The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

Synopsis
Daniel Mendelsohn tries to find out what happened to his grandfather's brother and his family during the Holocaust.

My thoughts
Mendelsohn is a mesmerizing writer and he could not have found a more poignant subject than his family's personal tragedy. Mendelsohn grew up hearing stories about his grandfather's older brother Schmiel, who was a successful businessman in the Ukraine before World War II and who was killed in the Holocaust along with his wife and four daughters. Over the years, the story of how they died became garbled—did they die in a concentration camp? Or were they murdered in a massacre by members of their own town? In a quest that takes him all over the world, Mendelsohn uncovers tantalizing hints about how Schmiel and his family lived during the war—that they hid in a castle, that they joined the resistance.

There are two separate stories—Schmiel's story and Mendelsohn's journey—and both are told in the voice of a strong storyteller. Six million is an unfathomably large number, but the six members of Mendelsohn's family come alive through his research. Mendelsohn talks to people who knew Schmiel and his daughters and comes to know them as individuals with distinct personalities rather than unsmiling figures in faded family photos. As he pieces together the stories of his murdered relatives, Mendelsohn also documents his relationships with his living family members. He doesn't focus as much on these dramas, but they're familiar and help round out the story.

Bottom line
It's a long book, and it's worth every page.

Fine print
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, by Daniel Mendelsohn
Genre: history, non-fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library
I read this book in April 2011