Biography

Jorge Semprún was born on December 10, 1923 in Madrid, Spain. He was a writer and actor, known for Z (1969), The Sidewalks of Saturn (1986) and The War Is Over (1966). He was married to Colette Leloup and Loleh Bellon. He died on June 7, 2011 in Paris, France.

You ask what haunts my writing. Well, after the camp there was the moral question of being a Communist. Trying to explain the folly and the necessity of that choice. Trying to show how it came to be my "Rasion D'Etre," and why this dead star hovered around so long above the previous century. Here are my obsessions, in no particular order: torture, the camps, the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, the singularity of that experience in the larger context of deportation. It is not easy to reflect on this issues today. Historically, the most significant pitfall has been the most dangerous-silence, the refusal to talk about what happened.

I came to believe that Communist rule was the most tragic event of the 20th century.

In the stories I tell there are always two specific ideas-deportation and Communism. Two things Americans do not understand.

I will always defend the legitimacy of literary fiction in expounding historical truth. In the case of deportation, both Jewish and non-Jewish, it is simply not possible to tell, or write the truth. The truth we experienced is not credible, and this is a fact that the Nazis relied upon in terms of their legacy.