蜜芽传媒

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.

Time passing is an essential underpinning of much narrative art. Playing with time has been at the core of a number of works of literature and cinema of those born long after Auschwitz was liberated. In this final essay, Michael looks at how the passage of time shapes memory and has slowly allowed writers like Martin Amis, Jenny Erpenbeck and filmmakers like Jonathan Glazer to reinterpret and re-tell the story of what happened in Auschwitz.