Claude Lanzmann, Director of "Shoah", dies at the age of 92



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PARIS – French director Claude Lanzmann, whose "9 o'clock" Shoah masterpiece, gave a hearty testimony of the Holocaust through the testimonies of Jewish victims, German executioners and Polish pbaders-by, died at the age of 92 years. Gallimard, the publishing house of Lanzmann's autobiography, said he had died Thursday morning in a Paris hospital. The power of "Shoah", filmed in the 1970s during Lanzmann's travels in barren Polish landscapes where the slaughter of Jews was planned and executed, was to view the Holocaust as an event in the present rather than as history. It contained no archive footage, no musical score – just the landscape, the trains and the memories told.

Lanzmann was 59 years old when the film, his second, was released in 1985. He set the Holocaust for those who saw him and defined him as a filmmaker

"I knew the subject of the film would be the death itself rather than survival, "writes Lanzmann in the autobiography." For 12 years, I tried to watch relentlessly in the black sun of the Holocaust. "

" "Shoah" was almost unanimously hailed, Roger Ebert called it "one of the noblest movies ever made" and Time Out and The Guardian were among those ranking the greatest documentary of all time. The Polish government was a notable dissident, who rejected the film as "anti-Polish propaganda." (But later allowed "Shoah" to be broadcast in Poland.)

In 2013, nearly three decades later, Lanzmann revisited the Holocaust with "The Last of the Unjust", focusing on his interviews in 197 5 with a Viennese rabbi who was the last "elder" of the Theresienstadt ghetto, used by the Nazis to deceive visitors into believing that Jews were treated humanely. 19659002] His most recent film, "Napalm," in 2017, essentially told of his visit to North Korea in the late 1950s, including telling his unacknowledged adventure with a Red Cross nurse in the country

. 27, 1925, in Paris, the child of French Jews. After the departure of his mother in 1934 and the war broke out, Claude and his two brothers and sisters moved to a farm where their father was timing his children while they were training to take refuge in a shelter that had been abandoned. he had dug.

Lanzmann eventually joined the Resistance as a Communist. He became intellectually in love with Jean-Paul Sartre, whose "anti-Semite and Jew" formed the philosophical foundation of what was to become the work of his life.

Lanzmann joined Sartre's circle and had an affair with Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre's companion. who was 17 years older than the young acolyte. Lanzmann left for Israel and moved with Beauvoir on his return, from 1952 to 1959, according to "The Patagonia Hare", his autobiography. Sartre, Lanzmann's hero, has become a constant in their life together.

"So I was an opportunist -" about the brand "you say, but she was beautiful, my attraction to her was genuine," he once said to Beauvoir's biographer. the end of their affair, Beauvoir provided a large part of the financial aid to Shoah.

Lanzmann tinkered with politics and journalism, working periodically for the newspaper France Dimanche, baduming freelance missions. Sartre signing the Manifesto for the 121, calling the French soldiers to refuse the fights in Algeria, and was pursued.

In 1968, he made televised reports on the Israeli army in the Sinai Peninsula. : "Israel, Why."

Beauvoir, writing about Lanzmann in his memoir "Force of Circumstance," described him as someone who "seemed to carry the weight of an entire ancestral experience on his shoulders." [19659002] It was this weight that drove finally an intellectual vagabond to examine the defining event of 20th century Judaism, obsessively tracking those who were closest to the dead. "The film should take up the ultimate challenge of replacing the non-existent images of death in gas chambers," he writes

The film opens on Simon Srebnik, who, as a Jewish detainee of 13 years, sang for the SS and fed their rabbits at the Chelmno Concentration Camp.Becoming a soft voice to his survival, Srebnik performs the same songs for Lanzmann while he is paddled along the peaceful river that leads to Later, he revealed that Srebnik's task was to throw sacks full of Jews crushed in the same waters.

He filmed Abraham Bomba at work in a Tel Aviv hair salon, describing how he was cutting Women's hair in the Treblinka gas chambers With periodic questions from Lanzmann, Bomba tells how, after each group of women, the hairdressers were invited to leave for a few minutes, the women were gbaded and the men came back for cutting r the hair of dozens of naked women accompanied by their children.

"This room is the last place they came in alive and they will never come out alive again," he said. "We cut their hair to make them believe that they are going to get their hair cut." The barber begged to stop when he remembered seeing the woman and sister come in. 39, a friend, but Lanzmann encouraged him to continue

used secret cameras to record testimonials, including that of Franz Suchomel, a former guardian of Treblinka who was pointing as a teacher on a camp plan to show how the bodies were thrown out, describing new gas chambers that could "finish 3,000 people in two." At one point in the interview, Lanzmann promised Suchomel not to be registered.

One of the Lanzmann's most poignant interviews were also among the shortest of "Shoah" – Yitzhak Zuckerman, a leader of Jewish resistance in Warsaw, who survived Treblinka and saw countless friends and comrades die. He told Lanzmann bitterly, "If you could licking my heart would be poisonous. "

At the film's premiere, French journalist Jean Daniel told Lanzmann," This justifies a life. "

Third wife, Dominique, and her daughter Angelic. His son Felix died last year.

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