5 classics so as not to forget Auschwitz

► The human species – 1947

Robert Antelme (1917-1990) was deported on 1^is June 1944 in the Buchenwald and Dachau camps due to his resistance activities. He was released in April 1945. Husband of Marguerite Duras, he quickly began writing the only book that he published in 1947, The human species. In this moving book, dedicated to his sister who died in deportation, he recounts the hell of the camps and chooses to show the humanity which imposed itself as the only bulwark against Nazi barbarism.

The style is stripped down, to better “see” the most concrete reality of the concentration camp universe. The author can describe in several pages the tension and desire aroused by the presence of a piece of bread in the hands of a weakened deportee. Admirable for the reflection carried out on what remains of humanity, this book is all the more remarkable because Robert Antelme wrote it barely after returning to freedom. Like an emergency to testify.

► Night – 1955

Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) was only 15 years old when he was deported with his family to Auschwitz. Ten years after his release in 1945, when his mother and one of his sisters were gassed and his father died of exhaustion, he began the story of his life in the camp and his inner collapse: “I will never forget these moments which murdered my God and my soul, and my dreams which took on the face of the desert”he writes in this breathtaking text, haunted as much by despair as by the hope that will arise Dawntitle of his next book. In a chilling scene, he notably recounts the execution by hanging of a child, with the imperative question: where is the good Lord? The answer explodes: God was “hanged here, on this gallows”.

► If it's a man – 1963

Italian Jew, chemist and survivor of the Auschwitz camp, Primo Levi (1919-1987) was deported in February 1944, at the age of 24. Deeply marked, he never stopped writing about the Shoah and the world of concentration camps, starting with If it's a manpublished in October 1947. But this is only a confidential print: for the public, this story comes too early, as the reading is so trying. It was in 1963, when Primo Levi published – under pseudonym – The Trucethat his first testimony is necessary. He talks about the cold, the hunger, the lack of solidarity. With If it's a manit is almost a sociological, distanced look that he takes on the camps and the dehumanization at work under Nazi rule.

► None of us will come back – 1965

Charlotte Delbo (1913-1985) was arrested with around a hundred resistance fighters, just like her husband. Georges Dudach is executed while Charlotte Delbo is sent to Auschwitz then Ravensbrück. “Since I had the privilege of witnessing this paroxysm of history, of participating in it, the chance to come back from it and the ability to write, well there was nothing left to do but write »she explained. In 1946, she began writing her testimony, but decided to wait twenty years before the publication of this major book. In a sober style, she describes in small scenes life in the camps, from which the deportees never completely return.

► Scripture or life – 1994

It also took time for Jorge Semprun (1923-2011) to put his story on paper. Arrested by the Gestapo in September 1943 for resistance, he was deported to Buchenwald. He only wrote this essential book in 1987, even if he had already mentioned in 1963 his transfer to Germany with The Great Journey. In Scripture or lifehe describes with surgical precision the humiliations, the violence, the death which surround the deportee. The distance from the event leads him to account for the power of art and literature in the face of totalitarian blindness.