Beyond Multiple Silences - Writing Fiction on the Holocaust to Overcome Grief and Achieve Remembrance: Vincent Engel's and Françoise Lalande-Keil's Challenges

Abstract

Born to Jewish Ashkenazi families who were victims of the Shoah and ruled by the silence law, Vincent Engel (1963) and Françoise Lalande-Keil (1941) consid-er fiction as the most accurate and efficient way to transmit this unutterable and traumatic experience to the following genera¬tions in order to overcome their own suffering and to gaze the future with serenity. In our work, we aim to show how these two Belgian writers fulfill their “duty of memory” imposed by themselves, and accept the challenge and how they achieve their aim through their most significant works where silence is used in various ways as a reading thread.