Are there any heroes in the room?
(Audience) Yes!
That’s wonderful!
Well, I should leave then since we’re already all heroes.
But you, heroes, can stay.
No, those who are not heroes, those who are here anyway,
when you hear: “Are you a hero?”, don’t you feel a little scared
while wondering, “If I am asked that, then I shall be asked something more,
maybe to go and give my life,
to go and fight,
perhaps to be the one on the raft who will be fed to the others,
because someone must sacrifice himself”?
So, the hero
is the one who saves the world.
If there are heroes, the world is saved but if there’s none, what do we do?
And what if right now, by this door, a terrorist comes in,
and aims at us?
Who will do what?
Who is going to throw himself on him to prevent him, to disarm him?
Who is going to hide, to protect his wife, his son?
Who?
And how can we know, until it has happened?
We all want to be heroes; we dream of being a hero
and when the moment comes, we reveal ourselves.
Personally, it happened to me once, on a small scale;
it was November 15, 2015.
Two days after the attacks against the Bataclan and the cafés in Paris,
I was with many others at Place de la République
and I went to pay some respect near a café, Le Carillon.
Then some friends and I went to sit on the terrace of a café,
we were not even afraid!
At that moment, we heard detonations,
real noises of gunshots.
Everyone rushed to the ground. I fell. We flipped the table.
I cut myself. I vaguely tried to protect the person next to me.
The bartender lowered the iron curtain.
In 10 seconds, it was a war scene.
Ten seconds.
So what do we do at that time?
Because the hero is the one who precisely
is ready to expose his life,
to brave death for something that is beyond himself,
something essential,
something that he considers more important than his well-being,
his comfort and perhaps even his existence.
So the hero
may be the one who can arise at any moment.
Of course, there are professional heroes, whose job is to do so, so to speak.
Let’s take the same example, a train,
a train between Amsterdam and Paris, a Thalys precisely.
A terrorist comes out, points a gun. He is ready to shoot.
Four people, with their bare hands, interfere, intervene.
They stop him.
Among these four people, there are two American soldiers,
two people trained to fight, we could say,
trained to have courage, and who therefore have reflexes.
It doesn’t make their gesture less heroic but still, they were prepared.
Okay, there are these professional heroes,
but what about the other two?
A 23-year-old American student, and an English senior, a consultant.
This particular event, this crisis,
revealed something that is essential.
So, we can always ask ourselves, “What would I have done?”
What would we have done if during German occupation,
someone knocks on your door at night; we hear planes flying over us;
we hear bombs.
Someone knocks on the door,
and there is a 10-year-old little girl with a yellow star who says,
“Hide me, there are soldiers who are looking for me.”
What would I have done myself?
Would I have opened?
Would I have said, “I can’t. I too have children”?
Would I have said, “Go there and hide”?
Let’s rethink what happened on January 9, 2015:
an hostage-taking in a kosher supermarket, a Super Kosher.
There were, two days before, the attacks against Charlie;
Paris, France, the world is in shock.
And, during this hostage-taking, a Malian employee,
someone who is not directly threatened a priori,
in any case, someone opens the door and hides the hostages.
He revealed himself at that moment.
Something arose we did not know about him, that maybe he himself did not know,
something that is essential, something heroic.
He was able to write a book a year later called:
“I’m not a hero, I didn’t do anything special,”
as if to clear himself or nearly apologize,
just as this pilot who managed to land his plane,
whose engines were dead, on New York’s river, the Hudson:
“I did my job.”
Yes, but there is the way you did it: a heroic job.
These figures, those beings
whose natural vocation is not to save, protect,
who are not firefighters, who are not first-aiders,
who are not soldiers defending people,
these ordinary men, at one extraordinary given point,
during a crisis, in a dangerous situation, or in a disaster situation,
have been heroic.
It means that among what makes a hero,
of course, there are often qualities.
There is strength, since the Odyssey, the Iliad,
Achilles with his extraordinary strength.
There’re trickery and even the superpowers of our current superheroes.
There is all that.
But all these qualities are secondary qualities
in the sense that they are means.
The queen of all qualities,
the one that will activate all the others and give them meaning
is courage;
that’s why at any given time,
we are able to go one step further, to dare,
and from then on, we become a legend,
someone who acts with courage,
and leaves his name in History and in memories,
someone whom no one will forget what he did.
I had the chance to meet someone like this once in my life,
someone who inspired me and besides, has changed a lot of things for me.
It was ten years ago,
at the end of one of my shows, a woman came to see me.
She says to me, “I saw many of your shows, I liked them.
– Thank you.
– I’d like you to tell my father’s story.
– Who is your father?
– His name is Haïm Lipsky, born in Poland
in a working-class Jewish family of seven children,
in the 1920s, very poor,
and he happened to have a passion for music.
He absolutely wanted to become a violinist.
His parents said, “You’re crazy! You can’t.
You won’t have enough to survive,” but he stubbornly persisted.
He used to sneak into classical concerts.
He managed to save small pennies, buy a violin and become a violinist.
– Magnificent!
– War comes: 1939, Germany invades Poland.
Haïm finds himself locked in the Lodz ghetto.
Half of his family dies, brothers and sisters.
He survives, thanks to his violin, because he plays,
and because it supports him morally and physically.
A little later, he’s at the Auschwitz Orchestra,
and this allows him not to be executed right away,
and there too, he holds out.
Life span in concentration camps,
is just a few days if you are not immediately sent to death.
He bears it for long. He bears it eventually until the end of the war.
Afterwards, having survived,
he stops music completely.
This is no longer possible.
It was his passion; it was his vocation; it was his survival;
it became an impossibility.
So, he becomes an electrician.
But he passes on the passion for music to his children and grandchildren.
And today, almost all of them are international musicians:
Arie, conductor in the United States;
Cziffra, at the Philharmonic of Israel;
Naaman in Paris;
all international musicians.”
[There is] something heroic in this story,
so I say, “Okay, I’m going to tell this story.”
It’s a story worth sharing, a story that inspires.
And here I start doing my job,
that is scripting stories and then staging them, materializing them,
so that people see them and become inspired as well.
But then, all the obstacles emerge.
Everybody explains to me that it’s impossible
to show concentration camps on stage.
I say, “I don’t want to show the camps.
I want to show how someone survived and transmit something he had lost.
It’s totally different, it’s a story about life!
It’s not about death. We go through death, but we pass beyond it.”
No, everyone refuses.
People, producers, let me down.
If so, then I’ll write, stage and produce the play myself.
I borrow money. I am told I am completely mad, but I continue.
Then one theater steps down a month before the opening,
although I had already hired the team.
then an actress, three weeks before the opening,
and so on … a disaster scenario, for a long period of time.
Whenever a disaster occurs worse than the previous ones,
which is a threat, I am told, “Stop!”
Everyone tells me, “Stop.
You cannot go on like this! You’re going to lose everything!”
My brother who has co-produced my shows for 15 years,
the person closest to me, Aïkan,
tells me, “We’ll lose everything, you’re mad!”
I say, “No, I’m going on.”
I continue because if Haïm managed to survive Auschwitz,
I should be able to do a show that tells this story.
Really, it’s not the same.
It’s not quite the same danger, the same issue, the same level.
So, I went forward.
To make a long story short,
ten years later, the show has now toured for six years.
It has been seen by tens of thousands of people.
it has received press coverage up to TF1’s newscast
and all daily papers.
We performed in Paris at Salle Gaveau.
We performed at La Criée, in Marseille. and we performed in London.
Yes, it was a success, and this amused me for those
who explained to me that it was impossible.
The reason why it was a success, is not just the quality of the show,
it’s History,
and it is especially this figure.
It’s the fact that there was something extraordinary
that was told, that was transmitted:
the fact that this man had managed to go through the horror
and to surpass himself, to give and to transmit.
There were essential values of will, of courage,
and starting literally from scratch.
This man today is 95 years old.
He is alive and at times when he was there,
I made him come on stage at the end of the show.
It was a gift for the public who wasn’t aware of his presence.
And this is what Haïm did when he was on stage.
As if just by himself,
he had managed to overcome and give.
I considered that I too should give and pass on this story,
because at my humble level, he had inspired me.
You’re going to tell me, “Yes, very well.
Again an extraordinary person with tons of courage,
will, aptitude, who has a passion, a talent.
It’s easy when you have ‘all this’, even in catastrophic contexts.
In fact, it’s downright crushing to have figures
that remind us that we are just in our mediocrity,
our ease, our comfort.
We do not manage to be as strong and brave as them.
And besides, heroes are somehow disturbing figures.”
There is like this a play by Brecht, “The Life of Galileo”.
Bertolt Brecht tells that Galileo, who is an absolute scientific hero –
who managed to prove something revolutionary :
no, the Earth is not the center of the Universe,
the Sun is, on the contrary, what revolves around it –
that Galileo is a hero who holds out against the Inquisition,
who holds out against everything up to a certain degree.
And at some point in the play,
all those whom Galileo inspired, all his disciples, are waiting,
hoping that Galileo will resist, that he will not give up, retract.
Brecht’s genius is revealed when he shows the disciples waiting.
And for a moment, the bell that marks the abjuration does not ring.
After five minutes, the bell rings.
We hear Galileo say, “I abjure my theories, I give up.”
Galileo is no longer a hero, he is a coward, a traitor.
He has collapsed; he hasn’t stood firm; he hasn’t made the truth triumph.
He enters and his main disciple says to him,
“Dirty coward! Woe to the country that has no hero.”
Because heroes save the world, don’t they? Because we need heroes to inspire us.
And Galileo replies, “No, woe to the country that needs heroes.”
Because if we need heroes,
it means we need something outside of us to be able us to surpass ourself.
So, this question about being inspired, what is it about ultimately?
Why can heroes inspire us, what do they evoke?
They evoke a kind of greatness.
They allude to a value.
Heroes are the revelators of value.
In a world where we can think that nothing is worth anything,
that nothing makes sense, the hero asks the question:
Why? What is life worth?
What is worth fighting for, standing up, speaking up?
What is worth getting committed, maybe even dying for?
Can we die for freedom?
Should we die for freedom?
Some died for freedom.
Some fought.
Two years ago, in 2015 too, I directed Lorenzaccio,
a play about a man who wants to kill a tyrant
because he wants to free men.
The play asks this question: should we die for freedom?
How far should we go for that?
It turns out that the opening of this show
took place on January 11, 2015,
four days after the Charlie attacks.
In the silent room,
everyone could hear this question perfectly:
can we die for freedom?
How far should we go?
And a few days later, while we were performing,
one of the actors’ mother was dying.
She had terminal cancer.
He leaves the stage. Then he learns that his mother died.
The next day, he departs for Brussels where she was.
He sees the body of his mother, I didn’t know what he was going to do.
He was one of the main actors: if he didn’t return, we couldn’t perform.
He comes back. He performs.
Believe it or not, he was even better than before.
I told him, “Olivier, what you did is heroic.”
He replied, “No, it’s not heroic.
It is we who are saying something essential,
I must be here”
because he was aware that it was not a show, a role,
that we were talking, at the very time of the attacks and terror,
about: “Should we die for freedom?” it was the question we were asking.
It’s because of these valuable figures that I’m staging plays.
It’s one of the reason why I write, and produce plays.
It’s an attempt to share these figures who can inspire us.
And it’s also an attempt to ask questions.
Sometimes heroes have flaws, weaknesses.
Sometimes they are even complex fascinations
such as the Joker, or Richard III, or the character of House of Cards,
all these kinds of evil characters,
because these figures too can fascinate us.
Pointing at them, understanding what fascinates us in them,
it’s also a way to differentiate them from those who claim to be heroes,
who, because they shoot women and children at café terraces,
say, “I am a hero, I support a cause.”
But in the name of which values? For the sake of what?
For the sake of what ?
So,
I invite you to listen, deep inside, since it’s about voices and vox,
to what is essential.
What is essential for you?
What resonates for you when you are silent.
When you don’t hear the sounds of the world, and the nihilism anymore,
nor the feeling that everything is equally valid, what is essential?
What would be a person, a value, an idea,
that would make you say, “This is worth it,”
“This makes sense and deserves my commitment,”
and “That drives my life”?
Well, if you hear that very voice,
then you have found the fulcrum, the lever of a heroism.
And during the challenge, during the crisis,
something may get activated.
So are there heroes in this room?
Yes, I think so!
Not just the official heroes, not just the self-proclaimed heroes,
not just the real heroes, but each of us has something.
Each of you can activate this from a value.
During the two years I spent asking Haïm what happened in Auschwitz,
during the interviews,
the only thing that Haïm told me,
the only one is, “I came out of it.”
It’s the only thing.
And the other thing he does when he sees one of the shows,
is to say, “All this joy comes from me.”
He managed to convey that, get this across.
So, I invite you to ask yourself:
what in you can be communicated in order to inspire people?
What ultimately can resonate and make future heroes resonate?
Thank you.
(Applause)
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