Claude Lanzmann: LE LIEVRE DE PATAGONIE Memoires / The Patagonian hare: Memoirs
When it was time to go to bed and put on our pajamas, our father stayed close to us and taught us how to dispose of our clothes in the very exact order of the dressing. He warned us, we knew that the bell of the outer door would wake us up in the middle of sleep and that we would have to flee, as if the Gestapo arose. "Your time will be timed", he said, we did not take the thing for a long time for a game. It was a bell with a strong and clear timbre, powered by a chain. And suddenly, this unforgettable imperious carillon of dawn, the back and forth of the beating of the bell on its walls unequivocally marking that we did not sound in the polite expectation of an opening, but to announce a brutal break-in. The awakening of the awakening, one of us shook our little sister heavily asleep, we dressed in the dark, at high speed, with gestures more and more mechanized over the progress of training, down the two floors, without a noise and in the total darkness, let us open the door of the courtyard as if by magic and work towards the edge of the garden, remove the branches, put them back in place after sliding one behind the other in the protective crevice, and waited for breath lost, out of breath. We waited for him, waited for him, he was slow or fast, it depended, he pretended to look for us and found us without fail. Through the branches, we could see his SS boots and we could hear his anguished voice of a Jewish father: "You moved, you made a noise." "No, Dad, it's a branch that has cracked." I heard you, they would have discovered you. " It kept going until he told us to go out. He did not play. He was playing the SS and their dogs. "
Written in a magnificent and powerful prose, the memoirs of the author of the Holocaust say all the freedom and horror of the twentieth century, making the Patagonian hare a unique book that combines thought, passion, joy, youth, humor, the tragic.
