Last night I read The Long Voyage with greater clarity. But this reading experience is vastly different from that of—probably almost exactly—a year ago. In part, my knowledge and understanding has increased. Last year, when I read Literature or Life, I tended to go over practically every sentence at least twice, as if I might distill its essence in this way. I wanted, or needed, to squeeze the slightest drop of information out of each line, each thought, every considered reflection. Now I am better educated with respect to the events Semprún deals with in his novels. Now the foundation of my understanding has been laid. Now it is not the whole that is so shocking and bewildering, but the particulars of the separate stories that he recalls. Like that of the dozen or so Jewish children who survived a winter exodus from camps in Poland. Most of the adults had died packed and frozen together (200 in a boxcar), and when the doors opened some of them tumbled out like logs, while others had to be pried free of each other. All of these corpses were stacked on the landing. Then the group of young survivors were discovered, and something had to be done with them. So Semprún describes what happened, the clubs and dogs and finally the single bullet in the back of each neck of each child who lay in the snow of that last winter of the war.
Or the disappearance of Hans, without a trace, after the group of maquis to which he belonged was ambushed and slaughtered. Hans, who was not only German but Jewish, had stayed behind with the automatic rifle, providing cover for the others who fled back into the forest that covered that particular mountainside. Hans, as Semprún recalls, was determined not to die as a Jew, or merely because he was a Jew, or at least not to allow the SS to treat and kill him like a Jew, the same way they treated and murdered an estimated six million Jews. So Hans stayed behind with the automatic rifle and did what he could and nothing was ever known of him after that. When Semprún returns to the farm below the mountainside after the war is over and he has been repatriated to France (despite his not being French), the farmers tell him what they know, but they can’t say precisely what became of Hans because nobody knows. And when Semprún walks up into the hills, and finds the area where the base camp was established, there is nothing—or hardly anything—to suggest that any of this ever was.
Of course this is the essence of the dilemma Semprún deals with in all his novels, the problem of remembering. And he isn’t the only author, or survivor, to do so. Memory is at the heart of any work of fiction, and the endless questions of memory operate in non-fiction as well. Historical accounts of actual events are meant to be based on some sort of documentary evidence, but practically all of this evidence disintegrates with time. Sometimes it is destroyed on purpose, so as to leave no trace. This is what the Nazis tried to do with an extermination camp like Treblinka, simply erase it from the experience of the world, so that nothing would be left to indicate what had happened there. In our own time there are countless examples of those implicated in wrong, illegal and immoral affairs trying to clean up after themselves so as to leave nothing behind that might incriminate them. And even in this age of instantaneous digital archiving, especially of images, we might imagine that such deceit—such cheating of memory, or history—would be more difficult. But at the same time we know how easy it is to delete a file, an image, or anything else, from a hard drive. Yes, our lives may be more widely (and perhaps more shallowly) documented than any lives before our time, but we would be foolish to imagine that the essential problems and difficulties of memory have been resolved in any way, that it will be any easier for future generations to remember what happened to us. Because no matter how much hard evidence we may have, there are always gaps in the story line, and these empty spaces can only be filled in with the work of imagination. Hence the dilemma remains unchanged: not only how to remember, but how not to forget.