Jorge Semprun was a Spanish communist who fought in the French Resistance, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, deported to Buchenwald in January 1944 and survived sixteen months inside the camp. He spent the rest of his life writing about the experience in a language that was not his first, French. The body of work that resulted is one of the most distinctive in the European literature of the catastrophe. Semprun is on this site as a survivor of a German concentration camp, even though he was not Jewish, because his work belongs in the same conversation as Levi and Wiesel and Klüger and because he wrote some of the best things ever written about Buchenwald.
The Semprún family was Spanish Republican. His father was the ambassador to The Hague under the Republic. The family went into exile in 1939 after the fall of the Republic, settling in France. Jorge studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and joined the French Resistance in 1941, working with the FTP-MOI, the foreign workers’ branch. He was arrested by the Gestapo at Joigny in September 1943, tortured and deported. His Buchenwald number was 44904. He was assigned to the Arbeitsstatistik, the camp’s administrative office, where the political prisoners ran an internal communist organisation that exercised real influence over assignments and could, in some cases, save lives by adjusting the lists.
After liberation he stayed in the French Communist Party, worked underground in Franco’s Spain in the late 1940s and 1950s under the alias Federico Sánchez, and was finally expelled from the Party in 1964 over disagreements with the Stalinist line. He turned to writing. The first novel, Le grand voyage, published in 1963, won the Prix Formentor. The book is the journey from Compiègne to Buchenwald in a sealed freight car over five days, told as a layered meditation rather than a linear account. Two further Buchenwald novels followed, Quel beau dimanche! in 1980 and L’écriture ou la vie in 1994. The last is the most considered, written from the perspective of fifty years afterwards. Semprun also wrote essays, screenplays for Resnais and Costa-Gavras, including Z and L’aveu, and the script for Constantin Costa-Gavras’s adaptation of his own novel La deuxième mort de Ramon Mercader.
The argument running through the work is a philosophical one. Semprun returns again and again to the question of what writing the camp does to the writer and what it can do for the reader who was not there. His position, set out in L’écriture ou la vie, was that the testimony was not really transmissible. The truth of the camp was the dying. The dead alone had it. Those who survived had been spared from the truth. The writer who came back could only write the experience by writing as if from inside the truth they had been spared from. He found that he could only do this by treating the writing as a kind of reconstruction, in fragments, with everything he wrote always one step short of the thing.
He was Spanish Minister of Culture in the post-Franco González government from 1988 to 1991. He died in Paris on 7 June 2011, at the age of eighty seven. His body was returned to Spain. His grave is at Garentreville near Fontainebleau. The reputation in French is high. The reputation in English is more limited because the books are dense, slow and require a reader willing to follow the writer into a philosophical conversation rather than a chronological account. The reader who does follow him gets one of the major bodies of camp writing in any language.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards