memoirs that were written in the first two or three decades after the war when the memory of the witnesses was still relatively fresh. These texts have not lost their relevance. These texts more faithfully reproduce everyday life in the camp and help to build a closer picture of what it was like in the camp. With such knowledge, the attentive reader is undoubtedly able to perform an initial critical analysis of today's popular publications on the subject of Auschwitz and indicate which of them were written in the privacy of the study, detached from the experience of the prisoners and not even preceded by the author's visit to the former camp. In most cases, a basic understanding of the history of the camp allows one to judge if one is actually dealing with literature that may aspire to be called historical, or with a quasi-camp literary fiction presenting only some form of authorial impressions about Auschwitz, which is devoid of any substantive value, detrimental to the memory education.