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INTERVIEWER
In your books you discuss the paradoxical nature of pleasure as something that might have reconnected you to life after the camp but which in fact drew you back to the memory of death.
SEMPRÚN
Yes, pleasure was, in reality, the complete opposite of oblivion. I could see the shadow of Buchenwald in the gaze of the girls who looked at me after I’d left the camp. And so to me pleasure became, to put it bluntly, a reminder of the life I had stolen from others. The sheer guilt of being in the world, of having survived the collective hell of the camp.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel more at peace today, more than fifty years and fifteen books later?
SEMPRÚN
Literature has played a dual and contradictory role in my life. The act of writing appeases one’s memories and eases the act of forgetting. When I write, I make my memories tangible, and in this way I can get rid of them. On the other hand, writing is but a ploy to convulse memory back into life. And the more I write, the more my memories return to inhabit me.
For a long time I only dreamt strange, penetrating nightmares, whereas now I no longer have nightmares at all. Literature has appeased my anxieties. The memories are there, but they remain quiescent. Some of them, the difficult moments, the freezing cold, the hunger, the horror of death—I am going to say something rather brutal here—have become nearly fictional in my eyes, as if I had invented them in order to write about them, as if they had never actually happened to me. But then I’ve come to realize that this process of dredging up old memories never ends. Here’s an idea that presents itself, clearly and concretely, in my book Quel beau dimanche! when I tell the story of a dog stew we made and ate in the camp. But I could write a whole book about just that one memory, about people’s reaction to the stew, the Czech who says, No, I will not touch it, and another man who says, No, it is just the idea of the dog that revolts you, and so on. There are so many episodes like that, which remain so vivid in my mind. Hence literature, in the end, has caused me new anxieties as well, because the idea that I may still have things to say and not have the time in which to say them is terribly unsettling. But that’s how it is.
INTERVIEWER
In Le Mort qu’il faut, there is an extraordinary instant when all of a sudden this other voice comes echoing out of you, spouting poetry. Is that something that really happened to you in the camp?
SEMPRÚN
Absolutely. That is not fiction. In a concentration camp you’re not really afraid of looking crazy by talking to yourself, since everyone there has something or other affecting them. Whispering poetry to yourself or reciting it out loud lends you a sort of solitude, allows you to imagine for an instant that you belong to yourself again. It’s like therapy. In fact, the richer and more complex the poetry, the more effective. You’re in the middle of the communal bathroom, being shoved by people trying to get to the water basin. That’s a discipline you must keep up, because if you don’t wash, you let go of yourself and begin looking like a tramp. So everyone is pushing to get to the giant sinks where the water is running, and in the middle of that formidable stench, those inhumanly foul odors, you are saying, “Calm, calm, stay calm! Feel the weight of a palm”—you are reciting Paul Valéry and suddenly you are alone, autonomous, private. Of course thirty seconds later somebody knees you in the leg and you’re right back in that roiling mass of people, but for that one second you’ve managed to escape. You went deep inside yourself to find strength, and you alone know that it took incredible resourcefulness to be anything but yourself.
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