In occasional conversations with men or women who were in WWII’s concentration camps, I have been surprised to discover a certain way they had of referring to that world didn’t fit the vocabulary I learned. They spoke of “there,” “sham,” “là-bas,” and the context was enough to understand, if you meant to. The surprise came because I naïvely expected more precision. I expected words I had learned in books and newspapers to originate from people who were there and would speak of it as event. And perhaps also, in the back of my mind, incongruously I think, there was the last word in the book of Ezekiel. We speak of “the camps,” “extermination camps,” “l’univers concentrationnaire”, “holocaust”, “shoah”, “ḥurban”…. Each with a peculiar history, each leading in a certain direction where one is in danger of losing the little chance one has of thinking straight. These words carry allusions to other things one can and would have to explain. They are dangerously long, classificatory, conceptual, specular, and products of a historical reflection looking for causes, even when the speakers admit their inability or reluctance to categorize. Why not use “then” instead of “there”, however? Because between “then” and “now” the chasm is too great, and “then” or “in those times” would be the beginning of an impossible story? While with “there,” “sham,” or “là-bas,” I imagine that something like both the distance and proximity to “here” allow the possibility of a secret mourning within an all-present life. “There” still exists, it is the same earth and land beyond oceans and rivers. Near.