I have never belonged to a political party

Your presence today at the Medef Summer University was highly anticipated. Why only will there you finally not

Laurence Parisot probably threw me a spell or a charm because I had agreed to participate. Me, my life, never gave a speech in some university summer either. My presence abroad that day me prohibited me find to Jouy-en-Josas among entrepreneurs. Furthermore, I am quite incapable of talking about freedom in a few minutes.

In your life, you have yet overcome challenges. At the age of eighteen, you agree in the resistance.

From October 1943, I was internal in take in Clermont-Ferrand, at the lycée Blaise-Pascal. I had recruited the previous summer by a member of the Communist Party. It was a random recruitment. My family was left. But this could have been as well people from movements United of the resistance (wall) or another organization. I would have accepted. I am not entered the Communist Party ideology. I had never read a line of Marx, Engels, Lenin. I found not scandalous to become a member of the Communist Youth.

Then why this choice

The Soviet Union accounted for us at this time, after the battle of Stalingrad. Hope came from there. I have never belonged to a political party. After the war, the Secretary of the Communist students at the lycée Louis-le-Grand, Jean Poperen, which later became a significant elephant of the PS, I had offered to take the card of the party, but I did not want. I made my way out of this. I have met many times in my life story, but I have not always been synchronous with it. In 1948, when the State of Israel was created, I was in Berlin, where I was a player at the University.

You always have a very optimistic vision

Only optimistic step. Both Brioude that Clermont-Ferrand, I registered under my real name. Among my classmates, there was no shadow of anti-Semitism, such as the one I had known before the war, for example at the lycée Condorcet in Paris. In Auvergne, was not at all like this. At the lycée Blaise-Pascal, there were militiamen. It was aware. They know us. Person has never spoken of this. "The sorrow and the pity", from Marcel Ophuls, is a film full of qualities, but he is Clermont-Ferrand city symbol of collaboration. This is not fair. Overall, the Auvergnats are very well behaved. We had lived, from 1934 to 1938, at Brioude, sub-prefecture of the Haute-Loire. We were very well known in this small town, where I was going to the Lafayette College. Despite the racial laws enacted by the Vichy Government in October 1940, I am never felt in danger or ostracized by people who knew me. However, it took to register as Jews with buffer "Jew" on the identity card, because at that time, he was still very difficult to know what to do and spend one illegal. My father, who was a total pessimism, knew that the worst was safe. But, very quickly, this became unbearable and we decided to save us under our real name, but without the buffer, and also to have false papers, which we used when had to confront the German controls.

After the war, you rediscover the anti-Semitism in Paris

After the urban resistance and the maquis, I redid a take in Louis-le-Grand in Paris. Students, the day of my arrival, were baptized into the name of Robert Brasillach room. I then realized that this had happened in Auvergne was something very special. All these khâgneux and hypokhâgneux were passed through the war without be achieved nothing. This is where I saw that the great ship France had continued to cut his way. Paris was an intact city, the owners had continued to receive their rent, the France had not been shaken in its depths. This was a real shock.

General de Gaulle remained a "great oak"

I would like for a great man and a great writer. Read his "memoirs" is exhilarating, and also those of Churchill. In another register, because Churchill was Shakespeare. But I changed to the General over time. We fought him during the war of Algeria. We had not understood the posture of statesman, with its inevitable cynical dimension, it had adopted. When he said to the Blackfoot people of Algeria: "I've understood you", he meant it as a true man of State. It had to be very strong. He had understood, but it was not followed. That said, he returned to power in 1958 and the Evian agreements were signed in 1962. Between 1958 and 1962, there were still four years of war, and he had to fight on many fronts. Types was sent to the guillotine. This is something that was me

unbearable. Every capital execution would take place during the war of Algeria, I was not living, I was in a constant state of alarm. But when de Gaulle explains that he remembers very well the morning of February 1945, icy, Misty, where Brasillach was executed, because each time that it would run a man to whom he had refused the grace, he was not sleeping at night, it was the way for him to accompany them. It was also true for the Algerians that he should send to the guillotine. And if it could count the number of nights without sleep of De Gaulle, one could know how many men he had refused the grace.

What is your relationship to the France and Israel

In a sense, it is not more French than me. But at the same time, I was not at all like de Gaulle, who speaks frissonnant flags to the vault of the disabled in his "memoirs". It was carrying the child. None of these symbols of French glory, however, do me one. This is why the discovery of Israel was so important to me, even if I knew Joan of Arc and Bertrand Du Guesclin.

In may 68, the difference of a Jean-Paul Sartre, you keep at a distance...

I still have a distrust for the large crowd movements. I went to the protests because it was deeply to my nature of left. But I was rather an observer, not a player in may 68. And then I went very quickly. Do not forget that I had a special issue of "Modern times" on the Arab-Israeli conflict that appeared on the first day of the Six-day war.

Do you hesitate to become Israeli

Never! On my first visit to Israel, Ben Gourion well told me that it was in need of men like me. But I was much too French. At the same time by discovering Israel with all these people who had the same origin of Eastern as my grandparents, I said that I was both a French strain and a random French. Israel me was brotherly and foreign. And the France me was infinitely close, consubstantial. This is the posture of the witness: be neither inside nor outside, inside and outside both. I would have never made "shoah" if I had been deported. I would have never done films on Israel if I had spoken Hebrew.

Sartre realized Israel

I think that he did not really understand. And yet, at the same time, it has always been Israel. Later, he accepted to be doctor honoris causa of the Hebrew University, at a ceremony at the Israel Embassy in Paris. When I made the trip to Egypt with Simone de Beauvoir and him, he was angry with the Israelis. When we arrived in Israel, and he refused to see the people of the army, I was very disappointed and the Israelis left, because they were both members of this army and readers of Sartre. Sartre did not understand what was meant by a Jewish army after the Shoah. This is what I called the reappropriation of the force and violence by Jews. We were in disagreement on this. In any event, after 1968, I do consider myself more as a witness of the life of Sartre.

Was Sartre pushed by events from 1968

Sartre was never paying nothing to his name. It was not a man who said or thought: "I am Sartre."On the contrary, it has always been the man of the "tabula rasa", the Tabula Rasa. His temperament was deeply anarchist. From 1968, he stopped wearing a tie, he was always dressed in a cardigan, open shirt, and then the upstarts tutoyaient, this gave him a sense of great brotherhood. When he wrote in "The words", "all a man of all men and that of all of them and how much is worth anyone", is not literature, it was actually things like this.

What is it that you pushed to "Holocaust"

"Shoah", it's complicated. He had to find the subject, it was not clear. I found it from my obsessions. I have worked enormously lu, surveyed, but this is not the trigger. I was truly halluciné when I myself am finally resolved, after several years, to go to Poland. The Poland was the detonator that did everything explode. I've just relived in the present. I have been brought by a huge force. Need I re-surfaced all the time the last trip. It is true that I was a very good journalist because I knew interrogate people interrupting when needed, but never more. It was very difficult. There were three postures according to the categories of actors in the film: the Jews of special commandos, the nazis and Polish.