Jorge Semprún

He served as Spain's Minister of Culture from 1988-1991 under Socialist Prime Minister Felipe González.
The son of a diplomat for the Spanish Republic, he went into exile in France at the end of the Civil War, at the age of fifteen.
After joining the French Resistance in 1942, he was arrested by the Nazis in September 1943 and sent to Buchenwald, where he remained imprisoned until 1945.
His first novel, The Long Voyage (1963), about his experiences in the French Resistance and as a prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp, won the prestigious Formentor Prize.
Using the nom de guerre "Federico Sánchez," Semprún served in the Spanish Communist underground, fighting against Franco's Fascist dictatorship, from 1947 until 1964, when he was expelled from the Party for his anti-Stalinist views.

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.
I came to believe that Communist rule was the most tragic event of the 20th century.
In the stories I tell there are always two specific ideas-deportation and Communism. Two things Americans do not understand.
I will always defend the legitimacy of literary fiction in expounding historical truth. In the case of deportation, both Jewish and non-Jewish, it is simply not possible to tell, or write the truth. The truth we experienced is not credible, and this is a fact that the Nazis relied upon in terms of their legacy.

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