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Shoah literature or Literature of the Shoah consists of novels and other writings that directly testify or refer to the Nazi annihilation of Jews between 1939 and 1945. This defining event of the 20th century was referred to by various names (Jewish genocide, Holocaust) before the term Shoah was established globally through Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film. Shoah literature began even before the annihilation in the concentration and extermination camps, in the ghettos where Jews from across German-occupied Europe were crowded together. "Everyone wrote" in ghettos, noted the historian Ringelblum, founder of Oyneg Shabbos, the clandestine organization collecting the archives of the Warsaw Ghetto, a set of testimonies, novels, and analysis on living conditions, food and creative conditions.

After the Second World War, the Shoah became a high-profile literary and philosophical object, particularly with the work of the Frankfurt School. Accordingly, Ariane Kalfa, philosopher of Judaism and heiress of the Frankfurt School, asks in her work if it is still possible to philosophize after Shoah. The texts of the Genocide collide with the difficulty of thinking and narrating an unprecedented event with acts sometimes so horrible that instill in authors the fear of not finding the words to describe and make understandable their real nature. But the survivors feel obliged to say what happened, to testify and keep alive the memory of the missing people. In fact, the diversity of the literary production, from testimony to philosophical probing and poetry has made palpable the horror of the Shoah, the suffering and the victims' desperation. From Primo Levi who narrates as soberly as possible his daily struggle to survive in an Auschwitz work camp, to the desperate lyricism of Itzhak Katzenelson, the reader can apprehend a part of the experience and emotions of the victims and witnesses of the Shoah. Since 1945, testimonies, novels, poems and essays continue to be published with varying public success.