According to Jewish legend, the world is sustained by thirty-six Just Men, the Lamed Vav, whose righteousness preserves creation from destruction. Andre Schwarz-Bart traces one family of Just Men from a massacre in York in 1185 through eight centuries of persecution to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The novel won the Prix Goncourt upon publication in 1959 and remains a landmark of Holocaust literature. Schwarz-Bart, himself a French Jew who lost his family in the Holocaust, writes across historical periods with a style that shifts from chronicle to lyric to horror. The Levy family passes the burden of righteousness from generation to generation, each Just Man absorbing the suffering of his age. The final chapters follow Ernie Levy through the humiliations of Nazi Germany to his death alongside the woman he loves. The novel asks what it means to be chosen for suffering, whether righteousness can be sustained across centuries of persecution, and how literature can represent atrocity without either sensationalizing or sanitizing it. The ending, set in the gas chamber, achieves a terrible beauty. Readers approaching the Holocaust through literature will find The Last of the Just one of the essential texts, a work that honors the dead by bearing witness to their deaths.