I promised a foreword or something along those lines for the catalogue of my friend, the Flemish painter Jan Vanriet.

The exhibition is related to the place at which it has been organized – the former Dossin Barracks, where political prisoners and above all Belgian Jews were held temporarily before being deported to Auschwitz. Vanriet’s subject is the loss of the individual’s face in the camp in the hopeless end-time.

Do the persecuted really lose their faces?

They have no presence, that much is true. They are turned in on themselves, no smiles, only sternness: avoid expression at all cost.

That is their message: I will say nothing here.

We are together, turned in on ourselves.

Even when a photographer shoots a rapid burst of pictures round about him.

And you pull back from your beaten face and leave it behind. Is the guard watching you? No answer comes.

For the prisoner in his camp uniform, spooning up the food that is identical for all, and humiliated and mocked by everything and everyone, this is the only means of resistance: the austerity of nothing.

He does not respond, to either the fists or the whip.

He thinks: if I am nobody in your eyes, I can assure you that in my eyes you are nobody either, you do not exist, I pay you no attention, I am not even aware of you.

You are a shrieking puppet in a uniform.

Someone who reduces me to nothing, according to the rules and in his own way.

We come close to the bone of our skulls.

Nothing and nothing regard one another.

Beings reduced to camp numbers move to command.

There can be no question of human dignity in their case, they have no personality and may not have one either; they may be nothing but obedient instruments of the camp’s will.

To be an individual with a face of your own is a form of rebellion in the camp.

The soul withdraws behind the visible face, behind the inscrutability, the clenched teeth, the half-closed eyelids.

The prisoner stares out before him, at the mud, at the puddles of rainwater.

The guard can stamp the prisoner into the mud, but what can the prisoner do?

He cannot strike back if he does not want an immediate bullet in the head.

He can say: I am still here and will be for a while longer.

He collects the minutes of life and appeals to... well, to what?

To the future, which might not be there tomorrow?

Or rather to the past, which cannot be confiscated? All those the prisoner cared for, who belonged to him, who were his loved ones, cannot be taken away from him retrospectively; his brothers and sisters were, however, cremated yesterday.

The camp guards have no power over his past, which can still be brought to life.

The true reality was when he was still living.

The old hours swarm out like bees from the hive.

They free themselves and fly off into the future that calls out, and the prisoner follows, or at least drags himself in their direction.

The call of the past takes on an invulnerable power.

The past transforms within the prisoner into the future.

The inner strength of the tormented human being is inviolate and continues to exist until the moment of his death, which is perhaps close. We have lived, and when we are old, we know that with greater certainty than we did back in the baby bath.

At every age, human beings coincide more with what they have been prior to that moment than with what might yet follow.

*

When the prisoner feels he no longer possesses the strength to endure the present and to obey the call of the future, the cornered person might seek liberation in death.

The prisoner who submits to death is an escaper who can never be recaptured.

A silent army drags itself past the eyes of the camp command, each member an escaper.

You cannot catch me any more in death, the prisoner thinks.

There are no more guards there, no more kapos.

Regardless of his past, the prisoner becomes kin to his fellow prisoner who stands alongside him, whatever his origins.

He knows more about death than we do, the living and the survivors; he sees the panic before and the repose that follows, when Game Over flashes on the screen.

Anyone who has witnessed so many scenes of death can think soberly about the last step. From the perspective of ‘non-living’, the distinction between the different forms of ‘still living’ is relative.

The twentieth century was the era of the great reduction.

It was customary to argue that something complex was nothing other, nothing more than something much simpler.

Nothing other is the magic phrase.

The preachers of totalitarian power do not see the piles of corpses. If you can grasp the electric wire in the concentration camp and choose a quick end, an invisible struggle is played out between the survivor and the escaper fleeing into death.

When an artist considers this theme, he faces the dilemma of having to choose the perspective from which he wishes to show the process of destroying or of being destroyed; on which side he sees the active force – on that of the murderers or that of the victims?

It is the murderer who acts; the victim does not, of that there is no doubt. The victim undresses and stands where he is ordered to stand, where the bullet will come, or the gas.

Is it possible that obedience is the mask of the secret escaper?

*

There was another liberation too.

Sixty-seven percent of European Jews were killed. That is the average, and the figure does not vary much.

It was the proportion not only in Hungary, but in the Netherlands and Belgium as well.

That means one third survived and had the responsibility of reconstructing their faces.

In photographs from after the war, I already see the smiles of the returned.

Even those who had been to the depths of hell could smile.

Yesterday’s camp inmates wrote poems too, contrary to Professor Adorno’s prediction. Because someone who has narrowly escaped death is all the more eager to live, difficult though that may be.

A dialogue continues in him for the rest of his life, in which one voice yearns for death and the other speaks for the survivor. Neither is ever wholly stilled.

He who lives decides every morning afresh that it is better to live.

His face and his entire body awaken in response and he does all sorts of things; he showers, eats, greets people, smiles, chats.

If he has no reason to fear, his face will mostly blossom.

You can read in it what he makes of the world.

The face then displays unfathomable lines, from which it cannot be construed what they express, until it ultimately becomes a frozen relief.