Claude Lanzmann died on July 5th

WHAT did “Shoah” mean? After Claude Lanzmann had spent almost 12 years making the film he was most famous for, recording 350 hours of interviews in 14 countries, sitting in his shirtsleeves across the table from greying, cautious, sometimes angry people, unsparingly coaxing out of them their memories of the Holocaust, he often met that question. The simple translation was “destruction”. But as a secular Jew, brought up in central France with no sense of Jewish culture and no Hebrew, he had no idea, at first, what it meant. The word seemed just an utterance, a sound, without associations. It might have been the wind in the trees, or a moan of pain. That suited his purposes, because he wanted to give his work no name at all.

His theme was death, and at its most extreme. The subject, especially the moment of death, had obsessed him from childhood, when he had acquired that slight crouch, protecting his neck from the shining blade of the guillotine that might slice through. In middle age he could not turn away from Goya’s depictions of bayonettings; in old age he watched without flinching as Islamist terrorists, on video, crudely sawed off the heads of their victims. He found himself transfixed by the look, the dazed or vacant stare, of those who knew they were about to die. By witnessing it, he joined them in their awful loneliness.

So the task he assumed was to be a witness to the mass-death of the Holocaust and to draw witness out of others. But he wanted no images from the camps, no newsreel footage, since those were sacrilege. “Shoah” was not history and not a documentary, as he would shout when ridiculous people said so. It was an evocation through revenants, ghosts, of how memories of the Holocaust went on pulsing through the present, like the slow ripples of the river on which one Polish interviewee rowed and sang a Prussian song; or like the laboured clunking of a train in which an old railwayman stood, remembering how he had drunk vodka to mask the smell of burning bodies; or the rote recitation of railway stations by the German who ran the Department of Special Trains, still proud of ensuring that they got to Treblinka in time. In one scene Abraham Bomba, the Jewish barber who cut women’s hair as they huddled in the gas chambers, chirpily clipped and reminisced in his Tel Aviv salon before Mr Lanzmann, with determination, made him break.

He took great pride in his film, comparing it to a symphony, an epic, or the works of Shakespeare, and from a man who knew little about cinema or film-making. But it was a strange route to fame for an alpha male who otherwise romped through life, an acclaimed journalist, a doughty pilot, an excellent skier, an intrepid traveller and an all-round bon vivant. From the 1950s he was at the centre of France’s intellectual left, hobnobbing with its poets (Aragon, Breton, Éluard), writing and debating at Jean-Paul Sartre’s side at the philosophe’s own magazine, Les Temps Modernes, of which he became editor-in-chief, and living for seven years with Simone de Beauvoir, “Castor”, as he called her, the beautiful aristocrat whose nostrils drove him wild. Women flung themselves at him, of course, and in his masterly way he could dispense with any billing and cooing, going straight for “the thing” itself.

For him the world divided easily into left, right, black, white, wise men and fools. “Shoah” was not some brooding return to his own past, though it was part of his regret for the teenage anti-Semitism that made him hate his mother’s “enormous” nose and fear to be seen with her. His compulsion to evoke the Holocaust came from far beyond. If he or any of his family had been in the camps he could not have been a perfect witness, standing both inside and outside. In fact his war had been in the Auvergne, running guns and laying ambushes with the Resistance, while his family moved carefully in and out of hiding. Everyone survived. The blade did not fall.

Sartre, with that riveting certainty of his, thought death was an absurd conundrum. Mr Lanzmann believed it was inexplicable, as evil was, and also a scandal to be challenged. As he became more fervently Jewish through his life, he willed that resistance on his people. His film “Sobibor: October 14, 1943” exulted in the escape of Jews from an extermination camp, and two other films celebrated Israel, both its founding and, in “Tsahal”, its defence forces, which he saw through a lens of proud joy at their youth, beauty, massed weaponry and reappropriation of violence. Jews, too, could be fierce.

The hares of Birkenau

They could also deceive death, that great deceiver. He loved hares, remembering how, in Patagonia, the dash of one across his path had made him feel astonishingly alive, and how when shooting “Shoah” at Birkenau two hares, initially bewildered, had skilfully contorted their way through the dense barbed wire, as prisoners had failed to. He hoped his people would choose to come back as hares.

As it was, the very presence of those silent creatures at Birkenau underlined a great absence. “Shoah” was full of images of emptiness, whether railway wagons, or roads, or forests, or simply the eyes of interviewees suddenly remembering and staring fixedly at the camera, as at the face of death. Through them, he was staring too.