WRITING was seen as a form of resistance to the dehumanization imposed on the Jews by the Nazis. In the words of Rafael Scharf, the literary works produced at this time were

At the same time, writers sought to make sense of the tragic reality with which they were confronted and to link it with early cases of Jewish suffering and martyrdom. They wrote in all the languages employed by the Jews in the area. Indeed some writers switched languages in response to what they were encountering, the Hebrew writer Yitshak Katzenelson adopting Yiddish for his Dos lid fun oysgehergetn yidishn folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People, 1943) and the diarist Abraham Lewin abandoning Yiddish for Hebrew in his diary when he came to describe the mass murder of the Jews in Warsaw.

The term ‘literature of testimony’ is often used to describe the writing produced during and immediately after the Holocaust. These works are primarily Jewish, although there are non-Jewish testimonies, for instance the works of Tadeusz Borowski. The phrase is Elie Wiesel’s. In his words, ‘If the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature: that of testimony.’2 Its aim was to record what had occurred. The historian Ignacy Schiper described the difficulty of doing so in the summer of 1943 to a fellow inmate in Majdanek, where he was to perish: