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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

In America, the years after the war saw a flowering of literature by Jewish writers like Philip Roth, Joseph Heller and Saul Bellow. None wrote directly about the Holocaust. It took 25 years before Bellow gave it a go in Mr. Sammler's Planet. The first and most enduring works of literature were written by those who lived the Shoah and survived it. This essay looks at Primo Levi and Vassily Grossman, both knew the horror of the Shoah first hand. Levi, was a prisoner in Auschwitz. Grossman, whose mother died in a mass execution in Ukraine, was the first journalist to file a report from a Nazi death camp. Both tried to fictionalise the horror.