In 1998, a group of middle-school students in Whitwell, Tennessee,
a small town whose residents are almost all white and all
Christian, embarked on a project designed to help them grasp the
human scale of the Holocaust. To do that, they collected paper
clips with the goal of accumulating six million --- one for each of
the Jews slaughtered by the Nazis. Their project is recounted in
the moving 2004 documentary film Paper Clips, a powerful story
about tolerance and overcoming prejudice.

In his gripping memoir, THE LOST: A Search for Six of Six Million,
Daniel Mendelsohn, a classics scholar and literary critic,
approaches the same historical events from a dramatically different
perspective, recounting his quest --- one that consumed five years
and took him around the globe --- to discover more about the lives,
and deaths at the hands of the Nazis, of his great uncle Shmiel
Jäger, his wife Ester and their four daughters: Lorka, Frydka,
Ruchele and Bronia. As he describes his task, "Often it is the
small things, rather than the big picture, that the mind can
comfortably grasp: that, for instance, it is naturally more
appealing to readers to absorb the meaning of a vast historical
event through the story of a single family."

From an early age, Mendelsohn had been captivated by the stories
shared by his maternal grandfather, Abraham Jaeger, who had left
his home in the village of Bolechow, Poland (now Bolekhiv,
Ukraine), in the Galicia region, for the United States at age 18.
Abraham's older brother, Shmiel, had made the same pilgrimage, but
for reasons that are never fully understood --- perhaps sibling
conflict or the desire to attain prominence in his small town ---
he returned to Bolechow, where he became a prosperous butcher and
well-known member of the Jewish community. As a youngster,
Mendelsohn heard his mother and her immigrant relatives speak in
hushed tones of family members who had been "killed by the Nazis,"
and this cryptic reference spurred him on a quest to tell their
story.

Accompanied by his brother Matt, an accomplished portrait
photographer whose black and white photographs are sprinkled
throughout the book, Mendelsohn travels from Bolechow to Israel,
Australia, Sweden and Denmark, among other countries, and then back
to Bolechow where he brings the memoir to a moving climax. He
persistently and skillfully mines the sometimes tissue-thin
memories of Holocaust survivors and others, many of them in their
80s and 90s, for facts that will help him reconstruct what life was
like for Shmiel and his family and how they met their respective
fates. Against formidable odds, he's able to illumine aspects of
their personalities and to relate, in at least one case with
disturbing specificity as he describes the first "Aktion" or mass
killing of Bolechow Jews in October 1941, how they died. In the
end, fewer than 50 of the town's 6,000 Jews escaped annihilation.
THE LOST is peopled with vivid characters and tales of heroism and
cowardice; in short, its pages are filled with humanity in all its
complexity.

Into his tale, Mendelsohn weaves scholarly meditations on some of
the stories of the Book of Genesis, from the Creation narrative
through the story of Abraham. Impatient readers may find themselves
skimming these passages to get back to the main narrative thread,
but the juxtaposition of these familiar stories with the events of
the Holocaust invests them with new meaning.

One of the most poignant aspects of Mendelsohn's book is the page
at its conclusion entitled "In Memoriam." There, he lists the names
of seven of his interviewees who died in the course of the project.
While the goal of fully recreating who his relatives were, how they
lived and how they died was, in the end, elusive, how much more
daunting will that task be for others when the last of the
Holocaust survivors are gone?

Probably because the fate that befell the Jews of Europe between
1939 and 1945 remains so incomprehensible in its horrific scope,
few other historical events have inspired such a wealth of
compelling literature as the Holocaust. Daniel Mendelsohn's THE
LOST justifiably deserves a place among the most valuable
contributions to that body of work.