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30 years ago, on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army, a survivor of the camp told Michael Goldfarb, "One day they will never believe it happened". As soon as the conflict ended it became the task of artists to ensure that the industrial slaughter of European Jewry was never forgotten. How well have they succeeded?

On the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz Goldfarb looks at how writers, filmmakers, and poets have over these decades succeeded or failed in the almost impossible task of understanding and memorialising what happened at Auschwitz and in other places in the terrible three and a half years of the Shoah.

Upon arrival at the camps in Germany, Allied commanders insisted the sights they saw be filmed. Among the images a bulldozer pushing emaciated corpses into a massive open grave. The horror is still impossible to believe. How can filmmakers hope to compete with that? Michael looks at the three French directors - Alain Resnais, Marcel Ophuls and Claude Lanzmann - who decided that the only way to tell the story was through documentaries: And wonders if any of the more recent generations of filmmakers, have been able to succeed in visualising the horror.