Although written as a memoir, it was initially marketed in Spain as fiction because of political sensitivities after Franco’s death in 1975. The book drew lavish international praise for its powerful insider’s account of a political party coming to grips with de-Stalinization.
Jorge Semprun Maura was born in Madrid on Dec. 10, 1923. After his family moved to France, he dedicated himself to French underground guerilla forces fighting the Germans.
(MIGUEL MEDINA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES) - Jorge Semprun said his experience as a prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp at first deadened his desire to write.
Captured by the Gestapo in 1943, he was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany for the remainder of the war. He attributed his survival to having obtained a desk job through his fluency in German — thanks to a German nanny from childhood — and influential connections in the underground.
Once liberated from Buchenwald by the Americans, he found himself too emotionally deadened to pursue a longheld interest in writing.
“For the first 17 years of my life, I never doubted that I was a writer, even though I’d written nothing — just the usual youthful fragments,” he later told the London Independent. “And then, what was I going to write if not about Buchenwald? Some little romantic novel, about first love or rites of passage? [Holocaust survivor and author] Primo Levi said that in writing one is liberated and returns to life, whereas I didn’t return to life but remained locked in death.”
Mr. Semprun initially thought that his involvement in politics was the way forward. Then, once expelled from the communist party, he turned full time to writing books and screenplays.
He worked again with Resnais, on the French political drama “Stavisky” (1974), but was better known for his collaboration with Costa-Gavras, which included stinging indictments of fascism including “The Confession” (1970), about the Stalin-sponsored show trials in Czechoslovakia, and “State of Siege” (1975), a political kidnapping drama set in Latin America. Both Costa-Gavras films starred Montand.
Mr. Semprun’s early marriage, to French actress and playwright Loleh Bellon, ended in divorce; a son from that marriage died. Mr. Semprun later married Colette Leloup, who died in 2007. Survivors include five children from that marriage.
In addition to his films, Mr. Semprun made significant contributions to Holocaust literature. His first book, “Le Grand Voyage,” published in France in 1964, was a fictionalized account of his journey by train to Buchenwald.
After it was translated decades later into English as “The Long Voyage” and “The Cattle Truck,” critic Amanda Hopkinson, writing in the New Statesman, called Mr. Semprun’s work “essential reading.”
Mr. Semprun’s other books included “Quel Beau Dimanche (What a Beautiful Sunday!),” a novel set at Buchenwald that flashes backward and forward in time and that was influenced by Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn’s novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.”
In his highly praised 1994 book “L’Ecriture ou la Vie (Literature or Life),” Mr. Semprun wrote about the struggle of describing the Holocaust — how to put the unimaginable horrors into words.
Art, and especially literature, he later told an Israeli reporter, “can transform culture, and through this process, society. Only minimally, of course. It’s obvious that it is wars, revolutions and big capital that really make the crucial differences. Literature is not a privileged activity separated and alienated from the real world. Even the most abstract writers still somehow bear witness to reality.”
Loading...
Comments