'If I spoke out, I'd betray others,' Robert would answer me. And in chorus, they would add, 'You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.' But in the end, who's going to eat all those omelettes? The broken eggs will rot and fester in the earth. 'It's already festering.' Yes, that's true. Too many things are true; they make my head spin, all those truths fighting each other. I wonder how they keep from getting all mixed up. As for me, I don't know how to add four hundred million Chinese and fifteen million slave labourers. And besides, maybe what you have to do is subtract. In any case, all those calculations are false. One man plus one woman doesn't make two men; it will forever make one plus one. All right, I'm wrong in resorting to arithmetic; to make order out of chaos, you have to turn to dialectics. It's a matter of getting beyond the slave labourers to the Chinese people. Good. Let's get beyond. Everything passes; 'all is vanity and vexation of spirit'; we'll be past all this some day. We'll have got beyond the camps, and we'll have got beyond my own existence. It's laughable, this little ephemeral life brooding over those camps which the future had already abolished! History takes care of itself and each one of us into the bargain. Let's just keep quiet, then, each in his own little hole.

Well, then, why don't they keep quiet? That's the question I asked Robert more than twenty years ago, when I was a student. He laughed at me, but I'm not sure today that he ever completely convinced me. They pretended to believe that humanity is a single, immortal person, that one day it will be rewarded for all its sacrifices, and that I, myself, will receive my due. But I don't accept that: death nibbles at everything. The sacrificed generations won't rise from their graves to take part in the final love feasts; what might console them is that the chosen ones will join them under the earth at the end of a very brief interval spent above it. Between happiness and unhappiness, there isn't perhaps as much difference as one might think.