A DAY IN BUCHENWALD
Semprun, Jorge
Jorge Semprun, now living in Paris, is the author of several novels and screenplays (among them Z, The Confession, and La Guerre est finie). The son of an ambassador of the Spanish Republic,...
...I said, in turn...
...Anyway, the news of the liberation of Paris radically changed the attitude of most of the deportees, and especially of the kapos and German block leaders, the cadres of the kazettlerian [Konzentrationslager] bureaucracy, toward the French...
...In winter, this blue line was white, and the sun pale and brittle, like an old silver coin worn with use...
...I looked at Jehovah, murmured a polite goodbye, and went off carrying Faulkner's novel, which reminded me of a young woman with blue eyes...
...And everyone, Poles and Germans, Czechs and Russians, everyone criticized France for allowing itself to be so easily beaten by the German army in 1940...
...Ens...
...There is that other phrase, about those who "see Gulags only in their neighbor's eye, when Billancourt and Javel are under their own noses...
...I was not looking for anything in particular, vaguely wanting to borrow a work of fiction this time, rather than a volume of Hegel, Nietzsche, or Lange...
...which Harcourt Brace Jovanovich will publish this fall), Semprun presents a remarkable narrative whose flavor can only be appreciated in reading the full text...
...And he was a man of God...
...So I turned around to the guy who had just spoken in such a quiet but warm voice...
...427 It's incredible that even the simplest people in that cell, people who had never seen France, felt the fall of Paris like the death of their last hope, an even more irremediable defeat than the surrender of Warsaw...
...The block leader heard the commotion that the Frenchmen were making, and for once he didn't object...
...Eventually, they were 426 beaten and deprived of their last personal belongings, but the SS command did not carry out its threat of execution...
...In Buchenwald, the Jehovah's Witnesses had been singled out for special persecution...
...Perhaps a stronger word is called for...
...Admiring the view...
...But it's not to revive those childhood recollections of the Bible that I ask the camp librarian for Absalom, Absalom...
...But it wasn't a joyful occasion, for it was connected, not with the memory of the liberation of Paris, but with that of its fall...
...Most of the other candidates were unknown to me...
...And on sunny days, I went out at sunset, at whatever hour sunset occurred, depending on the season...
...he said, by way of greeting...
...There were the Austrians who would greet you with their singsong "Servus...
...The language of Buchenwald was rather restrained, as far as the polite forms of social intercourse were concerned...
...The antifascists of all the nations of Europe reproached France for, among other things, the policy of nonintervention in Spain...
...Admiring the view...
...Standing by the window of the camp library, listening to Jehovah recite the beginning of the Biblical story of Absalom, I remembered the strange beauty of that young woman who had suddenly appeared before me, two years earlier, in the decrepit, suffocating examination room in the Sorbonne...
...I would never know...
...That is my first image of Absalom: a horseman lifted off his horse and held fast by his hair to the branches of a tree...
...The Russian worker has the sad privilege of knowing both oppressions, that of the Gulags and that of despotism of the entrepreneur, beside which that of the capitalistic system is paradise...
...met Jehovah—or, rather, his witness—some months before...
...425 He is standing next to me in the copse that stretches beyond the quarantine camp, just before you reach the open space, the border on which the machine guns in the watchtowers are trained...
...In my memory of childhood readings of Holy Scripture, the name of Absalom evokes, first and foremost, one very precise image: that of a warrior caught by his hair in the lower branches of an oak or an olive tree, who in this position is pierced by the spears and swords of attacking enemies...
...His pale, transparent blue eyes looked at me with almost unbearable penetration...
...In the Nazi camps, everyone will tell you, the French were not very popular...
...I turned around, intrigued...
...Yet even at this final stage in the history of the camps, the Jehovah's Witnesses were still victims of collective beatings...
...It even seems to me that the only reason Absalom, Absalom...
...English translation copyright c 1982 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc...
...The night of slavery, which covered Europe, also obscured the narrow piece of sky, crisscrossed by the bars of our cell," says Gustav Herling...
...he cried out...
...Jehovah looked at its title and read it aloud, his voice trembling slightly, perhaps with surprise...
...It's an opening that has become something of a ritual since I've known him, and since we started talking to each other...
...So I wait, with rather sly curiosity...
...He could see very well that I was admiring the view...
...I was waiting for Anton, the librarian, to bring me the book I had asked for when the door from the hallway opened and Jehovah came in...
...First, one should note the crude empiricism of the sneer at "nonproletarians who have never undergone an apprenticeship in a factory...
...Later, I sometimes wondered what it was that made that young woman beautiful...
...To be pubished by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc...
...In the indistinct light of the summer dawn, in the morning murmur from the beech forest, the French deportees marched to the roll call that day in close formation, in rhythmic steps— they who had always dragged their feet, always lacked discipline!—steps, that morning, that were not obeying SS orders, but were the proud steps of victory—we didn't have our Marne, but we had Paris!—they marched up to the Appellplatz as one solid mass, eyes fixed on the sun rising in the East, beyond the square chimney of the crematorium...
...Suddenly I noticed the name Faulkner and the title of that novel, Absalom, Absalom...
...And he's an even more distinguished economist...
...What exactly is the point of it...
...But if it really wasn't an SS officer, it could be some prowler...
...But that book was there, in any case...
...Take Alain Lipietz: he's a distinguished Marxist...
...And so that novel—bought, like all the other books in the library, with the money of the German internees and chosen from lists drawn up by them (the SS command, naturally enough, took part of the money collected by the Kazettler to buy and place in the library fifty-odd copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf and other works by theoreticians of the Nazi ThousandYear Reich)—that Faulkner novel just happened to be there, by chance—if one must call "chance" some obscure, perhaps even inexorable, chain of causes and effects—in the camp library...
...Why had this book escaped the successive purges ordered by the SS command, whose object was to eliminate from the library shelves all non-German authors and all dubious, decadent works...
...To please two or three fellow intellectuals, to please oneself, to flatter a populist sensibility that is still prevalent among Paris intellectuals, particularly when they have a predilection for the hallucinogenic virtues of the dialectic of the late lamented Chairman Mao...
...It was afternoon, of course, during the few hours of leisure we enjoyed on Sunday afternoons...
...Then he smiles...
...Jehovah asks...
...He had white hair over a still-young face...
...There can't be many references to snow in the Bible...
...AA ?Admiring the view...
...For to the snow he says, 'Fall on the earth...
...This bitter, widespread contempt for France and the French was really frustrated love...
...I nod, somewhat surprised...
...What fleeting, violent happiness, threatened by some incommunicable anguish, does this view arouse in you...
...Above all because of the memory of that young woman, Jacqueline B., which had suddenly reappeared...
...Those on duty keep to the watchtowers or guard posts, snug and warm...
...He no doubt meant: "What do you find to admire in the view...
...Gustav Herling recounts a similar episode...
...Not only because of Faulkner, anyway...
...It was Josef Czapski who got me to read Herling's A World Apart...
...I looked at the sun setting magnificently over the plain of Thuringia, on the western horizon, behind the blue line of the Thuringian hills...
...Insisting, as he does throughout, on a strict order of "chronology," Semprun bends time and memory, plays with them, as he moves backward to the famous conversations between Goethe (who had lived so near Buchenwald) and his friend Eckermann, and forward to a lunch in 1960 with a French Communist proletarian who had shared that day in Buchenwald in 1944, to discussions with Merleau-Ponty in a Parisian café in the '50s, to reflections on passing Marx's home in London, to his elevation to the executive committee of the Spanish Communist party and his expulsion therefrom, to the stay in a resort for party functionaries in Russia (with sharp observations about the Spanish Communist leader Carrillo, about Khrushchev, and others)—always returning, "chronologically," to that "beautiful Sunday" in Buchenwald, which was, in fact, much like any other Sunday in that concentration camp, and really quite "shitty...
...Now, when I saw the name of Faulkner and the title Absalom, Absalom!, the blood drained from my face...
...It was she, Jacqueline B., who had lent me Sartoris, my favorite Faulkner novel, some weeks after we had met...
...What memories did this book hold for the German prisoner who had put it on the list of books to be bought...
...Jehovah's as good as Johann...
...Or they're chasing girls, in Weimar...
...I recognized at once his tall figure and white hair...
...Copyright © 1980 by Editions Srasset et Fasquelle...
...In his latest essay, Crise et Inflation: Pourquoi?, in a paragraph devoted to capitalist despotism in the entrepreneurial world, he makes the following imbecilic remark: "The word 'despotism' can shock only nonproletarians who have never undergone an apprenticeship in a factory, and who can see Gulags only in their neighbor's eye, when Billancourt and Javel* are under their own noses...
...Mahlzeit...
...I don't mean popular with the SS, of course...
...Then I turn back to the snow that covers the plain of Thuringia, the snow that is now Biblical, immemorial...
...We ran from one block to another to find our pals, to share their joy...
...But perhaps you don't know who Gustav Herling is...
...He didn't come rushing out of his hut, yelling that the French were dirty, undisciplined, lazy, shit, nur Scheisse, nothing but shit, and all they were good for was the crematorium...
...So I turned my head when I heard the crunching of feet on the snow behind me...
...So I say nothing, since he hasn't really asked the right question...
...In Buchenwald, then, at the beginning of September 1944, I was in the entranceway of the camp library, which had been set up in the same hut as the Arbeitsstatistik and the Schreibstube...
...I turned around for a second, listening to that crunching of snow...
...No doubt there were certain Sundays when a snowstorm or a torrential rain prevented me from walking out to the edge of the Little Camp and admiring the view of Thuringia...
...He was standing next to me, book in hand...
...he does great things which we cannot comprehend...
...Anyway, something of the kind...
...Or "What does that view mean to you...
...Whereas the Second book of Samuel has nothing to do with me...
...In the Nazi camps, the Jehovah's Witnesses, or Bibelforscher, which was their official label, bore a violet identification triangle...
...It was a thick, hardbound volume...
...Meanwhile, SS detachments ransacked their barracks and their places of work, looking, it was said, for religious tracts or pamphlets hostile to the regime...
...was to be found in the Buchenwald library—the only serious reason, I mean, one that cannot simply be brushed aside—was precisely the anticipation of that moment—unforeseeable from a strictly logical point of view—when my eye would catch the author and title in the library catalogue...
...Even He may get caught up in the banality of everday language, as we know...
...God thunders wondrously with his voice...
...It was as if we all felt that whatever was still to happen, nothing had been in vain, since we had lived long enough to hear of the liberation of Paris...
...There was nothing else I could be doing here but admiring the view...
...I met Jehovah in September 1944, at the beginning of September, if I remember rightly...
...He was wearing the violet triangle...
...Yes, I'm admiring the view...
...I nod, admiring and irritated...
...He turns his pale blue eyes upon me...
...And the words from the Bible are always the right words for the occasion...
...Mahlzeit...
...There is no possibility of liquidating the despotism of capital at the factory towns of Billancourt and Javel if one conceals from the working class, or obfuscates with sentences like the above, the existence of the Gulags in the U.S.S.R., in China, and in every country where power is monopolized by a single party that silences the proletariat, all the better to speak in its name...
...I cite Lenin not out of personal reverence, but simply because Lipietz still seems to make a special case of him...
...In 1940, people expected France to perform some kind of miracle, to reverse the tide of war...
...no doubt about that...
...At that moment, the librarian came back to the counter and put down the book that I had asked for...
...One could not say that greetings, leavetakings, or polite expressions of any kind were a frequent occurrence in Buchenwald...
...At first, they were automatically put into the disciplinary companies...
...Some days before, after the evening roll call, a rumor had run through the camp, whispered at first, then growing gradually louder and louder till it became an explosion of silent joy, a commotion of cries and stifled chants: Paris was free, Paris had been liberated...
...I even think Jehovah's easier to remember...
...he had said...
...It was obvious that I was looking at the Thuringian plain, the village in the distance, the calm gray smoke that was not smoke from the crematorium: life outside...
...The sun set almost opposite me, slightly to the left of the observation point that I had chosen...
...Absalom, in short, ranked for me with Samson: both were guys who had had trouble because of their hair...
...A face still alive, I mean...
...It's because of a young woman with blue eyes...
...and after a time Amnon, David's son, loved her...
...Jehovah asks...
...Did I say imbecilic...
...Anyway, whether it's to be found there, or in the Book of Kings, or even in the Book of Chronicles, doesn't mean much to me...
...But it wasn't a Russian prowler, it was Jehovah...
...Published in London in 1951, it is no doubt one of the most hallucinatory accounts, in its sobriety, its restrained compassion, in the naked perfection of its narrative shape, that I have ever read of a Stalinist camp...
...I was leaning against the window of the Buchenwald library two years later, holding the thick, hardcover volume of the German translation of Absalom, Absalom!, and I couldn't help remembering the young woman with whom I discussed Faulkner in the summer of 1942, dazzled by the strange light in her blue eyes...
...And in the cell of that Soviet prison at Vitebsk, in June 1940, a sigh, a murmur of distress broke out...
...How's Jehovah going to get out of this one...
...Even Jehovah may have difficulty clearly formulating the right questions...
...Not just a mask...
...He was still talking calmly and clearly as he looked at me...
...The entranceway of the library was a tiny space between the hallway of the hut and the library itself, in which one could see the shelves piled with books beyond the 428 counter window...
...The Gulags—that is, the concentration camps— have never liquidated the despotism of the entrepreneur, the despotism of social-bureaucratic capital in the U.S.S.R...
...The night before, I had found the title of this Faulkner novel in the catalogue of the camp 429 library...
...He declaims these words in a loud voice...
...The question was badly phrased...
...Not because of Faulkner or that novel, which I had not yet read...
...The son of an ambassador of the Spanish Republic, Semprun fought in the French Resistance and was imprisoned in Buchenwald...
...I must admit that I didn't attend many lectures, that year...
...Book of Job, 37:5...
...Jehovah is standing behind me, and he, too, is looking at the winter landscape in the December sunlight, brief and glorious, like that of Austerlitz, casting its last light...
...by Jorge 3emprun, translated by Alan Sheridan...
...The man stood stock still, with all eyes upon him, and murmured: "Paris has fallen...
...Again I was overwhelmed by its radiant mystery...
...A leader of the Spanish Communist underground from 1956 to 1964, he was expelled from the party for what later came to be called "Eurocommunist" views...
...So that phrase actually amounts to very little...
...Billancourthow much nonsense has been said about it...
...I think he was named Johann, but I'm not quite sure...
...The Poles, antifascist or not— and most of them were not, at least in the sense that the Communist vocabulary ended up giving to the term—reproached France for abandoning them in September 1939...
...I've decided to call him Jehovah in this story, whenever I have occasion to name him...
...Now Absalom, David's son, had a beautiful sister, whose name was Tamar...
...Two armed SS companies surrounded the Jehovah's Witnesses, but not one of them agreed to fight for Germany...
...She came into the room where we were waiting our turn to be called before Professor Guillaume for the oral examination in psychology...
...As far as I know, Lenin never underwent such an apprenticeship...
...On a June day in 1940, in the prison of Vitebsk, the door of Gustav's cell opened and a new arrival entered that overpopulated space...
...I was waiting absent-mindedly in that dusty, musty room of the Sorbonne when she came in...
...and to the shower and the rain, 'Be strong.' He seals up the hand of every man, that all men may know his work...
...In the pages we excerpt below from What a Beautiful Sunday...
...But there is worse to come...
...The day after this news reached us, a pervasive joy reigned in Buchenwald...
...Absalom, Absalom...
...It wasn't the first time I'd consulted the catalogue, but I'd never noticed that novel before, I suppose because I didn't expect to find it there...
...description of it, but also a theoretical explanation for it...
...But perhaps some distinguished Marxist will reproach me with using the term "Gulag" too unscientifically...
...In 1944, when I arrived in Buchenwald, the Bibelforscher survivors were working mainly as nurses in the camp hospitals or as servants in the SS officers' villas...
...They aren't in the habit of venturing into the camp on Sunday afternoons...
...Neither do I. I know very little about him, in fact...
...Some young Russian might have followed me and decided to pinch the leather boots I was wearing...
...I'm not a sufficiently keen reader of the Bible to remember that the story of Absalom is to be found in the Second Book of Samuel...
...Throughout German-occupied Europe people hoped for a miracle, a second battle of the Marne...
...They had been interned because they refused to perform military service or to take the oath of allegiance to the German flag...
...Life before, life outside...
...Second Book of Samuel, 13...
...Quiet, devoted, tireless, they waited patiently for the end of the apocalyptic evils that had arrived with the fall of Satan upon the earth, in 1914, and for the millennium that would follow, at some not too distant but as yet indeterminate date, ushering in a New World, in which the Elect would govern the earth from their heavenly home...
...That was the title of the book, of course...
...But today, before that view of snow on the Ettersberg and the plain of Thuringia, I wonder what quotation from the Bible he's going to come up with...
...On the other hand, there are millions —tens of millions—of workers who have undergone apprenticeships in factories, apprenticeships without end, apprenticeships for life, apprenticeships as convicts sentenced for life by the despotism of the entrepreneur—and who are unable to put a name to that entrepreneur, to know him and therefore to struggle effectively against him...
...to wish you good day or good luck, but they were the exception...
...Or joy...
...I didn't want to be caught by some Russian prowler armed with a knife or a bludgeon...
...I couldn't help thinking of her, of course...
...Usually, Jehovah begins any conversation by quoting a passage from the Bible...
...In the spring of 1944, I remember, they were gathered on the Appellplatz and searched...
...I heard someone arrive, footsteps on the snow, in the copse on the edge of the Little Camp, between the quarantine huts and the infirmary, the Revier...
...On several occasions, the SS command tried to make them abandon their principles...
...Or joyful surprise...
...In Block 34, which was just opposite mine, the rejoicing knew no bounds...
...Marx never underwent an apprenticeship in a factory either...
...I did not fear the inopportune arrival of some SS–Blockfiihrer...
...It's beginning to annoy me...
...Who had ordered it...
...Those not on duty Excerpted from What a Beautiful Sunday...
...are drinking beer in the SS canteen, awaiting their turn to go on guard...
...Paris had fallen, Paris, Paris...
...I wait with rather sly curiosity for him to say something else...
...Or perhaps not every one of my seventy-two Sundays in Buchenwald...
...430...
...But it was among the other deportees that the French weren't—or, rather, France wasn't—very popular...
...Every Sunday in Buchenwald, I came and admired that view...
...His apprenticeships, and very long they were, took place in libraries, which didn't prevent him from discovering the capitalist despotism in the corporation and giving not only a concrete * Industrial centers in France...
...it wouldn't mean much if the French were unpopular with them...
...I looked at Jehovah, intrigued...
...Or, rather, his witness: the Jehovah's Witness...
...A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book...
...In September 1944, for example, in Buchenwald, listening to Jehovah reciting a passage from the Second Book of Samuel, I suddenly remembered her beauty with a pang...
...But he said flatly: "Admiring the view...
...He stopped and raised a finger...
...It, too, was connected with Paris...
...It was destined for me, in other words...
...It is, moreover, a historical document of the first order, providing a detailed description as well as a fully verified general view of the Stalinist Gulag in the years 1940-42...
...In September 1939, for example, shortly after the outbreak of war, they were all gathered on the Appellplatz to hear the SS commandant announce that if one of them, just one of them, refused to join the army, they would all be shot...
...It was at the Sorbonne in June 1942...
Vol. 29 • September 1982 • No. 4
