919 words - 4 minute read
I’ve just attended an excellent conference on life in concentration camps in France, Germany and the USSR during and after the Second World War.
Much of the discussion turned on the different strategies employed by ex-inmates to communicate the horror of what had happened to them: how to express the inexpressible, describe the indescribable.
If we’re looking for a common denominator in this regard I think the closest we’ll get is ‘distancing’. This might seem counter-intuitive - after all, isn’t it exactly the fine-grained immediacy of the horror that needs to be communicated? If that’s the objective then some literary equivalent of the haptic shot in cinema seems to be what’s required.
But according to Spanish Buchenwald survivor Jorge Semprún, distancing is essential to effective communication of the horror. This is because ordinary language, ´factual’ language, won’t work: the quotidian simply isn’t up to the task of expressing the ineffable.
So Semprún insists on metaphor as a way of communicating what it’s like to be in possession of a body in the liminal, purgatorial, space between life and death. Metaphor creates a space in which the reader’s imagination can get to work, prompting precisely the instinctive, emotional and creative response that Semprún is aiming for.
Taking this a step further, he consistently employs fiction as a means of communicating the privations he underwent in Buchenwald and elsewhere. ‘No se llega nunca a la verdad sin un poco de invención´, he writes. ‘You never get to the truth without a little invention’. He’s come in for criticism on this score: if he admits to invention how can we know what’s true and what’s false?
But this is too literal an understanding of the distinction between fact and fiction and their relationship to the truth. There might not have been an actual Good Samaritan, for example, but the story tells a truth at least as accurately - and perhaps more so - than if he’d actually existed. And the same goes for every single fairy tale we tell our children.
So distancing, through metaphor and inventive fiction, is paradoxically a way of bringing the truth of the horror of concentration camps close to those of us fortunate enough not to have experienced them.
As the conference unfolded I couldn’t help thinking about another actually existing concentration camp at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean - Gaza. (For concentration camp it certainly is; the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a concentration camp as ‘a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard’).
Jorge Semprún had no way of communicating his experiences to the outside world while he was imprisoned in Buchenwald. And the same goes for all the others whose names we have come to know through their testimony: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Eli Wisesel, Varlam Shalamov, Józef Czapski and Elinor Lippe, among countless others.
What these testimonies have in common is that a) they were after the event, and b) they come to us via the written word.
Testimony from the concentration camp called Gaza couldn’t be more different. It comes to us live, direct, unfiltered, immediate. And it comes to us in visual form, 24 hours a day, incessantly and unsparingly, on our TV screens, mobiles and tablets. Literary inventiveness seems unnecessary. No doubt there’ll eventually be a literature of this genocide, this second Nakba, but thanks to modern communication technology we haven’t had to wait for it.
Is this a difference that makes a difference?
You might have thought so. It’s often said that the reason Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the rest of the German web of concentration camp suffering lasted so long was that no-one knew about what was going on in them.
So what if Jorge Semprún had had a mobile ‘phone and had somehow managed to use it to broadcast the camp conditions in Buchenwald to the outside world?
We’d maybe like to think that with this knowledge the Allies would have found a way of bringing a swift end to the genocide taking place in Germany, Poland and elsewhere.
But the evidence from Gaza suggests otherwise. Two years of direct visual testimony of the daily slaughter of Palestinians - mostly women and children - by the Israeli army are apparently not enough to persuade Western governments to bring an end to the carnage.
Far from it, in fact.
In the very week that a UN Special Committee has determined that Israel is committing a genocide, and concluded that Israeli President Isaac Herzog - among others - has incited the commission of genocide, UK Prime Minister welcomes the self-same Herzog to 10 Downing Street.
I’ve just attended an excellent conference on life in concentration camps in France, Germany and the USSR during and after the Second World War.
Much of the discussion turned on the different strategies employed by ex-inmates to communicate the horror of what had happened to them: how to express the inexpressible, describe the indescribable.
If we’re looking for a common denominator in this regard I think the closest we’ll get is ‘distancing’. This might seem counter-intuitive - after all, isn’t it exactly the fine-grained immediacy of the horror that needs to be communicated? If that’s the objective then some literary equivalent of the haptic shot in cinema seems to be what’s required.
But according to Spanish Buchenwald survivor Jorge Semprún, distancing is essential to effective communication of the horror. This is because ordinary language, ´factual’ language, won’t work: the quotidian simply isn’t up to the task of expressing the ineffable.
So Semprún insists on metaphor as a way of communicating what it’s like to be in possession of a body in the liminal, purgatorial, space between life and death. Metaphor creates a space in which the reader’s imagination can get to work, prompting precisely the instinctive, emotional and creative response that Semprún is aiming for.
Taking this a step further, he consistently employs fiction as a means of communicating the privations he underwent in Buchenwald and elsewhere. ‘No se llega nunca a la verdad sin un poco de invención´, he writes. ‘You never get to the truth without a little invention’. He’s come in for criticism on this score: if he admits to invention how can we know what’s true and what’s false?
But this is too literal an understanding of the distinction between fact and fiction and their relationship to the truth. There might not have been an actual Good Samaritan, for example, but the story tells a truth at least as accurately - and perhaps more so - than if he’d actually existed. And the same goes for every single fairy tale we tell our children.
So distancing, through metaphor and inventive fiction, is paradoxically a way of bringing the truth of the horror of concentration camps close to those of us fortunate enough not to have experienced them.
As the conference unfolded I couldn’t help thinking about another actually existing concentration camp at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean - Gaza. (For concentration camp it certainly is; the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a concentration camp as ‘a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard’).
Jorge Semprún had no way of communicating his experiences to the outside world while he was imprisoned in Buchenwald. And the same goes for all the others whose names we have come to know through their testimony: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Eli Wisesel, Varlam Shalamov, Józef Czapski and Elinor Lippe, among countless others.
What these testimonies have in common is that a) they were after the event, and b) they come to us via the written word.
Testimony from the concentration camp called Gaza couldn’t be more different. It comes to us live, direct, unfiltered, immediate. And it comes to us in visual form, 24 hours a day, incessantly and unsparingly, on our TV screens, mobiles and tablets. Literary inventiveness seems unnecessary. No doubt there’ll eventually be a literature of this genocide, this second Nakba, but thanks to modern communication technology we haven’t had to wait for it.
Is this a difference that makes a difference?
You might have thought so. It’s often said that the reason Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the rest of the German web of concentration camp suffering lasted so long was that no-one knew about what was going on in them.
So what if Jorge Semprún had had a mobile ‘phone and had somehow managed to use it to broadcast the camp conditions in Buchenwald to the outside world?
We’d maybe like to think that with this knowledge the Allies would have found a way of bringing a swift end to the genocide taking place in Germany, Poland and elsewhere.
But the evidence from Gaza suggests otherwise. Two years of direct visual testimony of the daily slaughter of Palestinians - mostly women and children - by the Israeli army are apparently not enough to persuade Western governments to bring an end to the carnage.
Far from it, in fact.
In the very week that a UN Special Committee has determined that Israel is committing a genocide, and concluded that Israeli President Isaac Herzog - among others - has incited the commission of genocide, UK Prime Minister welcomes the self-same Herzog to 10 Downing Street.
This puts the UK in direct contravention of Article 1 of the 1948 Genocide Convention which demands that contracting states ‘prevent and punish acts of genocide’. No-one - not even President Herzog - is immune from the charge of genocide - something which renowned human rights lawyer Keir Starmer is either unaware of or indifferent to.
So it seems to make no difference how testimony comes down to us - written, visual, delayed or immediate. Apparently it’s not the seed that counts, it’s where it lands. And when the soil is as contaminated by cruelty and indifference outside the camp as inside, the result is Starmer and Herzog shaking hands on the steps of 10 Downing Street while women and children continue to be butchered with impunity.
So it seems to make no difference how testimony comes down to us - written, visual, delayed or immediate. Apparently it’s not the seed that counts, it’s where it lands. And when the soil is as contaminated by cruelty and indifference outside the camp as inside, the result is Starmer and Herzog shaking hands on the steps of 10 Downing Street while women and children continue to be butchered with impunity.
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