Daniel Mendelsohn’s monumental book “The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million” has been selected by Salon as one of the five best non-fiction books of 2006:
"The Lost" is Mendelsohn’s attempt to find out who [his Ukrainian] relatives were, and what exactly happened to them [in the Holocaust]. After traveling thousands of miles, visiting the Ukraine, Israel and any place else where someone might have known someone else who knew his uncle, Mendelsohn discovers that the truth of what happened to his relatives was quite a bit more complicated — and surprising — than anyone had known.
The story is gripping, but along the way "The Lost" reveals itself to be so much more than a Holocaust family memoir: it’s also a page-turning mystery, a lesson on how history is written and a work of religious scholarship. This is a book that you start and think: I have never read a book like this one before.
The selection is accompanied by an interview of Mendelsohn by Andrew O’Hehir that is itself worth reading in its entirety. Here is an excerpt — Mendelsohn’s answer to O’Hehir’s question about judging others and judging oneself:
You cannot come up against this material without being forced to wonder about how one would behave oneself. I don’t think it matters whether you’re Jewish or gentile, actually. People say, "Oh, well, you know, if I were the gentile neighbor, I’m sure I would have hidden the Jews." I give graphic descriptions of what was done to people who tried to help, and it was terrible. Little babies, 6 months old, hanged in the town square.
I can say, well, yes, if somebody came to my house and said, "Where are you hiding the Jews? Give them up or we’ll shoot you," maybe I would do the right thing. Maybe I would think it was worth it. But if somebody came to my house — which is a more accurate scenario — and held a gun to my children’s heads and said, "Where are you hiding the Jews?" well, that’s the kind of moral complexity you have to envision. And then you have to really think what you would do. That was the point of the totalitarian terror imposed on these people. It wasn’t a nice choice: I’ll die to do a good thing. It was: Your family is going to die for you to do a good thing.
My book ends with a story about a remarkably good person who tried to save members of my family, and clearly a bad person who betrayed them to the Gestapo. My friend Louis Begley said to me, "Well, there it is in one sentence. The extremes of human good and the extremes of human evil." This may be an ethical failing on my part, but I don’t want to judge that 19-year-old boy who joined the Jewish police in 1943. He thought he was going to be a hotshot, or he thought he might save his mom. What history keeps giving you is unbearably complicated moral problems. Because the event is receding in time, because the people who were faced with those choices are vanishing off the face of the earth and can’t tell you what it was like, we all want to think we would have done good. As my interviews with survivors make clear, they are still haunted by the decisions they and their relatives made 60 years ago.
The answer reflects the empathy and generosity of spirit that appear on virtually every page of Mendelsohn’s remarkable book.
The two stories Mendelsohn mentions above do not actually end the book. There is a final scene after them, involving Mendelsohn himself, in a place no one, not even 475 pages into this 503-page book, could have imagined would close this Odyssey — and a simple but overwhelming gesture, made possible and meaningful because of the 500 pages that preceded it. An amazing, wonderful book.