Lest we forget | 17 March 2012

It was not possible, as Primo Levi memorably wrote, to convey the full horror of the Nazi extermination camps because no one had survived to describe death in the gas chambers. There were no ‘sommersi’ (drowned) left alive to speak for the men, women and children driven in naked to die.  Apart from Levi himself, one of the very few people to have got close is Claude Lanzmann, whose nine-and-a-half-hour film on the deaths camps, Shoah, transformed the way successive postwar generations have come to remember and perceive the Nazi killings. In his autobiography, The Patagonian Hare, Lanzmann provides much interesting material on the 13 years spent filming and editing, and on the life that first led him to Israel in the 1950s.

The Patagonian Hare — the title taken from the surge of pleasure he felt when observing a hare leap like an arrow across the road while he was driving over the Patagonian plain — is not an easy book. Not least, perhaps, because Lanzmann chose to dictate rather than write it, saying that he found his own handwriting illegible and typing too laborious. The result is an overly long ramble, with much switching backwards and forwards in time and place, around the literary and political highlights of the 20th century.

Yet there is much to admire. Lanzmann’s parents were Jewish, and they had separated not long before the second world war. After the German occupation of France, he stayed on with his father in the Auvergne, collecting revolvers and grenades with other young resisters, before seeing active service in the Ardennes. Courage and cowardice are themes that run through the book, along with suicide, his much loved actress sister having killed herself in her early thirties.