One of the most compelling aspects of Holocaust Education Week is the opportunity to hear survivors speak. Our understanding of the Holocaust would be incomplete and impoverished without these important voices.

Lately, however, I’ve been thinking about the stories we do not hear – stories that are just as integral to the essence of the Shoah, but are inaccessible or inaudible to us. Over the past several months, in the vast archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., I have plunged into stories removed from our radar.

There is a treasure trove of diaries, poems, and fiction written during the Holocaust under of impossible circumstances – in hiding, in ghettoes and in labour camps. This writing captures the torments, anxieties, resilience, desperation and hopes to endure, to live out the war years. While much of this writing has been lost, a substantial amount was recovered after the war, opening up a window on those terrible times for those who came later.

But there are no diaries from killing centres such as Sobibor and Treblinka, dreadful places where Jews were taken to be murdered, without chance of reprieve. There are no diaries from the killing fields, from the murdered families forced to undress in front of relatives, neighbours and strangers before being gunned down.

Those stories can never be told, except by those at some remove. The Italian writer Primo Levi, who survived slave labour in Auschwitz, has observed that because the Jews who “did not return” would never tell their stories, it was up to the minority who survived to “speak in their stead, by proxy.” Survivors are the closest witnesses to those who did not escape the genocidal net. Their voices help keep the lives and deaths of the murder victims from fading into oblivion. At the same time, Levi and others acknowledge that the living cannot fully represent the voices of the dead, whose stories cannot be wholly known to us.

The Yiddish poet Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever’s 1946 Poem About a Herring imagines such a horrific murder site by focusing on a mother and her child at the edge of a charnel pit. Because the child is hungry, and the mother is a mother, even at the edge of death, she feeds him a herring that she had thought to pack, not knowing where they would be taken. Sutskever, who was in the Vilna Ghetto for two years, composed more than 80 poems during the Holocaust. Here he attempts to bear witness by imagining the experience of the murdered Jews, gunned down brutally and coldly. As the body of the “child with a bloody herring in his mouth” falls into the pit where he will be buried, the poem reluctantly acknowledges the limitations of the living to speak for dead, as the poet searches “for that herring’s salt/and still cannot/find its taste on my lips.”

Several years ago, a professor of classics at an American university began to trace the fate of his great uncle who, unlike his own grandfather, did not come to settle in North America. The resulting book, Dan Mendelsohn’s The Lost, uncovers and attempts to imagine the lives, and finally, the brutal deaths, of his great uncle’s family. He reminds us not only of the insupportable loss of life, but also of the deliberate and perverse torment of victims before their murder. Mendelsohn’s lost relatives come to stand for the vast number of people whose lives and deaths fall outside of the stories we most often hear and tell about the Holocaust.

I have listened to scratchy voices of testimonies recorded on magnetic tape during the first year or so after the war. These tapes capture the hopeful determination of war refugees to rebuild their shattered lives. But they also reveal the inner and outer chaos of that time, the deep bereavements, the still-fresh shock of what had been witnessed and endured.

Some of the stories I encounter in the archives rarely find a place in a public forum. I suspect that they are more than most of us wish to bear. But they constitute the dark centre of the catastrophe we call the Holocaust.