France pays tribute to the director of the Holocaust, Claude Lanzmann

France on Thursday paid a national tribute to venerated filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, whose nine-hour documentary "Shoah" is considered the best of the Holocaust.

The director and writer, who died last week at the age of 92, hiding from the Nazis with his Jewish family in central France during the Second World War, then let them join the Resistance at 17 years.

Prime Minister Edouard Philippe conducted the funeral at the solemn ceremony at the Invalides, with Lanzmann's coffin draped in the French tricolor flag worn in the courtyard by a military guard.

"You have brought into existence those who no longer do," says Philippe of his cinematographic masterpiece that reconstructs the six million Jews massacre through the heartrending testimonies of the survivors.

"" Shoah "is a unique work on a single crime, it's a cry of defiance and a refusal to forget," added the Prime Minister

. The secret film concentration camp guards spoke of their role in the killing and were beaten by a group of thugs after his cover was bled while filming a former Nazi officer.

– [L'Orphée de l'Holocauste] – [19659008] Philip says that Lanzmann, a communist in his youth, had learned from his comrades his remarkable courage and sense of sacrifice during the war.

His first act of resistance as a Jewish schoolboy in occupied France was to refuse to write an essay to the glory of his collaborationist leader Marshal Pétain. He later fled to the hills to trap German patrols.

The philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy compared him to Orpheus in his speech, the mythical poet who returns from the land of the dead, working tirelessly to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust.

He described Lanzmann as a "committed intellectual and quarrelsome" as fearless in his life as a young member of the Resistance.

"I am completely against death," Lanzmann told AFP shortly after the death of his only son, Felix, at the age of 23.

The director was buried next to him in the family grave of Montparnasse. cemetery in Paris. His former lover, the feminist writer and thinker Simone de Beauvoir, is buried nearby.

Lanzmann directs Les Temps Modernes, the legendary literary critic she and her partner Jean-Paul Sartre founded until her death.

The final film, "The Four Sisters", about four survivors of the Holocaust, was released Wednesday in French theaters.