THE LOST: A SEARCH FOR SIX OF SIX MILLION by Daniel Mendelsohn (non-fiction, 2006, 513 pages)

Daniel Mendelsohn’s great-uncle, Shmiel Jager, and Shmiel’s wife and four daughters were all “killed by the Nazis”, and for decades, these four words were the extent of what was said about their fate within Mendelsohn’s extended family.

Mendelsohn, a classicist with a Ph.D. from Princeton, decided in 2001 to attempt to find out what exactly happened to Shmiel and family. Mendelsohn’s investigation spanned five years and took him to Bolechow, Poland (the town where Shmiel and family lived and were murdered), as well as several other cities and countries and continents including, improbably, Sydney, Australia and Stockholm, Sweden.

Here is part of a description of the first Bolechow Aktion (mass killing), which took place in October of 1941.  Mendelsohn quotes this from the testimony of a witness named Rebeka Mondschein given in Katowice, Poland in 1946:

On Tuesday 28 October 1941 at 10 am, two cars arrived [in Bolechow, Poland] …. In one car were Gestapo men in black shirts. In the other were Ukrainians in yellow shirts and berets with shovels …. The latter immediately drove to Taniawa to dig one large grave. From the city hall in a half hour a Ukrainian was assigned to each Gestapo man and these pairs went with a list set by city hall for the town. The list consisted of the wealthiest and most intelligent Jews.

…At 12 o’clock, they started taking [Jews] from their houses and the streets. The Gestapo men, Ukrainian militia members and innumerable young Ukrainian civilians…chased [the Jews] to Dom Katolicki [a large public hall].

…Nine hundred people were packed into the hall. People were stacked on one another. Many suffocated. They were killed in the hall, shot or simply hit over the head with clubs….

…[Those who survived in the hall] were kept in this way from 28 to 29 October without food or water…. [Then] they were taken…to the woods…. About 800 people were shot there. There was a board over a ditch onto which people were forced and they were shot and fell into the grave.

And here Mendelsohn describes a scene from a later Aktion, recounted to him by a witness named Pyotr while Mendelsohn was interviewing witnesses in Bolechow:

… as the last of the Jews of Bolechow walked naked [through the streets of Bolechow], two by two, to [their] deaths … they called out in Polish to their neighbors [who were watching from their windows]—“Stay well," "So long, we will not see each other anymore," "We'll not meet anymore."

These and the other Aktions described in this book were perpetrated by the SS-Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi killing squads that terrorized much of Eastern Europe during the latter years of the Nazi regime.

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Mendelsohn interviews many witnesses both direct and indirect, who had known Shmiel and Shmiel’s family or had known others who knew them. Their accounts are sometimes conflicting, and rarely crystal clear, and in the end that dynamic becomes largely what this book is “about” on a meta level. Rather than story as a “string” that takes you linearly from A to B and so on to Z, story becomes a tangle of strings that sometimes meet, sometimes form obstinate knots, and sometimes veer off in different directions only to meet again at a later point.

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I have only one complaint about this book: The presentation of the photographs.

First, the photographs are not on the same pages on which they are referred to. For example, one important photo is of Uncle Shmiel in his soldier uniform, with an unknown fellow soldier. This photo is discussed at length, but not shown until several pages later. And this type of odd placement happens throughout the book.

Second, the photographs are not captioned. Add the above problem to this one, and it is difficult to know what exactly all the photos are, and how they fit in.

Of course these two problems (as I perceive them anyway) were clearly choices made by the author and/or editors. I speculate that the idea was to have the reader experience the mystery – the not knowing quite the information you want to know – that the author experienced almost continually throughout his investigation. After all, while Mendelsohn was traveling from continent to continent and interviewing people, he heard stories of many people he did not have photos of, so he had to imagine. If this is indeed the reasoning behind these choices for the photography, I understand, but still I found these choices annoying, and they took away from rather than added to my enjoyment of the book.

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Still, this book offers great reward to the committed reader. It is a complex book—not a beach read—and it is well worth the effort. I highly recommend it.

The lost: A search for six of six million is part memoir, part history, part treatise on narrative, part thriller, and part investigative journalism; and has won numerous awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award.

I close with a recommendation: Before you read The lost: A search for six of six million by Daniel Mendelsohn, you should read the excellent Masters of death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the invention of the Holocaust by Richard Rhodes. While not an absolute necessity, reading the Rhodes book first will give you valuable context for understanding many of the events in Mendelsohn’s story, since the Aktions described in Mendelsohn’s book were perpetrated by the SS-Einsatzgruppen.