On March 1, 1995, at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, ARTE (a French-German state-funded television network) proposed an encounter between two highly-regarded figures of our time: Elie Wiesel and Jorge Semprun. These two men, whose destinies were unparalleled, had probably crossed paths-without ever meeting-in the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald in 1945. This short book is the entire transcription of their recorded conversation. During World War II, Buchenwald was the center of a major network of sub-camps and an important source of forced labor. Most of the internees were German political prisoners, but the camp also held a total of 10,000 Jews, Roma, Sinti, Jehovah's Witnesses, and German military deserters. In these pages, Wiesel and Semprun poignantly discuss the human condition under catastrophic circumstances. They review the categories of inmate at Buchenwald and agree on the tragic reason for the fate of the victims of Nazism-as well as why this fate was largely ignored for so long after the end of the war. Both men offer riveting testimony and pay vibrant homage to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Today, seventy-five years after the liberation of the Nazi camps, this book could not be more timely for its confrontation with ultra-nationalism and antisemitism.

Jorge Semprun was twenty years old - already an accomplished philosopher and poet - when arrested by Nazis for activites in the French Resistance. He was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. Literature or Life, a bestseller in France, is a deeply personal account not only of Semprun's time at Buchenwald, but also of the years before and after, of his painful attempts to write this book...created out of obsessions that returned him again and again like themes in a nightmarish rhapsody. His long reverie on life-as-death, now translated with the mesmerizing power of fiction. It is a profound contribution to Holocaust literature.
? Semprun was awarded the Jerusalem prize at the 1997 Jerusalem International Book Fair.
? Semprun's first novel, "The Long Voyage," won Europe's prestigious Formentor Prize.

Son of a Republican family of gentry, Jorge Semprun was born in Madrid in 1923. By then, in Europe, Hitler had failed his first attempt at control, Lenin was at the gates of death, in the Soviet Union the first labor camp was organized, and Spain started to live the early days of the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera.

It is 1943. In a narrow, sealed freight wagon, 120 deportees travel across France on their way to a concentration camp. It is an increasingly anguishing journey as no one knows when the trip towards horror will end.