This article first attempts to describe recent inflexions of the debates on the relations between history (as a discipline, a knowledge, a form of writing, or the past itself) and literature (as a corpus of texts, a social activity, a form of writing, a value, an institution…). I wonder about the way in which the historical discipline sometimes seems to renounce to make literature the object of its investigation and in which some historians prefer to invest the symbolic powers of literature and appear, as writers rather than scholars, on the scene of “contemporary literature.” In this shift, the historiographical operation loses one of its founding principles, the separation between the past and the present, and, along with this separation, a certain relationship to the dead, to the words and the accounts of the dead. Yet it is by turning these words and accounts into objects of historical knowledge that it is possible to work, as historians, with literature. The second part of the article stands for a history which would be less interested to confront “literature” than to be mindful of the words, the writings and the narrative forms produced in the past, by the people of the past. In this perspective, it analyses Michel Borwicz’s volume devoted to the Insurrection of the Warsaw ghetto published in 1966 in the pioneering “Archives” book series (Julliard/Gallimard).