Over the past few years, my writ­ing — both for the Jew­ish Book Coun­cil and research on my own book — has intro­duced me to numer­ous titles that are doing impres­sive, impor­tant work in record­ing Holo­caust mem­o­ry. These have tak­en a vari­ety of forms, includ­ing mem­oirs and wartime diaries. Some, like Renee Salt and Kate Thompson’s Do Not Cry When I Die, were writ­ten by sur­vivors who wait­ed years to speak, while oth­ers, such as Zal­men Gradowski’s The Last Con­so­la­tion Van­ished: The Tes­ti­mo­ny of a Son­derkom­man­do in Auschwitz, were pub­lished posthu­mous­ly, writ­ten by those who did not sur­vive. Many of these works share a focus on eye­wit­ness accounts, which can feel raw and are often frag­men­tary in nature, resist­ing a con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive arc. Many of these books that I am refer­ring to don’t end with easy lessons about human­i­ty, sur­vival, or hope. The authors’ expe­ri­ences are sim­ply allowed to speak for themselves. 

These are qual­i­ties, many would argue, that make them so impor­tant in terms of Holo­caust mem­o­ry. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, these are also qual­i­ties that don’t always align with the busi­ness of publishing. 

I found this out first­hand when pitch­ing my own non­fic­tion book about the Holo­caust, which traces the sto­ry of the Bursz­ta­jn fam­i­ly. Their fate reflects a broad­er real­i­ty — rough­ly 90% of Pol­ish Jews were killed dur­ing the Holo­caust. While the book includes the sur­vival sto­ry of Dora Bursz­ta­jn, it also cen­ters those who did not sur­vive, attempt­ing to hold mul­ti­ple sto­ries with­in the same nar­ra­tive. Sev­er­al indus­try insid­ers tried to warn me of the issues I might face in seek­ing pub­li­ca­tion, some­times cit­ing a sat­u­rat­ed mar­ket, low sales for the genre, and lack of read­er inter­est. I saw more than a few agents who rep­re­sent his­tor­i­cal non­fic­tion stip­u­late, among oth­er things, that they don’t accept pitch­es about the Holo­caust. One told me: ​“I don’t do Holo­caust books,” explain­ing that ​“they’re too upsetting.” 

That par­tic­u­lar response has stayed with me because it clar­i­fies a ten­sion that I’ve noticed in Holo­caust lit­er­a­ture. For decades, wide­ly-read Holo­caust books have cen­tered on sur­vival: sto­ries struc­tured around endurance, resilience, and the pos­si­bil­i­ty, how­ev­er frag­ile, of life after lib­er­a­tion. To be sure, these accounts are essen­tial. Pre­serv­ing sur­vivor tes­ti­mo­ny remains one of the most urgent lit­er­ary and his­tor­i­cal projects of our time.

But whose sto­ries are told and how is an issue that must be grap­pled with. The dis­com­fort expressed by that agent struck me as an expres­sion of a broad­er dynamic.

This ten­sion has been explored by schol­ars of Holo­caust mem­o­ry, though it is less often acknowl­edged in pop­u­lar lit­er­ary spaces. In The Holo­caust: An Unfin­ished His­to­ry, for instance, his­to­ri­an Dan Stone draws on the work of Holo­caust schol­ar Lawrence Langer, describ­ing a ​“gen­er­al­ized look­ing away,” in which ​“tears may flow, but the tru­ly destruc­tive nature of the Holo­caust for its vic­tims … are passed over in silence.” He points to a broad­er ​“beau­ti­fy­ing” of the Holo­caust: a ten­den­cy to ele­vate mov­ing sto­ries of sur­vival and to frame the Holo­caust through lessons and moral clar­i­ty, rather than through its full his­tor­i­cal real­i­ty. In this frame­work, the nar­ra­tives that cir­cu­late most wide­ly are not nec­es­sar­i­ly those that most accu­rate­ly reflect the his­tor­i­cal record, but those that have been shaped into forms read­ers can bear. Suf­fer­ing is not nec­es­sar­i­ly erased from these books, but it is medi­at­ed: struc­tured into nar­ra­tive arcs, tem­pered with hope, and made more digestible through tidy endings. 

Along­side these nar­ra­tives exists anoth­er body of work, one that might get less media fan­fare, but that is cru­cial for Holo­caust his­to­ry. For instance, Rokhl Auerbach’s writ­ing from the War­saw Ghet­to, recent­ly pub­lished in Eng­lish as War­saw Tes­ta­ment and win­ner of a Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award, includes her obser­va­tions of every­day ghet­to life, meant as a eulo­gy for those whom she saw as the walk­ing dead. She fran­ti­cal­ly record­ed as many names and sto­ries as pos­si­ble, know­ing that few of them would make it out alive. 

Sim­i­lar­ly, Calek Pere­chod­nik wrote his mem­oir dur­ing the war, after his wife Anka and their infant daugh­ter were mur­dered in the Otwock Ghet­to liq­ui­da­tion. Pere­chod­nik, who was lat­er killed dur­ing the War­saw Ghet­to Upris­ing, unfair­ly blamed him­self for their deaths, and writes to them direct­ly in his writ­ing. Like Auerbach’s work, his Con­fes­sions is hard to read. He speaks direct­ly to his late wife and daugh­ter, imag­in­ing their deaths in vivid detail. ​“Aluś­ka, are you still alive or have you already suf­fo­cat­ed,” he asks the ghost of his daugh­ter. ​“Anka, do you still have a lit­tle water? Or maybe Aluś­ka is already drink­ing your tears?” These are the mem­oirs of peo­ple who had no hope.

Writ­ing like Auerbach’s and Perechodnik’s — along with the work of the archivists, trans­la­tors, edi­tors, and (often) small, mis­sion-dri­ven press­es who have saved their words from obliv­ion — does not not look away from suf­fer­ing or empha­size sur­vival. White Goat Press, Yad Vashem Pub­li­ca­tions, Ams­ter­dam Pub­lish­ers (where my own man­u­script even­tu­al­ly found a home), and uni­ver­si­ty press­es at places like Cor­nell and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Alaba­ma have been enabling this impor­tant work for decades. While, of course, Holo­caust lit­er­a­ture can be upset­ting and hard to read, these press­es spe­cial­ize in the kinds of unfil­tered, first-hand mem­oirs that can be espe­cial­ly chal­leng­ing to read. They’ve pub­lished titles like Levi Shalit’s So We Died: A Mem­oir of Life and Death in the Ghet­to of Šiau­li­ai, Lithua­nia, Man­ny Steinberg’s Out­cry: Holo­caust Mem­oirs, and Ari Joskowicz’s study Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holo­caust. These books demand a lot from read­ers; more, per­haps, than the types of Holo­caust nar­ra­tives that have been shaped to fit a more con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive arc that end with the subject’s lib­er­a­tion or mor­al­iz­ing lessons about humanity. 

As the gen­er­a­tion of sur­vivors grows small­er, this ten­sion is like­ly to become more pro­nounced. What remains uncer­tain is how these dif­fer­ent forms will coex­ist, and which will be most vis­i­ble to read­ers. While there is no sin­gle ​“right” way to record Holo­caust mem­o­ry, it seems increas­ing­ly impor­tant to pay atten­tion not only to the sto­ries them­selves, but to how they are shaped — and what may be lost in that shaping.

If remem­ber­ing is, as Nina Auer­bach and her fel­low War­saw Ghet­to archivists under­stood, a form of resis­tance, then the ques­tion is not only how we pre­serve these his­to­ries, but how much of them we are will­ing to face.