The question of the Holocaust as a literary subject has been controversial. Some have argued that such literature should be limited to diaries, memoirs, and other firsthand accounts. They maintain that rendering the experience in fictional, poetic, and dramatic forms necessarily transforms the monstrous into a form of aesthetic pleasure, thereby diluting and distorting its reality. They also contend that even when a nonfictional source, such as The Diary of Anne Frank, is adapted to the stage and screen, it ends up presenting a universalized portrait (in this case, of adolescence) rather than a specific experience (of a young Jewish girl in the Holocaust). Others maintain that not to inscribe the Holocaust in the history of literature is to turn our backs, to foster ignorance and lack of interest, in effect, to collaborate with the Nazis. The Holocaust can be--and has been--cheapened and exploited by literary hacks, but in the hands of serious writers, its significance can be deepened, not palliated.

Twenty years before Hitler came to power, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), an obscure Jewish insurance clerk in Prague, wrote, but chose not to publish, a series of novels and short stories that would mark him as the literary prophet of the Holocaust. Perhaps the best example of this anticipation is The Trial (1925), a novel whose tone and theme are masterfully rendered in its opening line: "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning." The novel goes on to explore the systematic demoralization of the protagonist during his trial. Desperately trying to discover the reason for his arrest, Joseph K. becomes enmeshed in the seemingly mindless, bureaucratic legal machinery that leads inexorably to his conviction and execution. All of his efforts to find a rational explanation for his situation result in experiences of frustration that have come to be called Kafkaesque. He is condemned to death not for what he has done, but for what he is--without ever learning what that is is. His last words--"like a dog"--underscore the lack of meaning that his fate exhibits. Of course, Kafka is not predicting an historical event, but trying to capture a universal human condition. In this respect, his work also anticipates the philosophical mood of existentialism. But since the emergence of existentialist thought occurred in the wake of the Holocaust, it may be a pardonable exaggeration to suggest that the latter is a particular and terrible manifestation of the condition meditated on in the former, that the questions of death, nonbeing, negation, choice, and absurdity hover over the Holocaust. Dying at the age 41, Kafka did not live to see this conjunction of idea and event. Had he lived longer, he might have easily become one of the Prague Jews sent to Theresienstadt and later transported to Auschwitz. In any event, the wonder is, as the Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld (1932- ) put it, "How could a man who had never been there know so much, in precise detail, about that world?"

The fiction of the Holocaust may be divided into those novels and stories that deal directly with the ghetto experience, such as John Hersey's (1914-93) and Leon Uris's fictional accounts of the Warsaw ghetto, or those focusing specifically on the extermination camps, such as the unspeakable brutality captured by Tadeusz Borowski (1922-51) in his collection of short stories, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1948), or the nonfictional memoirs of Elie Wiesel (1928- ) (Night, 1958) and Primo Levi (1919-87) (Survival in Auschwitz, 1947), and those, undoubtedly influenced by Kafka, that approach the subject indirectly or metaphorically, as in Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim, 1939 (1980), in which affluent, assimilated Austrian Jews at a summer resort live in denial until the moment when the resort is turned into a concentration camp.

The most impressive, both in scope and emotional power, of direct renderings is the French novelist Andre Schwarz-Bart's (1928- ) The Last of the Just (1959). Placing the Nazis' annihilation of Jews in the historical context of European anti-Semitism, the novel outlines the history of the Jewish myth of the "thirty-six just men," who, often unwittingly, take upon themselves undeserved suffering, which, without their sacrifice, would lead to the end of the human race. In one version of the myth, in each generation, it falls to one member of the Levy family to be one of the just men. After outlining the history of the Levy clan from the 12th to the 20th centuries, the story focuses on young Ernie Levy, a schoolboy who comes of age in Germany in the 1930s. Intuiting his special role early on, he discovers, as a result of beatings by classmates and his Nazi teacher, the reality of the "just man's" fate. His first reaction is to avoid it by attempting suicide. His body is saved, but a profound despair overtakes his soul. Despite his sense of the apparent indifference of God, he nevertheless commits himself to the struggle against Hitler. After the family escapes to France, Ernie joins the French army, only to see its defeat and the deportation of his family. On the brink of despair and self-hate, he goes through a period in which he thinks of himself, and acts (coincidentally echoing Kafka's Joseph K.), "like a dog."

Returning to Paris he meets and falls in love with Golda, a handicapped young Jewish woman. After an idyllic day spent walking around the city without their yellow stars, they make love and consider themselves married. The following day, Golda is sent to a transit camp at Drancy. Ernie follows, determined to join her. Their beautifully understated reunion occurs before they are shipped to Auschwitz. In the nightmarish scenes that follow, Ernie, despite his own despair over God's silence, rises to his sacrificial role as one of the just. He brings comfort and hope to the terrified children and many of the adults huddled together in the boxcars carrying them to the death camp. And when they disembark and he is selected to be one of the laborers, he chooses to stay with Golda and the children, destined for the gas chamber. In the chamber itself, as the gas hisses out over them, Ernie "leaned out into the darkness toward the children even at his knees, and he shouted with all the gentleness and all the strength of his soul, 'Breathe deeply, my lambs, and quickly.'"

A final paragraph suggests that the spirit of Ernie lives on, but there is little in the novel, which is filled with a sardonic, often comic anger, to justify such optimism. Many readers prefer the celebrated penultimate paragraph, in which, interspersed amid the repeated incantation, "And praised be the Lord," are the names of the extermination camps: "And praised. Auschwitz, Be, Maidanek. The Lord, Treblinka." Whether these juxtapositions are intended to be ironic or deeply religious is left for the reader. But the ending is true to the sense that what happens to Ernie is less important than who he is--a just man.

Among the indirect renderings is Jerzy Kosinski's (1933-91) The Painted Bird (1965), a novel that its author originally claimed was a nonfictional account of his childhood in World War II. Later he backed away from this claim, responding to the objection that as nonfiction, the story lacked credibility; as a novel, however, it creates a surrealistic world of violence and brutality, and it constitutes an important metaphor of the human capacity for sadistic cruelty that issued in the Holocaust. The Painted Bird traces the experiences of a young boy--six years of age at the story's beginning--sent by his parents from a large city to a remote village in an unnamed country (clearly intended to be Poland) right after the Nazi invasion in 1939. After the death of the old woman with whom he is sent to live, the unnamed boy wanders from village to village. Since his looks indicate that he is either a Jew or a gypsy (gypsies were also victims of Nazi racial ideology), he is treated like a pariah, partly because of the traditional racism of the peasants and partly because of the peasants' awareness of the penalties for harboring a member of either group. Beaten, starved, and treated like an animal, the boy experiences a series of horrors, which include witnessing a jealous husband gouging out the eyes of a young man who had been flirting with his wife.

In the novel's nightmarish world, the boy is a traveler through hell, learning the lesson that evil, embodied in the beautifully pressed black uniform and shining boots of a German SS officer, is always triumphant. Eventually the boy's reaction is to lose the power of speech, to reject the distinguishing feature of the human animal, so as not to be further contaminated by the stigma of belonging to the human race. In the end, he recovers speech and reunites with his family, but his faith in the human potential for good has been irretrievably lost. He now feels like a painted bird, one that, having been painted, is no longer recognized or accepted by his own flock. As a result the flock attacks and kills it. As a realistic novel, The Painted Bird strains credulity and is crude and often violent for violence's sake, but it is a powerful indictment of the human capacity for evil and, as such, an important reminder that the Holocaust is an all-too-human creation.

The most recent and, in the view of many critics, the most successful attempt to represent what might be called the aftershock of the Holocaust--the collateral damage it has wrought in shaping the inner life of millions--is W. G. Sebald's (1944-2003) Austerlitz (2001). The framing story is told by an anonymous narrator who forms a relationship with Jacques Austerlitz, based upon their mutual interest in forms of architecture. But it is the inner story narrated by Austerlitz that constitutes the core of the novel. When not quite five years old, Austerlitz becomes part of a group of young Jewish children transported to Great Britain from Europe in 1939. Adopted by a Calvinist minister and his wife, he grows up in a remote village in Wales, having been given the name Dafydd Elias. The minister, a hellfire preacher who only comes alive in the pulpit, and his wife, a completely passive, unexpressive woman, living in a house where "they never opened a window," leave the boy emotionally frozen. Coming of age in this world with people who never refer to his past or to the war raging in Europe, he loses any memories of his earlier life.

His search to regain his past begins when he is sent to a prep school, where he discovers that his real name is Jacques Austerlitz, about the same time that he learns in his history class about the battle of Austerlitz in 1805, in which Napoleon Bonaparte defeated the Russian and Austrian armies. As a result of this nominal association, for the first time, he sees himself as having a place in history. His subsequent search to learn the fate of his parents and his own identity--"illustrated," as in all of Sebald's novels, by photographs of places and people--takes him from the Liverpool Street railway station in London to the new, electronically wired, soulless Bibliotheque nationale in Paris, to an apartment in Prague where he discovers Vera, his nursery maid when he was a child and his mother's closest companion. From her he learns of the fate of his parents, his father a political figure who fled to Paris when the Germans marched into Czechoslovakia, his mother an opera singer who stayed behind, deported to the so-called model ghetto at Theresienstadt, a place where in 1944 the Nazis invited a visit from the International Red Cross to show how well the Jews were treated. The novel records with passionate intensity the reality behind this Nazi showcase. One of the most moving sequences in the novel is Austerlitz's description of his visit to Theresienstadt, now a virtual ghost town, with its Ghetto Museum. Eventually he is able to find a picture of his mother.

As the novel ends Austerlitz is still pursuing his past, trying to discover his father's fate. But the search, however painful, has brought him back to life. In Jacques Austerlitz/Dafydd Elias, the Holocaust had claimed another victim. He is emotionally crippled, suspended in time; the roots of his life had been cut, as illustrated when the possibility of a relationship with a warm, intelligent woman seems lost as a visit with her to the famous spa at Marienbad ends not in romance but in an unexplained anxiety attack. Later, as a result of his search, he discovers the source of that anxiety. In the summer of 1938, he and his parents had visited that resort.

But learning the past, with all the suffering it entails, even the mental breakdown it engenders, is liberating. The end of the novel finds him not only searching for his father, but for the woman he lost at the spa in Marienbad. Early in the novel, Austerlitz's history teacher remarks, "Our concern for history . . . is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere . . . somewhere as yet undiscovered." Austerlitz is a record of that discovery.

In a literal sense, this is a difficult novel to read. It has no paragraph breaks, and so the reader may easily get lost in the narrative. There is also the frequently unnecessary repetition of the phrase "Austerlitz said," occurring so often that it becomes an incantation. However, those obstacles somehow don't impede and instead probably intensify the novel's hypnotic power.

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