Although the descendants of Holocaust victims and perpetrators do not have personal experiences, the last decades’ literary texts and memoirs make it evident that they carry the traumatic memories of these events to some degree that impact their personal development and social relations. Based on Marianne Hirsch’s ‘postmemory’-concept and other theories of trauma and cultural commemorative devices, the paper is set to demonstrate through two autobiographical and two fictional works (Rachel Seiffert: The Dark Room, Sacha Batthyany: Und was hat das mit mir zu tun?, Anne Karpf: The War After, Jane Yolen: Briar Rose) how these painful and shameful traumatic memories are transmitted through the mediums of culture and family and to show those sometimes surprisingly similar psychological and narrative strategies which lead these descendants to cope with the difficulties of shame and guilt.