Sheep magazine archive 1: issues 3-9

8
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 the 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 bittert 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 a 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 hads clasped for all eternity.’
It is this feeling of comradeship and fraternity
and the deep 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.
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 3