Georges Perec, a writer who experimented with new literary formulas with each work, wrote a record of memories in his book
I remember
.
Reading it one also wants to emulate a list that speaks of objects, scenes, characters of a time.
But if we know the history of the author we can ask ourselves if there is not really an exercise of not naming some memories, because in his case and in his history there are dramatic events that must have marked him.
His father died in combat a few years earlier, but his mother was arrested by the French police when he was seven years old, on January 23, 1943 in Paris, and later deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Both his mother and his sister Soura and his grandparents David Peretz and Aaron Schulevitz were murdered.
In Perec that will to leave his story in the air of his memory, remembering the festive in a list of 480
I remember
unrelated to his tragedy, it perhaps indicates a firm will to say to the criminal: I'm moving on, placing what he remembers in a secret place other than oblivion, but always present.
Many survivors point out that living, seeing his grandchildren, is his victory against Auschwitz.
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The last survivors of Auschwitz cry out that their memory not fall into oblivion
If the exercise of personal forgetfulness allows us to continue living, the forgetfulness exercised by countries, sometimes imposed, can place us on the side of injustice with the victims and give the perpetrators one last victory.
Heirs of official stories in which dissidence or versions of the other side seldom crept in, society has often been subjugated by stories organized from a will to condemn the future.
But in the last century, more than ever before, faced with the misrepresentation of historical facts, many victims decided to exercise their right to tell, even if that meant having to remember what hurts.
Mel Mermelstein, during his testimony in 1986 in the trial against Holocaust deniers. Bettmann (Bettmann Archive)
On January 28, Mel Mermelstein died, who presented a notarial document that narrated his confinement in Auschwitz and in which he recounted how
Nazi soldiers led
his mother, his two sisters and others to gas chamber number 5. He presented it as evidence against those who still dared to deny these facts.
And it marked a milestone.
Individual experience completes the margin, just like literature from fiction.
Not so long ago in Spain, Violeta Friedman, with the help of the Bene Berith organization, faced León Degrelle in a historic trial.
She had never talked about his history in a concentration camp, but when she heard Degrelle denying the truth, she decided to act.
For his part, Degrelle, a collaborator and responsible for the death of many, was not silent, instructed young people and even wrote to Pope John Paul II to warn him, almost threateningly, that it was a mistake to grieve over Auschwitz.
By changing history, he could save himself.
Whoever is interested in looking for the letter on the internet, it is a laborious exercise in die-
cutting
.
Violeta won in court.
Violeta Friedman, a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
The personal diaries and the testimonies nail a sting to the History, especially the official one.
Sociology and cultural anthropology dedicate studies and analyzes to this phenomenon.
Journalism also contributes to delimit and expand the data.
“From the pragmatic use of the past conceived as a given fact, the past was passed as an object of knowledge, which can be reconstructed through traces that, through procedures, can be interpreted and organized in a
true
narrative that includes descriptions, explanations and interpretations” (patricia Cardona).
Francesca Annette Wieviorka maintains that the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 opened a new time, the "era of the witness".
Historians and witnesses, therefore, fulfill functions that cannot be interchanged.
Memory and History are condemned to need each other, to complete each other, but also to confront each other.
If memory has made it possible to build peace, History must commit itself to a truth that allows building towards the future, taking responsibility for the rubble and the wounds.
And because "books are a simulacrum of memory, a prosthesis to remember, a desperate attempt to make what is irremediably finite a little more lasting," as Héctor Abad Faciolince wrote.
Reading testimonies and literary works will save us, because the witness needs the
listener
, a reader to complete the chain.
In nomine de Auschwitz
has just been published ,
a poetic anthology by Carlos Morales: reading those poems, becoming complicit readers, allows us to continue the work of clearing up our recent histories.
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