This study takes the move from the debate over the inability of language to express the tragedy of the Nazi extermination. We observe that the lack of answers to the questions raised by the Shoah is compensated by literary attempts to represent the events including omissions, impossibilities and paradoxes. Witnesses face difficulties and paradoxes (including Levi's paradox as Agamben formulates it). They embody the Old Mariner's syndrome, but are not heard or they go through several decades in silence until they begin to tell their stories. Some writers as Primo Levi, Robert Antelme, Elie Wiesel, Jorge Semprún and Imre Kertész, seek a literary path and attempt to overcome the limits of language through narrative expedients.
Literature; paradoxes; silence; Shoah; witness