defend my mother before justice.’ I

too instinctively chose my loyalty to my father over my loyalty to the Party, which

refused to keep its words.”

CLAUDE LANZMANN: The party that you said is the Communist Party.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: How were they about to betray him?

CLAUDE LANZMANN: How?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Were they about to betray him?

CLAUDE LANZMANN: If I were to obey to the Communist Party to the orders they

gave me, it would have been a real betrayal of my father, because there was an agreement

between the two resistance movements, between the communists and between the

organization of my father, the Gaullist one, and there was a real deal, a real agreement I

was almost decorated by the Communist Party they were so happy. They had a real

problem, the problem of the communists during the war was to get weapons and there

was only way for them to get weapons it was to take the weapons from the enemy to kill

Germans and I wrote—

I don’t know if it’s fair for me to talk about this now, but I know that Richard Brody is

not far from here, and I thank you for your beautiful article in the New Yorker, but you


made just a mistake, (laughter) and it is not your fault, you made a thousand

compliments to the translator but it is a mistake because the translator of this book is not

Mr. Frank Wynne. I had to revise line after line his translation because it was full of

horrible mistakes and you will see why I talk about this. The British publisher of this

book, it is the same translation, but the British publisher acknowledged in black and

white in the second page of the credits of the book that I was the one who revised the

book last summer for three months line after line. This Mr. Frank Wynne has no literary

knowledge and no historical knowledge, which is even more grave, and I come back to

my—but it’s not your fault, Mr. Brody, (laughter) because now the translation is good.

(laughter)

Although I tell you why I said, I write in the book that the communists were excluded, or

the parachuters of weapons given to the French resistance by the Allied forces, by the

British and the Americans, and that these weapons were given only to the Gaullist

resistance, General de Gaulle, Mr. Frank Wynne, before the revision by me, Mr. Frank

Wynne translated in the following way, the communists were excluded of the parachuters

and so on, which were given only to the French resistance, as if the communists were not

French, you know, and it is terrible because the last seventy years are a tsunami, I mean

the fall of the communism, of the Soviet Union, and so on, of the Berlin Wall, these

people know nothing anymore, it has been the core of our life, and it is a very small

example. And Farrar, Straus and Giroux promise me to acknowledge if there is another

edition of this book, to acknowledge the revision have been made by me.


PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: To come back to your father, he prepared you at every

given moment for the—

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Yes, he was a very pessimist man and he was sure that the

worst—was sure it would arrive.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: This is a question I have been wondering is—how early on

did you find out about the camps?

CLAUDE LANZMANN: If you want the most honest answer?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I do.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Truly, truly when I started my work on Shoah. Before I had

just a result, an abstraction, six million died, but it is nothing, just a figure and yes it is a

—the honest answer. The Jews think because they are Jews that they the inner knowledge

already, but it is not true at all, one has to work, and Shoah to make sure it was really

work.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So to come back once back to your father, your father was

pessimistic and knew that the Shoah was coming. What did he—


CLAUDE LANZMANN: He did not know the Shoah was coming, because it would be

impossible to foresee such a horror, but he knew that it would be horrible, surely. The

first day of the defeat of France when there was a famous speech of the Marshal Pétain

saying that he had asked for cease-fire to the Germans I was not very old, I was—it was

in 1940, I was—how old was I?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Fifteen.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Already, yes?

(laughter)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Maybe fourteen.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: More fourteen than fifteen years, because I was born very late

in ’25 year. (laughter) Somebody gave me a dog, a beautiful small dog, Danish, and I

loved him very much. He was three months old and my father having heard the speech of

the Marshal Pétain took me aside and told me, “We cannot keep your dog.” I said,

“Why?” He told me, “We have to—starting now we have to live unseen, we cannot be

seen, and your dog would become a very remarkable dog, very beautiful, very high,” and

I started to scream, to refuse, but, okay, he gave the dog to a veterinarian, who was

probably drunk, I don’t know, but he killed the dog. It was a moment all the animals have

to get an injection to survive, to live, he made a mistake, but maybe my father told him to


kill the dog because the dog would grow up very high and they need a lot of meat, these

dogs, and he thought that this would be very difficult, maybe, I don’t know.

But this question, you know, the Jews even at the door of the gas chamber, that we have

many things like this in Shoah. They refused to, even if the evidence was in front of their

eyes, they refused. And Filip Müller, who is one of the main protagonists of Shoah, says

this beautiful sentence. “Who wants to live is condemned to hope.” At the very doors of

the gas chamber when the Germans told the Jews to undress, “We will clean you,” clean

and not kill, the Jews believed it. Two forces in general was—it was impossible. You,

your question. When did you know? I knew when I started to work.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: In your adolescence, early adult life, one book had an

incredible power over you. Les Réflexions sur la question juive, and you talk about it

quite early in the book, you say, “with every line,” a book published in 1946, “with every

line I felt alive again, or to be more precise, I felt that I had been given permission to live.

Later I came to the description of what Sartre calls the Jewish inauthenticity and in it I

suddenly found a portrait perfectly depicting myself.”

CLAUDE LANZMANN: It’s true there are two things which remain unequaled in this

book. It is a portrayal of the anti-Semite written by Sartre. It’s wonderful. It has not even

today one wrinkle. The portrayal of the anti-Semitic passion, because it is a passion.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Passion?


CLAUDE LANZMANN: Passion. The passion anti-Semite. And a description of what

he calls the inauthentic behavior of the Jews. Many Jews are like this. I was like this.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: How so?

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Because I was child, conformist, like most of the children.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Embarrassed by going shopping for shoes with your

mother.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: This is the epitome, the absolute paradigmatic example of

inauthentic behavior. I didn’t see my mother for—because my parents were separated, I

didn’t see my mother for between 1938 and 1943 when I made a trip to Paris with false

papers, with a false identity. I was four years without seeing my mother. And she spent

the war, the whole war, in Paris with false papers, false identity card, even a special paper

in order to be able to eat, to buy food in the shops, okay, but she was fearless. She looked

extremely Jewish. Golda Meir, compared to my mother, is a pure blond Aryan (laughter)

and she stuttered, too, she stuttered because when she came to France at the age of three

months, her parents put a pillow on her to forbid her to scream passing the frontier

secretly and she stuttered all her life except when she was angry. Why do I tell you all

this?


PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The inauthentic inner feeling. I was just evoking that

moment you described—

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I arrived from Provence, from the mountains of Provence,

with wooden shoes, everybody had wooden shoes, but my wooden shoes were very ugly,

very provincial and she decided that I should wear beautiful, not wooden shoes, and she

took me in a big shop which was a Jewish before the war, which had been Aryanized and

she like me—Antonin talked very well about this, she could not choose, I could not

choose, to choose is to kill, and it is the reason why I make such long films (laughter)

probably and she asked for to the seller, “Okay, show me a pair of shoes for my son,” one

pair, two pairs, three pairs, four pairs, there was a mountain of boxes of shoes, and she

was unable to choose and people started to gather around us with mean faces, and I

thought we would be caught, we would be caught. She was completely unconscious.

Okay, I did not betray my father, but I escaped my mother, because I was full of fear. I

ran, I left her alone with the mountains of shoes. Nothing to be proud of.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You were also worried by her looks, by the way she

looked.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: She was a beauty. She was very beautiful. Now I have

pictures of her in my home in Paris and I see how beautiful she was but she had a Jewish

type and I was an inauthentic Jew and full of fear.


PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You recount in your book the period of Saint Germain and

the life you were living at that moment and the kinds of writers and intellectuals you were

meeting. Of course we’ll come to Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, but there

were others. There was Francis Ponge, there was Éluard. There were all kinds of writers

and when you look back retrospectively now many years back and you look at that period

which in our mind is now extremely—I mean, it’s iconic, in our mind it’s iconic, it’s

something that we can—iconic—who emerges from those writers that is important to

you, leaving aside Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir?

CLAUDE LANZMANN: There were great poets. Éluard was a great poet. Aragon, too.

Francis Ponge, too, Jean Cocteau. My mother was in love with the feet of Cocteau

because they were very smooth (laughter) and she found that my own feet were ugly and

stupid. She was a strange woman. But she was very strong, she was a genius, she was

very courageous, she was held three times in front of the Gestapo. There were pictures of

Hermann Goering on the wall, she said to the Gestapo, “look at your Goering, he looks

more Jewish than me.”

(laughter)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: During that same period one of your main occupations was

stealing books.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Was—


PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Stealing books. But you enjoyed stealing books and certain

books in particular—

CLAUDE LANZMANN: It’s complicated.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Not enjoyed, but Jean Hippolyte, for instance. It struck me

that you should steal a book which was a commentary on Hegel.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: It is complex. It is complicated.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Maybe I shouldn’t have said you enjoyed stealing books,

but in the memoir you do write about—

CLAUDE LANZMANN: To steal books of philosophy, very difficult books. Not

exactly the usual stealing. It was a fashion. It was because we read Sartre at this time. We

all admired Sartre very much, the Les chemins de la liberté, the passways of freedom, and

in Les chemins de la liberté there are people who steal books, and it was a way to testify

our admiration for Sartre, but I became a very good stealer, a book stealer.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Thief.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I stole even books with several volumes.


(laughter)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And you sometimes went to meet the writers of the books.

In the case of Hippolyte he wrote you a letter.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Hippolyte, Jean Hippolyte was a famous philosopher, a

disciple of Jean-Paul Sartre at École Supérieure, and he was a specialist of Hegel. Of

course we admired very much Hegel because he was a great philosopher in spite of the

fact that he was German. But many great philosophers were German, which is the reason

I went to Germany two years after the end of the war. Germany, it is strange to say but it

is the truth, remains the home, the patrie, the Heimat of philosophy.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The homeland.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Even today when I go to Berlin, this is a city I like very much.

There is a very small and charming cemetery in the middle of Berlin and in this cemetery

you have the tomb of Hegel, of Frau Hegel, Madame Hegel, and the tomb of another

great German philosophers, I goes there sometimes, the cemetery is beautiful and it’s a

way to pay tribute to philosophy. But I go also along the Landwehr Canal where the body

of Rosa Luxemburg after she had been assassinated by the Nazi, was thrown, her corpse.

This I go almost every time.


PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: When you went to Berlin, you went to teach a class.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I was a lecturer at the Frei Universitat at Berlin.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You taught a class on Jean-Paul Sartre and Stendhal.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Pardon?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You taught a class on Jean-Paul Sartre and Stendhal.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Yes, absolutely.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: How did these two figures find themselves together?

CLAUDE LANZMANN: It would be difficult to explain. Being and Nothingness,

France’s first great book of philosophy written by by Jean-Paul Sartre, which appeared in

1943, as a matter of fact. There’s a description of what he called le mauvais foi.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Bad faith.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Bad faith. How, for instance, how a man succeeds to seduce a

woman. He wants to make love with her but for this he climbs towards a spirituality, the

sky. Other if you read the Le Rouge et le Noir.


PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The red and the black, the red and the scarlet.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: For Stendhal the real question is how de Rênal and Julian

Sorel, everything separate, how they come together, I made a mixture of Sartre and

Stendhal, very croyant, I was—my students liked it very much. The students, the men

were all older than me, because they came back from the war, prisoner camps, did not go

at the normal age, but I paid my German taxes even the church tax, Kirchensteuer, I was

very proud of this.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Some years later you went for your first trip to Israel and

you met Ben-Gurion and in Israel the seeds of Shoah formed themselves.


PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The seeds of Shoah formed themselves. You were told by a

state official that you should make a film on the Shoah.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Yes, but it was not in 1952. It was much later, after I made my

first film, Pourquoi Israël, Israel: Why? In 1948 I was not in Israel, I was in Berlin

during the blockade of Berlin, during the airlift, and I was fascinated by these planes, the

Flying Fortress and it’s much later that I, oh yes, I forget to say that in 1952 when I went

to Israel for the first time I discovered because there is one thing which is false, not true


in the Réflexions sur la question juive of Sartre, two things are very bright—the portrayal

of the anti-Semite and the description of the inauthentic behaviors of the Jews but one

thing is false. He said that the Jews are a creation of the anti-Semite. If there would not be

anti-Semite, there would be not be Jews. I discovered when I went to Israel that this was

false. I discovered that there was a Jewish people.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And Sartre was very welcoming of—

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Yes, because he was open. One could talk—

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And you went on trips with him to Israel.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Much later. Much later.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But Sartre was very interested in your trips to Israel, and

actually in your disproving him, and you telling him that he was wrong.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Yes, I told him, and he admitted.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And after you did why Israel and you went back again to

Israel in I think 1973, you met Gershom Sholem, you met this state official, and that is

where the seed of Shoah happened.


CLAUDE LANZMANN: Yes. Yes. Shoah is a work of command.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Ordered.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I did not decide to cope with this subject. I was asked by an

Israeli friend, very important.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Alouph Hareven, Director-General of the Israeli Ministry

of Foreign Affairs. He suggested to you that you make a film on Shoah. He said a film

that is Shoah. But you then came up with the name of Shoah, you came up with the word

and gave the Holocaust another name.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Yes, I worked twelve years to make Shoah, day after day. It

was really a war. Every film is a war, but Shoah was a total war in every respect. Could

you repeat me your question?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I’m not sure what the question was.

(laughter)

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Your question.


PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I don’t remember where I left it off. You were saying it

was an oeuvre d’ command, you worked on it for twelve years. Now I’m stopped by you.

Shoah. You say that this film differs from all others because it will focus on what was

missing. The gas chambers, death in the gas chambers, from which no one has returned.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Excuse me. You are too fast. When I was proposed to do this

film.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You did not know.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I did not know. I had to find my subject, the core of the film,

and it was not so easy to find. I remember reading books on books on books on the

archives written archives but on the trying to make shots and so on it was maybe useful

but a little bit stupid and I found my subject after almost two years of work and my

subject I discovered that Shoah should not be a film about survivors. It is by no means a

film about survivors. It is a film about death, about the radicality of death in the gas

chambers and when I was I convinced myself about this of course it gave me the keys to

make the film, this doesn’t mean that it was easy. It was not easy at all, but it is the

reason why I decided there should be Germans in the film, there should be perpetrators

and killers, in spite of all the difficulties, the dangers it represented but this is what is the

film about because in the era of the Shoah the difference between the concentration camp

and an extermination camp, they are not the same everybody makes the confusion, but

the survivors don’t like me very much and don’t like they hate very often Shoah, because


they are not inside Shoah, Shoah is not a film about survivors, it is a film about death,

and the Jewish protagonists of Shoah they are all members of the Sonderkommando I

choose them because they could testify for the last moments of the Jewish people. They

never say “I,” they never explain how they succeeded to escape, not to survive, they are

not survivors, I call them in French revenant, they are like ghosts, they come from the

threshold of the crematorium, or even of the gas chamber, and they were interested only

in the fate of the people as a whole, not about their own story, and I was not interested in

myself.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I want us to look at clip number 2 if we could.

(clip from Shoah plays)

CLAUDE LANZMANN: It was difficult to shoot. It was so cold the camera was frozen.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: There is a line by Shoshana Feldman where she says,

“Shoah is a film made exclusively of testimonies. It conducts its interviews and takes its

pictures in the present. Rather than a simple view about the past, the film offers a

disorienting vision of the present, a compelling, profound, and surprising insight into the

complexity of the relation between history and witnessing.”

CLAUDE LANZMANN: She wrote a beautiful piece. Which I translated myself in

France. Advantage is it was a better translation than Frank Wynne.


PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: This relationship between witnessing and history.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: There are no corpses in Shoah, there is not one single corpse.

Why? Because there were no corpses in the extermination camps. People who died were

burned immediately and their ashes thrown into lakes, river, wind. Shoah is not—I wrote

to Mr. Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, he says that this never existed, it is a creation

of the Jews or of the Zionists, and I told him if you want to see Shoah as a proof that the

extermination actually took place, you are very wrong. Shoah is by no means a proof.

There are no corpses. Many people want corpses, you know, but precisely it is the lack of

corpses which is the truth.

You have in the cemeteries in France, for instance, still you have many tombs completely

empty with a picture on the tomb of a woman, man, or even a child who is written a

legend or mention, “killed in Auschwitz in 1942” or “1943” but there are no corpses,

there are no bones, nothing. I don’t know if it is—if I answer to your question about

relationship between history and witnessing, but it has always been the case, no?

Everybody today says, “Ah, what will happen when the last witness are dying,

disappearing?” But they are not witnesses, excuse me, there is no one single witness of

happened in the gas chamber, nobody returned alive from a gas chamber.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yet one of the ways in which you manage to tell the story

is through some witnesses in the present time who reenact. I know one of the passages in


Shoah that is most meaningful to you is the barber and you have him quite painfully, I

would like us to see it, I’m sure many people have seen it, but you very painfully have

him reenact his moment.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Because you have to imagine how difficult it is for such a

man, for such a people, to relate in front of a camera, in front of a cinema team, what they

went through, what they did, cutting the hair of the Jewish women inside the gas

chamber. It is horrible, it is one of the reasons I discovered during my work, that for the

Jews, the Jewish protagonists of the film, I had to know as much as possible before

shooting in order to be able to help them, and Bomba, the barber of Treblinka, was more

and more anxious when the time that when he should relate this horrible story

approached, and I was myself very anxious, too.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And yet you push him, you push him to the wall, you push

him as far—

CLAUDE LANZMANN: First of all, excuse me, first of all, I had suddenly the idea to

film this in a hairdressing salon. Why? Because he could make the gesture. Of course it

couldn’t be a hairdressing salon for a woman, it would have been absolutely obscene. Try

to imagine this. There were always during the making of Shoah ethical questions which

were at the same moment aesthetical, no difference, and I propose him my idea and he

liked it, okay? He found himself the hairdressing salon. He was not a barber anymore. He

was retired, but he had still the yellow dress, he was a barber in Grand Central Station


before going to Israel, in the underground of Grand Central Station here in New York,

and when he starts to talk there are several moments, it’s a very complicated, very

complex scene, he started to talk in a completely neutral voice, objective voice, as though

it did not happen to him, and he tries to escape every question related to him, and I had to

stop him, and tell him, no, it didn’t go like this and there is a certain moment in the scene

where he answers to my question what did he feel when he saw arriving at the gas

chamber, waiting the woman with sixteen other barbers, when he saw they were arriving

naked completely with the children, how he has a beautiful answer, he had a feeling

living living their own life with such a—among corpses, your feeling disappeared, you

were dead with the feeling, and it is at this very moment that he breaks, suddenly the

feelings come back full force.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let’s look at clip three if we could.

(clip from Shoah plays)

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I am his brother. And he knew it. I don’t torture him. Not at

all. It is not a sadistic scene. He wanted to.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: By saying this you are answering your critics.



PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: By saying what you just said you are answering your

critics. Some critics have felt that in these moments you pushed people too much.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: There are stupid people, yes. (laughter) A lot of them. I

didn’t push. I didn’t push. He was very grateful to me after this, this very day and when

the film was released I saw him several times. He was a great man. I admired him very

much. But it was as Marcel Ophüls said, as you cannot make a film like Shoah and

respect the rules of fairness of the cricket player of Eton. It’s a different world.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: When you say—in closing, when you say that he was your

brother, one of the concepts that comes up towards the end of your autobiography is the

notion of incarnation.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: It is incarnation. The tears of Bomba are incarnation, the tears

of Bomba is the seal of truth. They are more precious than blood. Shoah is an experience,

it is a real incarnation, not only him but also—

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What does that mean?

CLAUDE LANZMANN: What?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What does that mean?


CLAUDE LANZMANN: Incarnation, this means it is the only possible resurrection.

You cannot see this without—

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You espouse, you fill.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Yes, you—it is a problem for you that it is an incarnation?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No, it’s not a problem at all. I want to understand better.

Because you have been asked and you have said, “Shoah in one word is about

incarnation.”

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Yes. What do you want that I add? It’s very clear, no? When I

say to you it is the scene of truth, saying he’s not a man who is retired telling a souvenir.

It’s much stronger than any souvenir. Souvenir are completely weak. It is not souvenir.

He relives.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But you put them in that situation of reliving.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Yes, but he agreed to this. Don’t forget that I spent two days

and one night with him two or three years before the actual shooting in the mountains,

upstate New York. I had no camera, no tape recorder, only a pen, and I listened at him for

two days and one night and I asked him if he would agree to appear in this film, he said,


“yes,” I told him, “I cannot tell you when. I am not even sure that the film will ever

exist,” and I lost him because I—

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Time went by.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: When I shot with him he was living in Israel not any more in

United States.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You tracked him down.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I had to, yes. But I wanted—I knew in advance, learned these

two days as much as possible of him, but I didn’t foresee the tears. This came because of

the camera, because I was actually shooting, it was very important for the incarnation and

with this camera I had to reload every eleven minutes, completed that scene. And I felt

during the shooting that something was—attention was climbing, I thought that

something could happen. I did not know what, when, and I was not sure. But there was a

reason. I looked there in the camera, there is a counter, how do you say a counter.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: A timer?

CLAUDE LANZMANN: A counter, like one can read how many meters of film remain,

virgin film and remained five or six minutes, I can’t remember exactly, in one way it is

much, but I obeyed to an intuition, I said to my cameraman, coupe, we cut and we reload


immediately—we put a new film, eleven minutes on the—he broke at the very moment

when there wouldn’t remain film in the camera if I had not obeyed to my intuition and

changed it. I could not have asked him, “please, cry again.” (laughter) This is what is

incarnation. This is not theater, so.

(applause)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The title of the book. To end with the title of the book is

another form of incarnation.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: It is what?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The title of the book is another form of incarnation.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: It is incarnation. Incarnation is my only problem. (laughter)

Is the world a décor or not? When you are in a very fast time, the world is a décor, you

don’t see anything, okay, but incarnation happens in this book in several moments and it

happened in Shoah most of the time, and when I was in Patagonia I would talk to myself,

I was alone in Patagonia, I was seventeen, in the far south of Argentina and I rented a car

and I started to drive northwest, towards the border of Chile. I wanted to see the glacier,

the beautiful glacier. There was a beautiful immense sky and I was talking to myself, this

happens rather often in my life, I talk to me. I was telling to me, “Please, you are in

Patagonia, you should explode with joy.” I was happy to be in Patagonia but I did not


explode. Patagonia remained a décor. I saw even llamas, lots of fur, you know, saw it’s

really Patagonia, okay, Patagonia remained décor, and at the very end of the day when I

left the main road, the asphalt road, for I had say ninety kilometers to drive on a very bad

road, on a piste, and suddenly I saw a hare crossing in front of my headlights, and I did

everything I could not to kill this hare and I succeeded, I did not kill him, but my heart

exploded. I was suddenly in Patagonia. And I says this in the book: Patagonia and me and

I, we were truly together. This is what is incarnation.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Thank you very much.

(applause)


Documents

Lanzmann - Shoah and My Life. a Conversation With Paul Holdengräber (NYPL, 2012.03.21) Transcript