Literature or Life

Jorge Semprun was twenty years old - already an accomplished philosopher and poet - when arrested by Nazis for activites in the French Resistance. He was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. Literature or Life, a bestseller in France, is a deeply personal account not only of Semprun's time at Buchenwald, but also of the years before and after, of his painful attempts to write this book...created out of obsessions that returned him again and again like themes in a nightmarish rhapsody.His long reverie on life-as-death, now translated with the mesmerizing power of fiction. It is a profound contribution to Holocaust literature. ? Semprun was awarded the Jerusalem prize at the 1997 Jerusalem International Book Fair. ? Semprun's first novel, The Long Voyage, won Europe's prestigious Formentor Prize.

Biographies & Memoirs

SEMPRÚN, Jorge

Arts & Literature

Penguin Publishing Group

Gasping for breath in a cattle truck occupied by 119 other men, a young Spaniard captured fighting with the French Resistance counts off the days and nights as the train rolls slowly but inexorably toward Buchenwald. On the five seemingly endless days of the journey, he has conversations that send him into daydreams about his childhood or set him fighting Resistance battles over again. He describes the temporary holding prison where the names of distant concentration camps are spoken of in whispers - their individual horrors discussed, rated, contemplated. In chilling detail, the trip with those 119 men - some fearful, some defiant - is evoked, along with his own confusion, anger, and bitter resignation. When at last the fantastic, Wagnerian gates to Buchenwald come into sight, the young Spaniard is left alone to face the camp.

The Long Voyage (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Penguin Classics

On March 1, 1995, at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, ARTE (a French-German state-funded television network) proposed an encounter between two highly-regarded figures of our time: Elie Wiesel and Jorge Semprún. These two men, whose destinies were unparalleled, had probably crossed paths―without ever meeting―in the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald in 1945. This short book is the entire transcription of their recorded conversation. During World War II, Buchenwald was the center of a major network of sub-camps and an important source of forced labor. Most of the internees were German political prisoners, but the camp also held a total of 10,000 Jews, Roma, Sinti, Jehovah's Witnesses, and German military deserters.
 In these pages, Wiesel and Semprún poignantly discuss the human condition under catastrophic circumstances. They review the categories of inmate at Buchenwald and agree on the tragic reason for the fate of the victims of Nazism―as well as why this fate was largely ignored for so long after the end of the war. Both men offer riveting testimony and pay vibrant homage to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Today, seventy-five years after the liberation of the Nazi camps, this book could not be more timely for its confrontation with ultra-nationalism and antisemitism.

It Is Impossible to Remain Silent: Reflections on Fate and Memory in Buchenwald

History

Wiesel, Élie

World

Indiana University Press

The Second Death of Ramon Mercader

Literature & Fiction

GROVE PRESS

What a Beautiful Sunday! (Abacus Books)

SPHERE

La Guerre est finie (Evergreen original)

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

The first Ramon Mercader assassinated Trotsky near a garden wall beneath the yellow sun of Mexico. This is the story of a second Mercader, twenty-five years later, in Amsterdam. But is it the same man, Trotsky's assassin? He is a killer, and deeply entangled in a strange kaleidoscope of events. When he arrives in Amsterdam on a mysterious mission, agents from the CIA, the East German Secret Police, and the Russian KGB, converge on the Dutch metropolis to shadow his every move. He sends telegrams, roams through the city, waits. A few days later he is found dead in his hotel room. From the moment Mercader's plane lands in Amsterdam to the final tragic climax, which turns into a transcontinental manhunt, Jorge Semprun grips the reader's attention in an important contemporary novel that poses in the guise of a spy thriller taut with suspense. On one level an exciting spy story in which the warring agents of Russia, America, and East Germany clash in the dark byways of Amsterdam, The Second Death of Ramon Mercader is far more than a fashionable thriller. It is a grand panorama of our violent time that traverses the high hopes of Soviet Communism and the collapse of ideology, the death of causes, the death of hopes, bright new worlds forever turning foul.

The Second Death Of Ramon Mercader

Grove

Stavisky

Penguin

A deeply personal, fictionalized account of one man's arrest for his work with the French Resistance during World War II describes his subsequent incarceration in Buchenwald concentration camp and his painful struggle to record his experiences.

Viking Adult

Le Grand Voyage

French & European Pubns

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Books by SEMPRÚN, Jorge