502
PARTISAN REVIEW
Rousset tends to justify the role of the politicals, the majority German
Communists who, when the Allied troops reached Buchenwald, were
obliged to flee for their lives with the S.S. The detailed story of the last
days of Buchenwald, the attempt of the S.S. to evacuate the camp,
the he:;itations of the camp bureaucrats-who had defended the turpi–
tudes which were inseparable from their power on the grounds that their
power alone could prevent the physical liquidation of the entire camp
population-all this offers some of the most dramatic and revealing
political instruction since Kronstadt.)
By remaining on the plane of general causality, Rousset neglects
one of the most important lessons of the camps. The great political prob–
lem of our time is not to demonstrate the malignant disorder of capital–
ism, but to face up to the question: what comes next? The camps, as
the S.S. understood, are an answer to that question. The Soviet regime
offers an analogous answer, and it is no accident tha t a greater per–
centage of the Soviet population is interned than anywhere else in the
world. Can anyone but the sleepwalkers, who live in the illusion that the
nineteenth century would go on and on
if
people only stopped watching
the calendar, fail to recognize in this formul ation the decisive political
issue of the camps? We must decide what comes next,
what comes now.
Our behavior, as prisoners and as free men-for we are all prisoners and
all free men--cannot
be
sanctioned by appealing to a distant and ready–
made future. There is no future other than the one our present creates.
And it is in our behavior, as prisoners and as free men, that we decide
what meaning the whole adventure shall have.
IV
Eating Claude-Edmonde's sandwi:..hes and reading her copy of
Sur
le bard,
I was suddenly filled with enthusiasm. I took the volume over
to Patrick, who was just receiving another libation from Marcelle Sibon
and murmuring stubbornly:
"No entiendo el francCs."
I told him that
he had understood,
poetica
if not
politicamente,
that the answer began
by refusing to function in the world's systems of servitudes. By refusing
the circles of power and subjection.
Ton pays c'est le mien et c'est celui des negres
Son ge au nombre de drapeaux qu'on pourrait
tailler dans les robes des pretres morts
Qu'y avait-il encore ah oui cette couche de glace
fondante
Sous laquelle il est interdit par la loi d'aller se noyer*
*Your country is mine and that of the Negroes
Think of the number of flags one could cut from
the gowns of the dead priests
What else was there
ah
yes that layer of melting ice
Under which it was forbidden by law to go and drown
oneself
