 After the war, Lanzmann worked in Paris as builder and a welder, and showed promise as a painter.During the early 1950s, he moved to Chile for two years, where he worked as a copper miner.While Lanzmann was in Chile, a manuscript of a novel he had written, "La glace est rompue" ("The ice is broken"), was given to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir by his brother Claude.