Thomas Sutcliffe: Approach the Holocaust at your peril

I've spent a lot of time in Auschwitz recently – culturally at least. And if this sentence seems a little off to you, a little too blithe in its use of that terrible placename, I know what you mean. Auschwitz shouldn't be for attracting attention in a newspaper column, it should be for paying attention to.

Yet it gives some sense of what a hazardous subject this is for any writer or artist. I've encountered three examples of creative response to the Holocaust in the past few weeks – Frank Cottrell Boyce's television play God On Trial, the Imperial War Museum's exhibition Unspeakable: The Artist as Witness to the Holocaust, and Mark Herman's film The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas – and I found myself sketching out a set of rules of engagement for any artist approaching the subject.

First, never imagine you're the victim. The task for non-Jewish artists – perhaps even for younger Jewish ones – is not to imagine what it must have felt like to have these things done to you, but to imagine whether you might have done them to someone else. Martin Amis's Time's Arrow was criticised in some quarters for its chronology, which ran time backwards so that the death camps summoned a people into being. But he had the decorum to imagine events from the perspective of a perpetrator, and not to appropriate a suffering that could never have been his. If you've been through the camps, like Primo Levi, you are entitled to shape your experience into fiction.

Second, never add emotion. There are paintings in the Imperial War Museum exhibition that attempt to give expressionistic force to inner agony. Some are by survivors and they deserve respect. But they are less memorable than some of the flatly representational paintings by official war artists, which seek simply to record the facts. In Human Laundry, Doris Zinkeisen shows German orderlies washing emaciated camp inmates before they go to hospital. It is as uninflected as a travel poster, yet the transformation it depicts – brutalisers obliged to become carers, victims turned to patients – is piercingly suggestive of what you can't see.

Third, never embroider or adjust. To establish a friendship between a Jewish boy and the German son of a camp commandant, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has to skirt round the fact that children were usually the first to die, and to create a camp in which a child can sit by the wire for hours, unmolested by the guards. It's not a dishonourable invention, but it's one that diminishes the reality of the original event. If you have to falsify the events to make your fiction work, there may be something wrong with your fiction.

The last rule is that there will be occasions when all the rules can be ignored. If you do, though, you had better be sure that the art is very good indeed.

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