This pioneering book provides a radically new and profound approach to the study and understanding of the Holocaust through the ideas of Julia Kristeva. 'Powers of Horror', is the best known work by Kristeva in the Anglo-American world and has had a profound influence in diverse fields. This book provides a timely critical reassessment of Kristeva's often misunderstood writings on the abject and a crucial appraisal of the value the concept of abjection holds for the study of the witnessing and representation of the Holocaust. The book is transdisciplinary. Nicholas Chare offers fresh interpretations of the poetry of Paul Celan, the poetic prose of Charlotte Delbo and the paintings of Francis Bacon. He also explores the 'Scrolls of Auschwitz', discovered buried in the grounds of the crematoria at Birkenau. These material remains of an event that have become historical documents composed in the most abject circumstances from within the horrific core of the operations of a deathfactory, are analysed through the prism of their physical state as excavated objects and testimonial texts extending the complex reading of writing, imaging and the bodily that is the core of Kristeven theses on abjection.