A week in books: The survivor who bore witness to a century

If George Orwell, Albert Camus or Boris Pasternak were to speak in public in London, I think we can assume that the event would make a few tall waves.Those authors may be sadly unavailable, but a figure of more or less equal stature in the intellectual history of 20th-century Europe will be here, as large as life. So far as I can gather, virtually no one in our trivia-fixated media has yet noticed.

Jorge Semprun – Resistance fighter, Buchenwald survivor, former Spanish minister of culture and a literary witness to rank with Orwell or Levi – will be discussing his idea of Europe at the Institut Français in South Kensington, on Tuesday evening (29 January) at 7pm. What's more, to see and hear this very living legend will cost you precisely nothing.

Semprun has led an extraordinary life at the core of a continent's history. He was born into a noble family in Madrid in 1923, his father a celebrated editor and professor of law. Franco's revolt against democracy in 1936 sent the Sempruns into exile. As a gifted schoolboy in Paris in 1940, Jorge witnessed the German occupation and soon joined a Communist-led Resistance network. He was arrested in October 1943 along with one of the Resistance's fabled women leaders, Irène Chiot.

Interrogated by the Gestapo, he was imprisoned in Auxerre and then deported to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. The 18 months he spent there as inmate 44904 shaped all his future life and work. As a political detainee with Communist contacts behind the wire, perhaps he had some slight advantage in maintaining his morale over those prisoners earmarked for extermination on the grounds of so-called "race". If so, a lifetime's work of witness has more than paid that debt.

After the liberation, Semprun worked as a journalist and Unesco translator. Then, in 1953, he returned to Franco's Spain as a leading clandestine Communist activist under the alias "Federico Sanchez". He was expelled from the Party for dissent in 1964, just as his career as a writer of searing literary memoirs (or, if you prefer, autobiographical fiction) began.

The Long Voyage, his first book to explore the camp universe, appeared in 1963; it's currently in print as a Penguin 20th-Century Classic. He returned to the excruciating dilemmas of existence in hell 30 years later with Literature or Life (published by Penguin in the US), his sense of urgent testimony sharpened in the wake of Primo Levi's suicide.

Yet Semprun's bow holds many more strings. If you're any sort of film buff, it's likely that you know his work anyway. He wrote the screenplays for Costa-Gavras's masterly political thriller Z, for the same director's The Confession with Yves Montand (about the Stalinist side of modern tyranny), and also for Alain Resnais's Stavisky, which starred Jean-Paul Belmondo as the swindler who brought down a government in 1930s France. From 1988 to 1991, Semprun entered government himself as the culture minister for Felipe Gonzalez's Socialist administration in Madrid.

Not surprisingly, Semprun's wartime experience of "radical evil" has never loosened its imaginative grip. His latest, so far untranslated book La Mort qu'il Faut (2001) revisits the inferno of Buchenwald, once again probing the endless overlaps and slippages between memory, history and invention.

As time passes and most survivors leave the stage, he recently explained, so the task grows more, not less, pressing: "We're in the period when direct witnesses disappear, and there's an urgency about saying what you still have to say to conserve the bodily memory of things, before the word is finally given to historians or novelists".

Or, one might add, to Steven Spielberg. We can't enjoy an audience with Orwell, Levi or Camus, but Semprun certainly belongs in their company. Catch him while you can.

Institut Français: 020-7073 1350