Histories of war have often been discussed in relation to questions of silence. The interminable struggle to talk about the grotesque, bleak experience of war is a theme that has overshadowed many survivor narratives. Paul Fussell has discussed how impossible it was for many soldiers to write and to speak about the conditions they endured in the trenches during the First World War. A language could not be found, let alone spoken, that could adequately convey the ghastliness of what they had witnessed. A recurring theme in many of these accounts is the ‘presumed inadequacy of language itself to convey the facts about trench warfare’. As many writers have shown, the symptoms associated with shell-shock, which has been characterised as ‘male hysteria’ by Elaine Showalter, became the only language through which returned soldiers could speak of their experiences. ‘Soldiers lost their voices and spoke through their bodies’, she observes. It is ironic that a twominute period of silence was introduced for Anzac Day as a collective form of remembrance, given that First World War participants found it so difficult to convey their experiences and those of the dead.

What is spoken about and what remains unspoken, forms a pervasive pattern in narratives of those who survived atrocities inflicted during the Second World War. In the wake of different aspects of brutality and trauma came yet a further paralysis in the attempt to make some sense of unprecedented human tragedy.