Thinking of ways to rearrange the story of the Holocaust means, first, exploring the possibility of narrative. We now know a tremendous amount about the Holocaust from vast, detailed studies. One problem is how to present this evidence in new ways, thereby telling different stories.

A major historical task since 1945 has been simply to describe aspects of the historical reality of the persecution and extermination of the Jews between 1933 and 1945. The basic task of all history writing – to tell what the case was – was immensely difficult. After 1945 the Holocaust was generally not considered in public and scholarly circles as a key past in European history; the term itself became synonymous with the extermination of the Jews only around 1960. Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo (dreadfully translated in the United States as Survival in Auschwitz) was rejected in 1946–1947 by Einaudi and by five other Italian publishers for lack of interest before it was taken by a small publishing house in Turin. The managing editor of Einaudi was Cesare Pavese, the famous writer, who assigned it to his assistant reader. She rejected the book, claiming it was not “right” for Einaudi's list. In 1999 the readers of the Italian daily Corriere della Sera selected the book as the most significant one of the century. The Einaudi assistant who rejected the book , to conclude this story, was the then young and talented novelist Natalia Ginzburg, who came from a prominent antifascist family and was married to the resistance fighter Leone Ginzburg, who was murdered by the Germans in Rome in 1944.