Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered six million European Jews through shootings, ghettos, forced labour and extermination camps. Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners, Poles, queer people and other persecuted groups were also imprisoned or killed. Auschwitz, Treblinka and other sites became symbols of industrialised genocide and displacement.

Holocaust poetry confronted the limits of language, witness and mourning in works by Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Miklós Radnóti and survivors writing in many languages. Diaries, testimonies and poems became essential records of lives that perpetrators attempted to erase.