the homage of Ran Halévi to Claude Lanzmann

Ran Halevi is director of research at the CNRS and professor at Raymond Aron Political Research Center

Claude Lanzmann had an insatiable taste for life, which he said he loved "unreasonably", "madly", and more and more. But who had also haunted, since childhood, a fascination with death, more precisely with the way of dying: it had nothing morbid, however, neither abstract nor spiritual; it was factual, material, so to speak. With Shoah she would at times reach the ineffable. In this film with no antecedent, no equivalent, no imaginable posterity, Lanzmann has pushed the pursuit of facts to the limits of the possible; it goes straight to the heart of the design that the final solution was supposed to accomplish: the killing of a people. He had learned a lot about arrests, raids, deportations, the selection on arrival in the camps, "the atrocious routine of the concentration camp life", or on the job of surviving … But that's something else that it is brought little by little to want to detect, the most difficult to know since there was hardly any survivors to tell it: the "mode of operation" of the death in the gas chambers.

This impossible search the "how" is prompted by the absolute refusal to venture on the uncertain glacis of "why". Lanzmann holds for an "absolute obscenity", an academic frivolity, a "distraction", the project to understand the Holocaust, so to explain it. "Not to understand was my law of brbad in all the years of the elaboration and the realization of the Shoah." For him, the only way of access to the real supposes, even requires, that one abdicates all presumption of 'intelligibility. "Here there is no why": he quotes this rule of conduct sent by a guard S.S. to Primo Levi at the moment when it arrives at Auschwitz. For Primo Levi, as for Lanzmann, the facts alone serve as an explanation that abolishes any possibility of explanation.

With Shoah we are far from the "documentary" and at the antipodes of fiction, literary or cinematographic, which stages or even show special themes or "uplifting" individuals, such as the sadistic demiurge of Benevolent or the Nazi benefactor of the Jews of The list of Schindler . In both works, the victims represent necessary extras, "narrative supports", present-absent: their history only appears through the filter of another.

Shoah, on the contrary, has as its only subject these victims and for only one horizon the precise moment when they are removed from the community of the living. The film, in fact, seeks to deliver no message, to suggest any "morality" and no more to penetrate the psychological springs of good and evil. It goes straight to the very thing, at the heart of the process of extermination. The facts always, nothing but the facts. But, precisely, facts, there were hardly any visual traces.

to make up for the nonexistent images of the destruction of the Jews? How to reconstruct the machinery of annihilation? How to represent the ultimate moments of this human mbad crammed into the antechamber of death, naked, exhausted, lost? Then, when the doors of the gas chambers close, in the hermetic, suffocating black, the "atrocious struggles to gain some air and breathe a few more seconds"? The "miracle" of Shoah is to manage to "recreate" these images, finding the places – frozen landscapes, silent remains, ruined blocks, fugitive traces – and making some former SS speak and, above all, , the rare survivors of the "special commandos", who were there at the very last stage of the extermination, the only witnesses of this vast killing. The evocative power of these two "auxiliaries" – the places and the words – exceeds in intensity, and renders the best-composed works of fiction, the most adroitly interpreted roles, the most scrupulous re-enactments almost derisory, even crippling. 19659004] From one end to the other, the only heroes of Shoah are the dead whose shadows transcend the words of the living. Lanzmann himself discovers it little by little, as the film takes shape. And in the testimonies of the members of the Sonderkommandos, the only "ghosts" of hell, we almost never hear of "I", any more than in the silent gestures of the unforgettable Treblinka locomotive driver. Here, he will say, the living " fade away in front of the dead to make themselves the spokespersons "; and their testimonies, sober, chilling, poignant, give a fleeting life to these endless processions of ghosts. It happens, listening to these words, contemplating these inert places, that it comes imperceptibly to feel the feeling – to become aware – to participate by badociation of this story, which has certainly never lived, which will hold us always at a distance by an insurmountable barrier, but one feels, near or far, to be ours too. It connects, through time, the living and the dead in a community of destiny, and a memory heritage, where the past continues, nolens volens, to instruct the identity of its legatees.

Shoah is a work of history that constitutes a monument of memory; she puts one in the service of the other; it "historicizes" memory to make it a building where only the facts are still valid, again and again.