La Escritura O La Vida: Writing Or Life

On a Sunday during the month of April in 1945, the III Army of General Patton freed Jorge Semprun, twenty-two years old, from the concentration camp at Buchenwald. During the autumn of that same year, he began to write about the monstrous paradox of having lived death, but found it impossible. As he says, It was not possible to write: it would have been impossible to survive the writing. I had to choose between writing and living, and I chose to live. "La escritura o la vida is not only the memory of death, but of all those experiences lived, past and present and enriched by reflection, which emerge charged with the emotion of finding oneself. Semprun could have simply written a testimony, but instead he chose the path of literary creation.