Jack Scanlon as Shmuel in the 2008 film adaptation of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Photo by Maximum Film/Alamy In his 1998 essay “Who Owns Auschwitz?” the survivor and Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertész grappled with the problem of how to represent the Holocaust in literature and film. The paradox he expressed was that “for the Holocaust to become with time a real part of European (or at least western European) public consciousness, the price inevitably extracted in exchange for public notoriety had to be paid”. That price was the Shoah’s “stylisation”: its transformation into either “cheap consumer goods”...