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Socialist Review, October 1993

Lee Humber

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Books

Light in the darkness

From Socialist Review, No. 168, October 1993.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

The Cattle Truck
Jorge Semprun
Serif £8.99

On 9 November 1938, 30,000 German Jews were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps. One thousand were murdered in this operation. Synagogues, homes and businesses were destroyed. It was the start of the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’ which was to see six million Jewish people murdered by Hitler’s thugs in the course of the Second World War.

With the racism of anti-semitism at the core of their ideology the Nazis scapegoated Jews for all society’s ills. They made them the target for the anger and despair of millions who had lost their jobs and their homes in the great slump of the 1930s, much as today’s Nazis across Europe attempt to build political influence in the recession racked 1990s.

Hitler’s Nazis built concentration camps and special extermination camps like Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec, whose sole purpose was to commit murder on a mass scale. Of the estimated two million who entered these camps, barely a hundred survived. These are the facts that Jean-Marie Le Pen of the French National Front calls mere ‘details of history’, the events that the racist historian David Irving denies ever happened.

Gays, lesbians, Gypsies, trade unionists, socialists and Communists were forced into the camps along with Jews. The author, Jorge Semprun, was a Communist sent to Buchenwald camp while still in his teens and his book is the memories he has of his life in the Resistance, his journey to the camp and his release.

Semprun was a Rotspanier, a ‘Spanish Red’ who had fought against the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War before fleeing to France to join the Resistance. Crammed, standing up along with 119 others in a freezing and airless cattle truck, he spent five days and nights en route to the slave camp as the war drew to a close.

In pain from previous beatings, surrounded by the suffering of his fellow prisoners and with the memories of the hardships and deaths of his comrades haunting him, Semprun could be forgiven for writing a bitter story of despair. But that is not the case. Instead, even the most brutal and desperate stories he recounts have an element of resistance and hope.

The most shocking of his memories concerns a truckload of Polish Jews which arrived at Buchenwald while he was there. The men were stacked into the freight train almost 200 to a car, travelling for days without food and water in the coldest winter of the war. On arrival all in the carriage had frozen to death except for 15 children, kept warm by the others in the centre of the bundle of bodies. When the children were emptied from the car the Nazis let their dogs loose on them. Soon only two fleeing children were left and as Semprun recounts:

‘The little one began to fall behind, the SS were howling behind them and then the dogs began to howl too, the smell of blood was driving them mad, and then the bigger of the two children slowed his pace to take the hand of the smaller ... together they covered a few more yards ... till the blows of the clubs felled them and, together they dropped, their faces to the ground, their hands clasped for all eternity.’

It is this feeling of comradeship and fraternity and the deep felt belief in the necessity of resistance that marks every aspect of the book. Semprun’s socialist ideals have never left him, even after the experience of the camps and the ups and downs of struggle in the years since the war. He still retains his belief in human beings and their ability to change the world for the better.

Throughout he is very careful to draw a distinction between the racist Nazi ideology and the different sorts of people who carry it out. For the SS he has nothing but utter hatred. But for other German soldiers he shows a different understanding. After conversations with a prison guard from Hamburg, often out of work ‘till the Nazis came along and started up the industrial machine of re-militarization again’, Semprun says:

‘We’re on opposite sides of the bars, and never have I understood more clearly why I was fighting. We had to make this man’s being habitable, or rather the being of all men like him; because for him it was no doubt already too late. We had to make the being of this man’s sons habitable ... it was no more complicated than that ... For it’s quite simply a question of instituting a classless society.’

Over the 50 years since Semprun experienced the terrors of Nazism, this conclusion remains the most important fact of human life. It lies at the heart of the fight against the Nazis today and makes Semprun’s book an important one for all socialists to read.


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