Holocaust literature started even before the mass killings themselves, with Jewish poets, novelists, and essayists reacting to the rise of Nazism and the war, and it continues to the present day. At first, many representative authors were survivors, but, with the passage of time, new generations of writers came to engage with the reality of the Holocaust, either as descendants of survivors themselves, or simply as human beings wrestling with one of humanity’s greatest calamities. Traversing poetry, diaries, memoirs, and novels, this chapter tracks the evolution of Holocaust literature, its expansion into a global vernacular, and the ways in which diverse authors have sought to deploy language to process mass slaughter.

It is unsurprising that the legacy of the Holocaust was central to postwar Europe, but it is striking that the Holocaust became no less important in postwar America. It can be argued that the Holocaust has been “Americanized.” This phrase was initially deployed as a pejorative by critics who decried what they saw as the commercialization and trivialization of Holocaust memory. In some cases, they even argued that Holocaust memory was instrumentalized in the service of specific political agendas – support for Israel and the consolidation of a specifically Jewish identity in a multicultural America. At the same time, given the size and diversity of the Jewish diaspora in the USA, there was no way the Holocaust could not become central to American-Jewish self-understanding and, therefore, become a core part of American culture more broadly.

Even as the Gaullist narrative of the Resistance and Deportation asserted its primacy, the Jewish story continued to percolate, drawing growing public attention to itself. That was in part thanks to the intercession of sympathetic Catholics, a number that included, not just Father Riquet, but also François Mauriac and Paul Flamand. Both were practicing Catholics, the former a Nobel prize-winning novelist, the latter a founding editor of Le Seuil, one of France’s leading publishing houses. Mauriac enabled Elie Wiesel to get into print and in fact wrote the preface to Wiesel’s La Nuit when it first appeared in 1958. The latter was patron to André Schwarz-Bart, author of Le Dernier des Justes (1959), the first Holocaust-themed best-seller in France. He also helped launch the career of Saul Friedländer, then a student of the Vatican’s wartime diplomacy but soon to become one of the world’s leading Holocaust historians.