French Forum

On Having Died

A common theme in Holocaust literature is that of having already died in the camps (see Ames; Davis, “Littérature” 60–65). Nowhere perhaps is the paradox expressed more clearly than in Dan Pagis’s poem, “An Opening to Satan” (30):

As he waited in front of the new invention,Danton said, “The verb to guillotine(this brand-new verb of ours) is limitedin the tenses and persons of its conjugation:for example, I shall not have a chance to sayI was guillotined.”Acute and poignant, that sentence, but naive.Here am I (and I’m nobody special),I was beheadedI was hangedI was burnedI was shotI was massacred.I was forgotten.

In L’Écriture ou la vie (1994) Buchenwald survivor Jorge Semprun explores this paradox in a philosophical vein: “Une idée m’est venue, soudain [. . .], la sensation [.. . .] de ne pas avoir échappé à la mort, mais de l’avoir traversée. D’avoir été, plutôt, traversé par elle. De l’avoir vécue, en quelque sorte. [. . .] J’étais un revenant, en somme” (27, see also 183–84).

Elsewhere he adds: [End Page 179]

Car la mort n’est pas une chose [. . .] dont nous aurions réchappé, comme d’un accident dont on serait sorti indemne. Nous l’avons vécue . . . Nous ne sommes pas des rescapés, mais des revenants . . . [. . .] ce n’est pas crédible [. . .], à peine compréhensible, puisque la mort est, pour la pensée rationnelle, le seul évènement dont nous ne pourrons jamais faire l’expérience individuelle. . . .

(121)

These ruminations remain somewhat abstract in L’Écriture ou la vie. Seven years later however, Semprun publishes Le mort qu’il faut (2001) where the experience of having died is dramatized and explored. Le mort qu’il faut describes a previously untold episode from Semprun’s camp experience. An episode “refoulé si loin qu’il était sorti de ma mémoire” (Semprun, interview, Gallimard). The communist organization in Buchenwald discovers a message from Berlin enquiring about Semprun, and decides that to protect him, his identity will be swapped with that of a dying inmate. “On a le mort qu’il faut!,” the autobiographical narrator is told by his friend Kaminsky in the text’s opening line. A Muselmann who is about to die has been located, “le mort qu’il me fallait pour continuer à vivre” (97–98). The narrator is asked to present himself in the Revier, the camp’s medical clinic, for the swapping of identities to be performed. He passes the night in the room of the dying, near the Muselmann whose identity he is supposed to assume. The dying Muselmann miraculously turns out to be François L., a Muselmann the narrator had befriended weeks before, and whom he had already then seen as a sort of double of himself. The narrator accompanies François in his agony and death. In the morning, he assumes his identity—he himself has officially died—only to discover that the message from Berlin that necessitated the entire affair was benign.

Semprun’s text is a miraculous story of having died and yet remaining alive. It bodies forth the acute paradox of being dead, while still writing about that death. Danton’s citation in Pagis excludes the possibility of death being part of individual experience, but as Pagis and Semprun both claim, the experience of the camps renders it possible.¹

The life that was one’s own prior to deportation could be felt to have ended in the camps. To be sure, literary testimony is produced by those who survive to tell, but this survival is to some extent an illusion. In a sense, one really has died. In that sense one is, when writing, one’s own ghost. One writes as a witness to the death of oneself. If the time in the camp continuously bordered on death, was saturated with death; if it can even be seen as equivalent to death, and if those who tell the stories are [End Page 180] those who have survived to tell, then every camp narrative...