Death of Claude Lanzmann, director of 'Shoah'

Hazkarah Ceremony (2005) at the Shoah Memorial

Claude Lanzmann, filmmaker and journalist, born in 1925 in Bois-Colombes into a family of Jewish origin from Eastern Europe, leaves behind him many works, cinematographic and literary, but the greater part of his career, he will have devoted it to tell the hell of the Holocaust. This former decorated resistance fighter, friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, committed intellectual and defender of Israel, has never stopped working on the genocide of the Jews of Europe and the question of the duty to remember. His film Shoah, a succession of long interviews through which the Nazi crimes are evoked and for which he had received a César of Honor, was made without any archival images but only through staged testimonies. By replacing his witnesses in real-life situations, Claude Lanzmann had come as close as possible to a cruel truth.

« The truth is that there was no name for what I didn’t even dare to call ‘the event’. Around me and as in secret, I was saying 'the Thing'. It was a way of naming the unspeakable. How could there have been a name for what was absolutely unprecedented in the history of men? If I could not have named my film, I would have done it.”

Claude Lanzmann also claimed to be resistant and a fighter for the truth.  It is this truth that he has sought to embody in all his achievements, such as his films on Israel (Why Israel, 1973 and Tsahal, 1994) as well as in his reports. We will remember his article on the flight of the Dalai Lama from Tibet published in Elle in 1959, or his political commitment against colonialism and the death penalty during the Algerian war through the magazine Les temps modernes in 1960.

Claude Lanzmann and the Shoah Memorial

The "radical act of nomination" of the Shoah, as Claude Lanzmann said, was part of the evolution of the construction of the memory of the Shoah.  For this thesis, there was a before and an after Claude Lanzmann.

Simone Veil and Claude Lanzmann at the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr, during the commemorative ceremony of Hazkarah -22/09/1985 © Daniel Franck

Claude Lanzmann was particularly attached to the Shoah Memorial, which he considered "radically devoid of emphasis, as if the overwhelming evidence of the facts and the tribute paid imposed simplicity". He had also donated to the Shoah Memorial passages from his film Shoah, shown continuously in the permanent exhibition, including an interview with Franz Suchomel, a guard at the extermination camp of Treblinka. Similarly, the director liked the idea and the symbol of the Wall of Names, which welcomes visitors to the museum and along which they must necessarily pass again when leaving, because it allows for, according to him, "the individuation of these thousands of names."

Recently, Claude Lanzmann had to face the death of his son. Félix, 23, died on January 13, 2017, of cancer. He then confided: "Death is not a given. I am not for death at all. I always believe in life. I love life to death even if it is not often funny.

All our thoughts today go to his loved ones.

Speech by Claude Lanzmann for the Hazkarah ceremony (2005)

Read the speech (pdf)

Meeting at the Memorial: Claude Lanzmann and Serge Klarsfeld, fighters of memory (2015)

Claude Lanzmann and Jacques Fredj in front of the Memorial’s Wall of Names under construction (2006)

Meeting with Claude Lanzmann at the E.J.Safra auditorium of the Memorial (2015)

Jacques Fradj, Claude Lanzmann, Serge Klarsfeld and Serge Moati in the E.J.Safra auditorium of the Memorial (2015)

Speech by Claude Lanzmann at the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr, during the commemorative ceremony of Hazkarah, 22/09/1985