Claude Lanzmann, the journalist and film director whose obsession with the Nazi genocide brought forth “Shoah,” a groundbreaking film that relived the annihilation of Jews through the memories of witnesses, died on Thursday in Paris. He was 92. His publisher, Gallimard, confirmed his death, at the Saint-Antoine Hospital. Mr. Lanzmann, a son of assimilated French Jews, took everything at full tilt. At 18, he led a Communist youth Resistance group, risking his life by smuggling small arms under the eyes of the Gestapo in Clermont-Ferrand, in central France. He became a figure of the intellectual Left, a protégé of Jean-Paul Sartre, the lover of Simone de Beauvoir for nine years, and a colleague of them both at the cultural review Les Temps Modernes, where he was editor in chief for many years. With “Shoah” — Hebrew for catastrophe — Mr. Lanzmann upstaged everything he had done before. From its release in 1985, the film was internationally recognized as both an important hi...
Striving for a World without Capital Punishment