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Notes -
It's an interesting question why no seemingly no one was interested in it in the 1950s.
If anyone has an idea, let me know.
As I wrote in my other reply, the delay is quite common. As a comparative example of unrelated WW2-era atrocity, Wikipedia article about Korean comfort women suggests that the Korean-Japanese debate and activism about comfort women in particular (opposed to Korean forced laborers and compensation in general) gathered steam in the 1980s and 1990s.
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The vast majority of survivors wanted to move on with their lives and never discussed it, often even with their children. The popular memory of the war was about heroic national successes - the French resistance, the Battle of Britain, Iwo Jima and D-Day, tank battles in North Africa, daring prisoner escapes from German POW camps - not the camps. The vast majority of the camps and places of origin of the victims were behind the Iron Curtain.
The Cold War became a news priority. The moguls who ran postwar Hollywood didn’t think anyone would be interested in depressing stories about Jews and, where they were interested in inculcating philosemitism among the masses preferred stuff like Ben Hur. (The 1959 Anne Frank movie also bombed iirc.) The Allied powers were interested in rehabilitating much of the German right to ward against communism domestically, rehabilitating the great majority of former party members, SS officers and so on, while the East Germans avoided teaching it entirely to fit with the state’s narrative of a great people rescued from fascist Bavarian capitalists by the Soviet Union. The Israelis wanted quite explicitly a new identity that didn’t reflect on being weak and pogrom’d in Europe, the organized Jewish community was more concerned with helping Israel which was under great regular threat through this period, and in any case the Holocaust was of little immediate relevance to the streaming flows of Arab and North African Jews who flooded into Israel in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Things began to change in the late 1960s because part of the German ‘68 movement in that country was about confronting your parents about what they actually did in the war, which became a big thing in that generation and changed the way WW2 was taught in West Germany. Then in the 1970s and 1980s more American Jewish authors started writing about the holocaust, more children of survivors became interested, and over time media that became influential like Shoah increased awareness of it. The tireless publicity efforts of people like Simon Wiesenthal contributed. Over time as American Jewry secularized, it became an ever more central part of Jewish religious identity. In Israel, where there had been a lot of resentment toward survivors who moved to Israel without wealth or possessions (often even in the press) the narrative gradually shifted away from ‘this is something that happened to them’ and toward ‘this is something that happened to us’.
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