Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

On November 12th 1949, four weeks after the execution in Budapest of László Rajk, David Rousset published in Le Figaro littéraire an appeal to former inmates of Nazi camps to assist him in establishing an enquiry into Soviet concentration camps. Basing himself on the Soviet Union’s own Code of Corrective Labor, he argued that these were not re-education centers as officials asserted, but rather a system of concentration camps integral to the Soviet economy and penal system. A week later, again in Les Lettres françaises, the Communist writers Pierre Daix and Claude Morgan accused him of inventing his sources and caricaturing the USSR in a base calumny. Rousset sued for defamation. The dramatis personae in this confrontation were unusually interesting. Rousset was no Kremlin defector. He was French; a longtime socialist; a sometime Trotskyist; a Resistance hero and survivor of Buchenwald and Neuengamme; a friend of Sartre and co-founder with him in 1948 of a short-lived political movement, the Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire. For such a man to accuse the Soviet Union of operating concentration or labor camps broke sharply with the conventional political alignments of the time. Daix, too, had been arrested for Resistance activities and deported, in his case to Mauthausen. For two left-wing former Resisters and camp survivors to clash in this way illustrated the degree to which past political alliances and allegiances were now subordinated to the single question of ...