The late Claude Lanzmann, director of the monumental Shoah – the nine-and-a-half hour documentary about the Holocaust, released in 1985 and widely considered the greatest cinematic work on the subject – would have turned 100 this week, a destiny he missed by only eight years, dying in 2018. What would the filmmaker – who devoted almost a decade to his masterpiece, nearly obliterating himself in the process – make of Europe in 2025, a place where idealistic crowds of the young march for Israel’s annihilation, where the words ‘Dirty Jew’ are spray-painted on Parisian walls, and where, in the first six months of 2025, there were a registered 646 anti-Semitic acts in his native France alone?
The war years, Lanzmann said, ‘had been heavy, the fear, the perilous balance between life and death. The new freedom opening up before me required, like proofs of its existence, gratuitous acts.’
The passing of Lanzmann’s generation – along with the rapidly dwindling number of concentration camp survivors – is surely key to this. Lanzmann, a French Jew, whose parents had fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe, knew the reality of antisemitism in his DNA. As a teenager during the war he saw almost the entire Jewish population of his adopted town of Brioude rounded up and deported in a single day: ‘Suddenly, they were no longer there; it was an extraordinary shock, an abrupt, incomprehensible absence…’
He moved from one place to another, carrying false papers ‘without the obligatory and ignominious stamp – JEW – in red letters on our identity cards.’ His father, finding a house for the family, specially oiled the doors so that no one could overhear them moving about inside. He created a hidden shelter at the bottom of the garden, regularly timing his sons’ flight to it and looking for slip-ups they made on practice-runs: ‘You were talking, I heard you, they would have found you.’ A beloved family dog, a Great Dane, had to be given up as well: ‘From now on,’ his father told him, ‘We have to be as grey as that wall…In a few months, your dog will draw attention to us all.’
‘Greyness’ was not Lanzmann’s speciality; he was a lifelong daredevil, who seemed to shy away from nothing – ‘The question of courage and cowardice,’ he wrote, is ‘the thread that runs through my life.’ As a teenager, he joined the Jeunesses communistes and the French Resistance, gun-running, distributing anti-Nazi leaflets and taking part in near-suicidal ambushes on German convoys. Narrowly avoiding arrest by the Gestapo, he was also condemned to death by the French communists for disobeying orders – a fate he only escaped when, after the war, he presented himself at their offices and demanded, to their embarrassment, they carry out the sentence. All this Lanzmann had seen before the age of twenty, something today’s bright-eyed, keffiyeh-wearing young, drunk on banner-waving righteousness, might take (sobering) time out to ponder.
Nearly everyone has heard of Shoah, but what do people know of Lanzmann? To read his autobiography The Patagonian Hare (a classic of the genre) is to explore a near-compendium of post-war French cultural life. The war years, Lanzmann said, ‘had been heavy, the fear, the perilous balance between life and death. The new freedom opening up before me required, like proofs of its existence, gratuitous acts.’
He clearly meant it – in the new peacetime Lanzmann womanised fanatically, stole books, and dressed himself up as a priest to beg for pocket-money. He hung out with poet Paul Éluard, had an audience with Jean Cocteau and, most importantly, had a long and deep friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre, to whose inner circle he was quickly admitted (the picture in the book of Sartre and Lanzmann in a Montparnasse cinema, weeping over David Lean’s Brief Encounter, is not easily forgotten). Lanzmann marvelled at Sartre’s ‘metallic, authoritative voice…this formidable thinking machine at work, the well-oiled gears and pistons revving until it was at full throttle,’ which left him ‘stunned with admiration.’ (Sartre’s post-war whitewashing of Stalinist brutality and the Gulag system, a quasi-Shoah of its own, is something Lanzmann – perhaps unforgivably – seems not to have dwelt on).
Sartre and his partner Simone de Beauvoir were the adopted family of Lanzmann’s adult life – ‘they helped me to think; I gave them food for thought’ – and an incestuous family at that. Soon Sartre was sleeping with Lanzmann’s sister, the actress Evelyn Rey (who later, devastatingly, committed suicide) while Lanzmann embarked, with Sartre’s full blessing, on an epic affair with de Beauvoir, of whom he wrote, long after its break-up, with warmth and loyalty: ‘Joy, in her, did not preclude seriousness; on the contrary, they melded into a rare attentiveness to the humanity of the other.’ She had a ‘unique and intensely moving way…of listening, serious, solemn, open, utterly trusting…transfigured by the act…as though her ability to focus on other people’s problems relieved her of her own fear.’ You don’t need to share the couple’s left-wing politics to find such passages affecting.
Outside the relationship, Lanzmann travelled hungrily: East Germany, North Korea, the Soviet Union, Algeria, whose fight for independence he ardently (and actively) supported. He was accident-prone but escaped death time and again – in a car accident, an attempted shooting, a dreadful, artery-severing encounter with a plate-glass door, in beatings by riot police and the family of an ex-Nazi who discovered Lanzmann was secretly filming him.
Alongside all these things ran a passionate, if fraught, love affair with the State of Israel, a loyalty which dated back to its beginnings and which Lanzmann never abandoned: ‘I declared that, after Auschwitz, the destruction of Israel was unthinkable and that, if by chance it should happen, I for one could not bear to go on living.’
It was his epic Pourquoi Israel – a penetrating, three-hour documentary on the land and its people – that brought him to the attention of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose representative Alouph Hareven pressed him to make a second work. There was no film about the Holocaust, Hareven said, which took ‘in what happened in all its magnitude…We believe that you are the only person who can make this film.’
Thus, Lanzmann began ‘the adventure of Shoah,’ his eight-year ‘ascetic retreat,’ which he regarded as the greatest challenge of his life:
‘I left that meeting stunned and shaking…weighing up the vastness of such a task, the insuperable obstacles, which seemed to me countless, terrified that I would never be equal to this incredible challenge. And yet something powerful, even violent, inside me urged me to accept…I spent a whole night, a night like Pascal’s nuit de feu, roaming through Paris. I steeled myself, telling myself that what was being offered was a unique opportunity, one that would require the greatest courage, and that it would be thankless and cowardly not to seize that opportunity with both hands.’
To read of its production in his book – the sleepless nights, the lies to secure funding, the hunt for survivors, the numerous anxieties and epiphanies (even semi-miracles) he has along the way – is to see the kind of manically self-sacrificing creativity which, in our own time, we seem to have forgotten how to recognise, far less value. The story of Shoah’s making, as recounted by its director, is as compelling (and instructive) as the film itself, and makes one return to it with renewed fascination.
Thus, Lanzmann began ‘the adventure of Shoah,’ his eight-year ‘ascetic retreat,’ which he regarded as the greatest challenge of his life
Claude Lanzmann has been gone seven years now – seven years containing some of the most awful events in the State of Israel’s history – but we still have his Everest of a documentary to remind us of the terrible paths mass-thinking, demagoguery or the abdication of the individual conscience can lead us down. Professor of medicine Didier Sicard called it, perversely, ‘the most beautiful film I have ever seen,’ a statement perhaps explained in part by Lanzmann’s own words here (on another film entirely): ‘Never have I been made so aware that humans are human only because they have the capacity to transform that which oppresses them into something of value, and to sacrifice themselves for it. It is the very essence of humanity, but could also be called tradition, or even more, culture.’
On the centenary of Lanzmann’s birth, the final word should go to his contemporary, the writer Jean Daniel. Following an early screening of Shoah, Daniel, shattered and emotional, made his way over to the director.
‘He shook my hand powerfully,’ wrote Lanzmann, ‘and with great eloquence said, “That justifies a life.”’
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