Jorge Semprún(1923-2011)

He served as Spain's Minister of Culture from 1988-1991 under Socialist Prime Minister Felipe González.

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.