At the end of La Question humaine (2007), a film by Nicolas Klotz and Elisabeth Perceval adapted from a novel by François Emmanuel (1999), the protagonist Simon Kessler (Mathieu Amalric) recounts a dream in which he witnesses a mass of bodies tumbling out of a gas van. The film refuses to visualise this atrocity for us, and as he is speaking the screen turns black. A psychologist working for an international petrochemical corporation with a murky past, Kessler has no ostensible personal connection to the events in his vision, and we never learn whether or not he is Jewish. His excruciatingly graphic account of his dream is a tissue of indirect citations from historical documents, eyewitness testimonies, newspaper articles, and other films, in which the meanings of words are questioned and revised. The neutral, bureaucratic, degraded language of a Nazi memorandum concerning modifications to gas vans is refuted through juxtaposition with the testimonies of Jewish prisoners who worked in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Moreover, as Kessler names the dead and claims them as his kin, Perceval slips new first names into the list of mainly Hebrew ones in Emmanuel's text, including Robert (Antelme) and Armand (Gatti). La Question humaine explores the enduring presence in quotidian reality of traces of the events known in English-speaking countries as ‘the Holocaust’, but which the French refer to variously as ‘la déportation’ and ‘le génocide’ or ‘la Shoah’.