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Robert Antelme, a member of a French Resistance group headed by Francois Mitterrand, was arrested by the Gestapo in June 1944, sent to Buchenwald, then to a work camp in Germany where he almost died. His moving memoir The Human Race (1957), his only book, is dedicated to the task of tracing the outline of the “human” from the perspective of both victim and witness. Its close observation of language's most subtle nuances, in an uncompromising effort to represent the event in terms of the experience of the event rather than in the terms of the retrospective observer, makes its reading uncommonly demanding. This demand constitutes itself the gravest and most exposed self-testimony, one in which Antelme constantly warns against slipping into “comfortable” categories and against a possible escape into the saturated state of the “gratified” consciousness and conscience. Whether they concern the executioners or their victims, his descriptions are marked by the same gentle restlessness which turns its penetrating gaze upon the observer no less than upon the object of observation.
Survivors’ experience can sometimes be condensed in a single word. Primo Levi (1979), describing a recurrent dream he has about Auschwitz, narrows it thus: “[A] single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, ‘Wstawach’” (p. 380). Antelme's nightmare also points at a word that became etched in his memory: “Fertig!”—”that's it!” (Antelme, 1992/1957, p. 18) It is not just a word that holds the difference between the before and the after, the human and the inhuman, the pre-traumatic and the traumatic. Somehow this word is so powerful exactly because it is quoted (uttered as a direct speech) rather than told about: it is directed straight at the reader, a call one