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The article discusses the growing corpus of literary works written by Israeli second generation writers, in the context of the Israeli collective memory of the events of WWII. It shows this literature to constitute a reaction to previous tendencies to repress the memories of the catastrophe. The literary characters it portrays, mostly second generation themselves, very often grow up in an atmosphere of suppression. The hidden stories, however, emerge from the “domain of the untold” and gain a substantive presence in their lives. Thus, literature dramatizes the social and political development within the Israeli society, where the Holocaust has gradually become a foundation of self-definition and self-conceptualization.