It has often been said that the concentration camp experience is unspeakable. And yet an enormous number of texts, plays or films strive to bear witness to it, seeking language and images capable of addressing what is beyond imagination. From a vast literary and cinematographic corpus, Philippe Mesnard studies the different forms of expression mobilized by witnesses, writers and artists. It establishes four testimonial configurations: realistic writing that is supposed to be transparent (for example, those of Vassili Grossman, David Rousset, among others), “transcendent” writing, which transposes reality to a symbolic setting (as in André's Last Just Schwartz-Bart or Life is beautiful by Roberto Benigni), the “critical configuration”, which gives place to emptiness and loss (for example, in Imre Kertész, Robert Antelme or Claude Lanzmann), and the “pathetic” writing , emotional, that forces the story so that its extreme violence emerges. These writings vary according to the authors, the moments and the contexts of their production: each one of them adjusts, between distance and proximity, its relationship with the catastrophe. But all use the resources of culture against what destroyed it, while destroying man. Such is the polyphonic resistance of the testimony, in the original, comprehensive and synthetic analysis of Philippe Mesnard, that it will become an unavoidable reference.