In 1955, Alain Resnais's now canonical documentary, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) ended with an ominous question, asking “who, among us, is keeping watch from this strange watchtower [of the ruins of Auschwitz] to warn of the arrival of our new executioners” who might bring about the return of the “concentrationary plague?” One man had already made it his mission to do so: the French writer and former political deportee David Rousset. Rousset had shaken the French world of letters and politics with the 1946 publication of L'univers concentrationnaire (The Concentrationary Universe), which warned of the civilizational and moral cesura that the Nazi camps had been. The term quickly became a widely used conceptual framework. Former deportee and Catholic writer Jean Cayrol borrowed from it to write his voice-over to Night and Fog. In 1949, Rousset published another text that created a scandal in Cold War France: an Appeal to “fellow deportees” calling upon them to “investigate the USSR's concentrationary universe” (Kuby, 46). This indictment fiercely divided the French left. In 1950, he brought a libel suit against another former deportee, communist writer Pierre Daix, who had accused him of amnesiac “apoliticism” (Kuby, 65–6; Dean, 61). Just before, in the wake of his Appeal, Rousset had founded an organization against concentrationary regimes with those, like him, who had been political deportees. In 1951, it put the Soviet Union on trial for crimes against humanity. Rousset and his organization were involved in many trials, eager to denounce the “new executioners” who had revived the “scourge of the camps” in the postwar world. For many today, he is an “exceptional” man because, as philosopher and critic Tzvetan Todorov argues, he was not paralyzed by the memory of “this painful experience”; instead, he harnessed it into action against dehumanizing state violence. For Todorov, Rousset had allowed morality to prevail over base political considerations.
