Despite the dichotomy between writing and life that presides over Semprún ’ s literary work dedicated to his deportation to the Buchenwald camp , his perspective is never rigid , since he understood the word “ testimony ” not as absolute truth , but as a possibility of truth . This is what he stated in the prologue he wrote for El no de Klara by Soazig Aron ( 2003 ): “ narration does not aim to reconstruct a documentary truth , but to create a spiritual reality ”.
To finish , I would like to mention an interesting feature of Semprún ’ s testimonial work that makes it somewhat easy to read despite the tragic content . I am referring to the short duration of the narrative voice within the camp . The past is reconstructed narratively through chains of thought that lead us outside the concentration camp , so that we can open ourselves to reflecting on other topics ranging from history to more subjective issues such as experiences
of love . This technique allows us to temporarily avoid the concentration camp issue and helps us to identify with other aspects of the narrator ’ s life or existence at the same time . In other words , as readers , we are often “ outside the camp ”.
The constant flashbacks that characterise Semprún ’ s literature remind us that the narrator ’ s life should not be interpreted as frozen in an experience , but rather makes sense both in the periods before and after the deportation . It is a life that has to do with politics , but also with knowledge . All this knowledge — we could call it academic knowledge — will act as a guide . It will be the Virgil of Semprún ’ s work , which will rescue us as readers from a knowledge otherwise impossible to share , that of the Nazi camp . But it also saves the author , who sees himself trapped in the dichotomy between writing and life .
3 . The long voyage , cover of the first edition published by Gallimard , Paris , in 1963 4 . Literature or Life ( L ' Ecriture Ou La Vie ), Memoir by Jorge Semprun , 1994
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