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 many works, both cinematographic and literary, but the greater part of his career will have been devoted to telling the hell of the Shoah. This former decorated resistant, friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, committed intellectual and defender of Israel, never stopped working on the genocide of European Jews and the question of the duty to remember. His film Shoah, a series of long interviews in which the crimes of the Nazis are discussed and for which he received an honorary César, was made without any archival images but only through staged testimonies. By placing his witnesses in real-life situations, Claude Lanzmann came 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'. Over here, as if in secret, I was saying 'the Thing'.» It was a way of naming the unnamable. How could there have been a name for what was absolutely unprecedented in human history? If I could not have named my film, I would have done it.”

Claude Lanzmann also claimed to be a resistant and fighter of 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 escape 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 put it, was part of the evolution of the construction of the memory of the Shoah.  For this memoir, 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 offered to the Shoah Memorial passages from his film Shoah, which were shown continuously in the permanent exhibition, including an interview with Franz Suchomel, a guard at the Treblinka extermination camp. 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 to have according to him "the individuation of these thousands of names".

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

All our thoughts are with his loved ones today.

Speech by Claude Lanzmann for the ceremony of the Hazkarah (2005)

Read the speech (pdf)

Meeting at the Memorial: Claude Lanzmann and Serge Klarsfeld, combattants de la mémoire (2015)

Claude Lanzmann and Jacques Fredj in front of the Wall of Names of the Memorial 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