Hearing from Holocaust survivors has long been a helpful means of fighting off these sorts of attacks. But soon it will no longer be possible to hear from our elders what it was like to slide from free person to hunted fugitive. At age 14, visiting Budapest, I sat, rapt, as Aunt Magda told of her last days in the Langenbielau concentration camp when she realized her captors had fled. Many children today know no survivors who can recount their ordeals.

Second- and third-generation storytellers — as well as those who are not direct descendants — attempt to combat this vanishing, in ways apt and new. The reverential, historical Holocaust novel, with trauma its narrative pulse, endures, but some works, like Jim Shepard’s “The Book of Aron,” add nuance through the ethical quandaries inherent in the actions of those desperate to survive.

Others find alternate frameworks, like Nicole Krauss’s “The History of Love,” interweaving past and present, and Shalom Auslander’s irreverent “Hope: A Tragedy,” which literalizes — and pokes fun at — the notion of never forgetting.

What these and other writers attuned to reverberations of the Holocaust seem to share is a wariness of the reductive quality of straightforwardly good-versus-evil stories. “What audiences learn is that they are better than the villain,” the playwright Brian Silberman has said of such simplification, which he upends in his vaudevillian take on a concentration camp, “Manifest.” Like Mr. Silberman, whose defiant anti-tragedy counters the narrative of Jews passively led to extermination, these writers seek to depict the sometimes problematic totality of human personality and possibility. When schools and libraries ban works such as “Maus,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel by the second-generation author Art Spiegelman, they acknowledge literature’s powerful role in the creation of social memory, whether offered by witnesses or provided secondhand by those who received that testimony.

The paradox of Holocaust storytelling is that as powerful as the familiar images may be — the heaped shoes, the indistinguishable starved bodies — these collective symbols dehumanize. And as we move farther and farther from the event, these images are ever more divorced from the people who wore those shoes and lived in those bodies. A single person’s or family’s story rehumanizes and reinvigorates generalized history. That is why our collective recollection and understanding of historical events relies on storytelling, past, present and future, and why the next generations of writers haunted by the Holocaust now shoulder this responsibility.

Daphne Kalotay is the author of “The Archivists,” for which she won the 2021 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. She teaches at Princeton University.