Pièces de résistance: The Dramas of Resistance and Torture in the Work of Jorge Semprún

Abstract

Abstract: Contemporary Western society has taken its ideas and representations of resistance from the French resistance in World War II. But these are more often evoked than elucidated. Participation in the resistance in France and at Buchenwald and in the Communist underground in Franco's Spain shaped Jorge Semprún. Analysis of what he took from these experiences is revealing. Semprún began with resistance as an existential choice that challenged individuals' identities, a question he explored in the resistance of Jews and, in his case, of a bourgeois man of letters in the making. Semprún came to see that to resist meant to join with others, to put one's life in their hands and to take responsibility for their lives. This is why the torture of resisters to make them reveal information about others is so central to his thought on resistance. When Semprún left the Communist party, he developed his ideas on torture and resistance. After the war, the Communists tortured some of his Communist concentration camp comrades, not to obtain information, but to get those being tortured to learn what they wanted them to recite in show trials. Semprún came to feel that as a former Communist, he developed a resistance to references to the fraternity at the heart of resistance when they were was used as an element of control by the Communist party. He wrote in an effort to spread that immunity.