CLAUDE LANZMANN:

Shoah and My Life, a conversation with Paul Holdengrber

March 21, 2012
LIVE from the New York Public Library
www.nypl.org/live
Celeste Bartos Forum

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: Good evening. In case you didnt hear me, good evening.
My name is Paul Holdengrber, and Im 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 Im 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

independent bookstore, is here as every LIVE night. And, as you know, for the last two or
three years I havent 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 Lanzmanns seven words, he gave
them to me in French and Ill 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 Im going to ask Antonin Baudry, who is
Cultural Counselor, Im 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)

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But speaking of lions, we have here in this arena one of the fiercest lions on earth, Claude
Lanzmann. (applause) We all heard Claudes seven words. These are lions 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 wont say the exact number, because its not a multiple of seven, so Im 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. Claudes life is a fight against death and destiny. Everything he
accomplishes is difficult. He is a lion who never climbs the small hillshe 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 Claudes 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

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

Prousts Remembrance of Things Past is a biography. But both are much more. They are
literary monuments.

The second reason is Claudes 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 its not Claudes 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,

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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 doesnt 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. Thats 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.

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Paul, thanks to you Claude is here for the New Yorkers. Thank you, Paul. Please
welcome Paul Holdengrber and the author of The Patagonian Hare, Claude Lanzmann.
Thank you.

(applause)

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: Well, thank you very much, Antonin, for having said it all.
Look at me, that way you wont be blinded. You wont be blinded, we can bring them
down slightly. Claude Lanzmann, a great pleasure to have you here tonight. Lets start
with something thatAntonin mentioned many things which we will be talking about.
But lets 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. Id 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 Id 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 HOLDENGRBER: This is not, more generally. La pendaison, you know, there
is, I dont know if there is a picture of Hugo of the guillotine. There is a picture I was

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looking for of a head that is floating in air, but I couldnt 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. Its absolutely true, and it is not
very good, these are not very good conditions to have a deep discussion.

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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 wasMy 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 cannoteven now its
difficult for me toIf I see in a book or in a newspaper the image of a guillotine its
difficult for me to look, at this images sight, I have pain its difficult. The real question is
how death can be inflicted as a pain, as a punishment. How do you say capital
punishment. Its a question I have no real answer for this but I was haunted all my life by
this question.

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There is a beautiful story which has not much to do with me. But its 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 dont
know how this happened but thegenerally they had their hands tied in the back but not
this man, I dont know by which generosity or the grace, and he was reading a book, and
he didnt 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 chafaud 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 HOLDENGRBER: This storys extraordinary partly because it speaks of a

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Its a beautiful story.

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: It speaks of a future. But you know its, interestingly

enough.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Stop the Gestapo projector.

(laughter)

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PAUL HOLDENGRBER: Lets bring it down one degree if we could. Its 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
Condamn a text that Hugo wrote when he was twenty-nine years old, where he has the
main character, le condamn, the condemned man, write up to the moment that he comes
on the chafaud. 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 Id 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 HOLDENGRBER: 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 dont believe in this. Death is always

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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 HOLDENGRBER: 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 onsometimes it happens to me to think what I did because I took very
serious risks. I put myself really in danger. And but I didnt 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 didnt 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
didnt 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.

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10

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: Something to be ashamed of?

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Maybe its going a little bit too far, but why not? (laughter)
Why not? Ill accept that. Because this is a real test and I talk in this book about the socalledSartre liked very much this expression, the courage militaire, the military
courage, the people who killed immediately themselves. But it isyou are right, it is a
red thread in this book all along because this was ait 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 didnt they commit suicide?
Preferably.

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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

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11

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 HOLDENGRBER: 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: Its the kingdom of death.

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12

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: You were talking a minute ago about the honesty that you
were striving towards. This book its 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 HOLDENGRBER: Yes, this book was dictated. Im wondering what the
process of dictation versus the process of writing.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I will tryOne has to make ato 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 HOLDENGRBER: 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

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13

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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 JeanPaul 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 HOLDENGRBER: 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 HOLDENGRBER: Well come back to that later, but I think this image of
being patient and having ones back on the wall is something that we might talk about
when we talk about your methods in Shoah. Its very interesting.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Dont be too intelligent.

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14

(laughter)

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: WellOkay, lets talk for a moment.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I did not finish to explain you why I dictated this book.
(laughter) I didnt make a plan, you know, I did not know where I was going.

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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 dont 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 HOLDENGRBER: He talks about the stickiness.

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15

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 HOLDENGRBER: I invoked the notion of stickiness. Yeah, its more or less
that.

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

printed like in a book but I wassince 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 formerthe 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 didnt plan to integrate should be in the book.

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: Maybe its natural for me to ask you to give me one
example of something that came about that you didnt

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

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16

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: velyne.

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 didnt foresee this, but I
was pushed to do it.

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: Did you foresee writing about the discovery you made
about your father?

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Which discovery?

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: The discovery that he too was in the La Rsistance?

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. Its very
important.

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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

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17

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 HOLDENGRBER: How were they about to betray him?

CLAUDE LANZMANN: How?

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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 dont know if its 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

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18

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
mybut its 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.

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19

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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
worstwas sure it would arrive.

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: This is a question I have been wondering ishow early on

did you find out about the camps?

CLAUDE LANZMANN: If you want the most honest answer?

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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 HOLDENGRBER: So to come back once back to your father, your father was
pessimistic and knew that the Shoah was coming. What did he

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20

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 Ptain
saying that he had asked for cease-fire to the Germans I was not very old, I wasit was
in 1940, I washow old was I?

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: Fifteen.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Already, yes?

(laughter)

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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 Ptain took me aside and told me, We cannot keep your dog. I said,
Why? He told me, We have tostarting 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 dont 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

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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 dont 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 Mller, 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 wasit was impossible. You,
your question. When did you know? I knew when I started to work.

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: In your adolescence, early adult life, one book had an
incredible power over you. Les Rflexions 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: Its true there are two things which remain unequaled in this
book. It is a portrayal of the anti-Semite written by Sartre. Its wonderful. It has not even
today one wrinkle. The portrayal of the anti-Semitic passion, because it is a passion.

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: Passion?

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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 HOLDENGRBER: How so?

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

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: Embarrassed by going shopping for shoes with your

mother.

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

inauthentic behavior. I didnt see my mother forbecause my parents were separated, I
didnt 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?

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23

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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 meAntonin 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 HOLDENGRBER: 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.

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PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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 well come to Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, but there
were others. There was Francis Ponge, there was luard. 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 extremelyI mean, its iconic, in our mind its iconic, its
something that we caniconicwho emerges from those writers that is important to
you, leaving aside Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir?

CLAUDE LANZMANN: There were great poets. luard 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 HOLDENGRBER: During that same period one of your main occupations was
stealing books.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Was

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25

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: Stealing books. But you enjoyed stealing books and certain
books in particular

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Its complicated.

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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 HOLDENGRBER: Maybe I shouldnt 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 libert, the passways of freedom, and
in Les chemins de la libert 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 HOLDENGRBER: Thief.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I stole even books with several volumes.

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26

(laughter)

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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 cole Suprieure, 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 HOLDENGRBER: 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 its 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.

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27

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

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

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

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Pardon?

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

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Yes, absolutely.

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

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

Frances first great book of philosophy written by by Jean-Paul Sartre, which appeared in
1943, as a matter of fact. Theres a description of what he called le mauvais foi.

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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.

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28

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

CLAUDE LANZMANN: For Stendhal the real question is how de Rnal and Julian
Sorel, everything separate, how they come together, I made a mixture of Sartre and
Stendhal, very croyant, I wasmy 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 HOLDENGRBER: 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.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Pardon?

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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 Isral, 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 its 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

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29

in the Rflexions sur la question juive of Sartre, two things are very brightthe 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 HOLDENGRBER: And Sartre was very welcoming of

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

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

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Much later. Much later.

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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 HOLDENGRBER: 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.

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30

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

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: Ordered.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I did not decide to cope with this subject. I was asked by an
Israeli friend, very important.

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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 HOLDENGRBER: Im not sure what the question was.

(laughter)

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Your question.

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31

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: I dont remember where I left it off. You were saying it
was an oeuvre d command, you worked on it for twelve years. Now Im 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 HOLDENGRBER: 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 doesnt 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 dont like me very much and dont like they hate very often Shoah, because

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32

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 HOLDENGRBER: 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 HOLDENGRBER: 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.

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33

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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 notI 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 dont know if it isif 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 HOLDENGRBER: 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

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34

Shoah that is most meaningful to you is the barber and you have him quite painfully, I
would like us to see it, Im 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 HOLDENGRBER: 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
couldnt 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

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35

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, its 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 didnt 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 aamong 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 HOLDENGRBER: Lets look at clip three if we could.

(clip from Shoah plays)

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I am his brother. And he knew it. I dont torture him. Not at
all. It is not a sadistic scene. He wanted to.

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

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Pardon?

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PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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
didnt push. I didnt 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 Ophls said, as you cannot make a film like Shoah and
respect the rules of fairness of the cricket player of Eton. Its a different world.

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: When you sayin 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 HOLDENGRBER: What does that mean?

CLAUDE LANZMANN: What?

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: What does that mean?

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

You cannot see this without

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: You espouse, you fill.

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

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: No, its 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? Its very clear, no? When I
say to you it is the scene of truth, saying hes not a man who is retired telling a souvenir.
Its much stronger than any souvenir. Souvenir are completely weak. It is not souvenir.
He relives.

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

CLAUDE LANZMANN: Yes, but he agreed to this. Dont 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,

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38

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 HOLDENGRBER: Time went by.

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

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: You tracked him down.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: I had to, yes. But I wantedI knew in advance, learned these
two days as much as possible of him, but I didnt 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 wasattention 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 HOLDENGRBER: 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 cant 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

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39

immediatelywe put a new film, eleven minutes on thehe broke at the very moment
when there wouldnt 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 HOLDENGRBER: The title of the book. To end with the title of the book is
another form of incarnation.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: It is what?

PAUL HOLDENGRBER: 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 dcor or not? When you are in a very fast time, the world is a dcor, you
dont 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

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explode. Patagonia remained a dcor. I saw even llamas, lots of fur, you know, saw its
really Patagonia, okay, Patagonia remained dcor, 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 HOLDENGRBER: Thank you very much.

(applause)

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