Should one write fiction about the Holocaust?
- charlespalliser
- Feb 26
- 6 min read
Literary Essay on Holocaust Fiction, Moral Questions in Literature, and Writing About Historical Trauma
This literary essay by Charles Palliser explores the ethics of Holocaust fiction, the morality of writing novels about historical trauma, and the ideas behind his novel Sufferance. The essay examines moral responsibility, the nature of evil in literature, and how fiction can approach the Holocaust without sensationalising or simplifying it.
Should one write fiction about the Holocaust?Should one write fiction about the Holocaust? I express the question like that because we all know that there are so many lies – and lies are fictions - about that hideous series of events, including even the lie that the Holocaust is itself only a fiction. Truth must prevail over fiction. So what need is there for a novel when works exist like Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, Elie Wiesel’s Night, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch’s Inherit the Truth, Wladyslaw Szpilman’s The Pianist, and many others. (Those are well-known but an overlooked account that I must mention is Hélène Berr’s Journal in which a brilliant young woman records the gradual tightening of the Nazi noose in Paris during the Occupation but, of course, breaks off before she can record her own murder.)
Why contribute another fiction when there is so much harrowing truth? That is the question I asked myself for several decades and, failing to find a reasonable answer, I didn’t write a novel about the subject until I finally published SUFFERANCE in 2024.
And yet I’d wanted to write about it for many years. My first question – “Should one write fiction about the Holocaust?” – raises the question of the morality of tackling the subject. My answer for years was: “Yes, one should. But how?”
One should at least try to write about it because it is so utterly unavoidable a topic. That a civilised country – the nation of Bach, Beethoven, and Goethe – could perpetrate such a massive act of barbarism with the knowing (or unknowing) complicity of its population, must bring into question everything one wants to believe about civilisation and the general decency of human beings. Isn’t it part of the novel’s function to explore issues like that?
What happened in Nazi-occupied Europe during the War has obsessed me ever since, at the age of thirteen – about the time I was fixing my hopes on becoming a writer – I found a book in my local library about the concentration camps. It was 1961 and the topic was not known or talked about and the word Holocaust was not used.
I still remember the shock I felt at seeing the now horribly familiar photographs of skeletal naked bodies piled up for incineration. It gave me a sudden awareness of humanity’s capacity for evil in a revelation that perhaps a child of that age now would not experience because our screens daily show us horrors.
So when I started to write fiction I knew I had to write about that subject because for me, writing is a way of discovering what you think, what you feel, and what you know and don’t know.
All my previous novels dealt more or less directly with the question of evil. What is it? If one can speak of an individual as evil, can one say that about a whole society? Later I came to see that I was thinking about it in the wrong way.
The reasons for not writing a novel about the Holocaust that held me back for many years are twofold. First, there was the fear of merely repeating what has been written and thought - recycling the old tropes and cliches - without offering the fresh insights that would be the only justification for writing about it. Secondly, I was keenly aware of the danger of exploiting it, of turning the horror into an exciting story or sentimentalising it.
Had the best of the novels that avoided those two dangers, left me anything to contribute? (Among the best, in my view, are Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin and William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark which was published in the US and filmed as Schindler's List.)
Thinking about why those novels had avoided the pitfalls of either banalising or sensationalising their subject, I saw that both those errors derive from the idea of “evil” as an entity that takes over individuals. The very concept of “evil” is a religious one that is incompatible with humanist beliefs. The assumption that the Holocaust occurred because “evil people” got into positions of power is too simple. There were not enough of them to carry it out without the assistance - or perhaps the unenthusiastic consent, or at least the “willed unawareness” – of the rest of their society. The truth is, surely, that “evil” is not a force that is within individuals. Rather, it is the case that in certain circumstances a society can degenerate to the point where certain people will emerge who have no qualms about exploiting a situation which gives them opportunities to benefit themselves by behaving towards others with indifference to their suffering – or even with enjoyment of it.
Having arrived at that point, I felt I could say something about how the Holocaust came about through an insidious bureaucratic and legalistic process in which those who had no desire for it or even, at first, any knowledge of it, became caught up in it. That hasn’t been much explored in fiction which mostly focuses on either the victims or the perpetrators. What interests me is the choices my characters make. The victims of the Holocaust had little choice and the motive of the perpetrators is a dark and complicated issue that I don’t think fiction has yet managed to illuminate. Bernhard Schlink’s novel, The Reader, has been widely admired but I found it confused. It comes close to suggesting that the fact that a woman has never learned to read is part of the explanation of her wicked actions during the War. The play Good by the Scottish dramatist C. P. Taylor is a bold attempt that fails to cast much light on the mentality of a “good” man who becomes a murderous Nazi. To digress for a moment: apart, of course, from Dostoyevsky, the most percetive study of “evil” in fiction I’ve read is Dan Jacobson’s unfairly neglected The Confessions of Josef Baisz.
So I wanted to write from the perspective neither of a victim nor a perpetrator but from that of the vast mass of people who were neither of those things but found themselves implicated in the horror.
I set out to create the most agonising moral dilemma that a well-intentioned person could find himself in when trapped in a situation of the kind the Nazis imposed on occupied Europe. I wanted the narrator to find himself in a situation in which he has to make a terrible choice in a way that posed the question to the reader: What would you have done in his position?
I’ve long been haunted by the story of Anne Frank and others in her situation who hid, or were helped to hide, during the Holocaust. Anne was a brilliant and courageous girl but was clearly a difficult and demanding teenager who was bored and frustrated by her state of sequestration and liked to make mischief.
The idea came to me: what if a child – a girl of Anne Frank’s age – were taken in and given shelter by a family when an invasion separates her from her own relatives, and turns out to be much more difficult than Anne Frank and without most of her virtues? If the girl is disturbed and disruptive, how would the family cope? And if she belonged to a community that the authorities began to persecute and so the mere fact of giving her a place to live became a crime, what choices would the family face?
They would be surrounded by people watching out for opportunities to betray them and would find themselves unable to trust even their own friends and relatives. Eventually, perhaps, unable even to trust one another.
I didn’t want to limit the setting to Eastern Europe in the 1940s, and so the novel has no dates and no proper names. I began writing it long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine where, horribly, actions similar to those in my novel are being perpetrated by the occupying authorities. As we all know, there are many other places where the same sort of policies are being instituted against specific ethnic, religious, or linguistic communities. In SUFFERANCE I tried show how that functions at the bottom of a pyramid which may have at its apex a small group of ill-intentioned persons but has at its base a vast number of ordinary people with varying degrees of decency and altruism and courage.
About the Author
This essay is part of the literary reflections of Charles Palliser and relates directly to his novel Sufferance.
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