The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn
In Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, Frederick, the artist, comments on a TV show he’d been watching on Auschwitz:
“More gruesome film clips, and more puzzled intellectuals declaring their mystification over the systematic murder of millions. The reason they can never answer the question “How could it possibly happen?” is that it’s the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is “Why doesn’t it happen more often?””
The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn doesn’t answer this question and it doesn’t attempt to “explain” the Holocaust. The author travels all over the world talking to people who may have known his Great-Uncle Schmiel and his family and others who experienced the Holocaust in the attempt to provide a narrative of survivors. But the book is not merely a collection of testimonials. The Lost is an attempt to understand memory itself, and because in this story the search for memory revolves around the events of the Holocaust, we come to realize how far we are from understanding what took place just 65 years ago. (more…)
