The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million

Categories: History , Rediscoveries , Nonfiction

When Daniel Mendelsohn was a boy, elderly relatives in New York or Florida would pinch his cheeks and begin to cry. Daniel, it seemed, looked uncannily like his great-uncle Shmiel (Sam) Jaeger, who, along with his wife and daughters, died in the Holocaust.

Mendelsohn’s grandfather and most of his grandfather’s siblings were safe in America, having emigrated long before the war. Only one estranged brother stayed behind in Bolechow, Poland, with his family.

But to Mendelsohn, his grandfather’s mesmerizing tales of life in the old country made Bolechow almost a legend, and the family likeness between himself and his long-vanished great-uncle haunted him. Years after his beloved grandfather’s death, he decided to trace the clues to his uncle’s family’s fate.

The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million is the deeply moving account of how Mendelsohn worked from a few snapshots and letters, a few half-rumored family stories, to discover the fate of his uncle, his aunt, and their four daughters.

Mendelsohn tells the story slowly, clue by clue, dead end by dead end, interspersing his own family story with passages from Jewish history, legend, and Talmudic scholarship. The suspense is almost unbearable as he painstakingly unfolds the years of research, travel, wrong turns, and freak chances that led him onward in his search.

An improbable encounter halfway around the world with a man who once dated one of the Jaeger girls; an evasive conversation with an elderly woman still living in their old home town; the fierce, terrified obstructions raised to his search by a survivor who still feels hunted, decades later; the dry accounts in history books that blandly summarize dreadful suffering—they’re all part of the story.

It’s a terribly sad story, but a powerfully human one. The scenes in which Mendelsohn and his own brothers and sister visit the streets and buildings where their family lived and died have an eerie, heartrending resonance. It’s impossible not to be moved.