Écrire sa vie. Entretien avec Jorge Semprun

Holocaust denial, Le Vicaire, and the absent presence of Nadine Fresco and Paul Rassinier in Jorge Semprún's La Montagne blanche

“…Rassinier is never absent from Semprún's oeuvre. He is present not as an individual, but as a superego for Semprún, who drew his subjects from his own life and believed that the artifice of fiction was essential to convey the truth of life as a Communist and resister in France, Buchenwald, and Spain, and the subsequent traumas he experienced: “j'ai toujours le sentiment que la vérité a parfois besoin d'un peu d'artifice pour être crédible, vraiment vraie” (Alliès, 1994: 24; Semprún, 1991: 357; Semprún, 1996a: 165–167, 217, 262). Semprún presented his decision to write his first account of deportation, Le grand voyage , as a response to listening to the Mauthausen survivor Manuel Azaustre tell his story without artifice:I will always defend the legitimacy of literary fiction in expounding historical truth.…”

“…However, Semprún's own accounts of the Spanish Communist party leadership and its policies are factual in nature, because he believed that this was a more effective way of countering the denials and mistruths he saw at work in the leadership's recounting of its past and his past: “il n'y a pas un nom qui soit faux, on n'a pas pu me démentir sur un fait. Il y a un effort de véracité historique” (Alliés, 1994: 26). Rather than a traumatic event that those who did not experience it will need literary artifice to grasp, Semprún made the case against the party in historical narratives.…”