CLAUDE LANZMANN

(27 November 1925 - 5 July 2018)

The French filmmaker and journalist Claude Lanzmann, who has died aged 92, was the son of a Jewish family who had emigrated to France from Eastern Europe and who then went into hiding during World War II. Claude joined the French Resistance movement and fought with his father and brother in Auvergne. He became chief editor of Les Temps Modernes, a journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and later became a university lecturer in Switzerland. He began writing and directing epic documentary films from 1972.  Shoah (1985) was his magnum opus running over nine hours, a huge survey of the Holocaust in which he interviewed witnesses of the atrocities undergone by the survivors and also their perpetrators. Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4pm was an account of the prisoners uprising at the Nazi extermination camp of Sobibór. The Last of the Unjust was about Theresienstadt, Hitler’s so-called model ghetto, just one stop before the gas chambers. Lanzmann’s latest work, The Four Sisters, with interviews with four Holocaust survivors he had not included in Shoah, was shown on French television on the day before he died. Claude Lanzmann was married three times and has two children. He won many awards for his work including a Bafta for Shoah.

MICHAEL DARVELL