Abstract

In this interview, Ruth Klüger, writer and survivor of Auschwitz, speaks of the wound of who, once alive outside the lager, has felt a “feeling of rejection” by the world that she thought it would have accepted her – as if the fault of the executioners had contaminated the victims. A separation that the survivor will live for all her life, both because, as a matter of fact, she feels to have a “double citizenship” between the alive and the dead – such that all in a sudden the normality breaks down and it gives way to the “old world” and the sensation that anything can be subtracted away – and because the witnesses, after having been rejected, they have turned into a generation of martyrs, object of a worship that can easily turn into nausea. However, the reflection on the human conditions cannot do away with the identification with what is acknowledged as similar, and for that reason a proximity is necessary.