Hvordan skrive noe nytt om Holocaust? Daniel Mendelsohn rekonstruerer en familie på fem, og borer seg inn i deres liv slik de var, både før og etter de ble tatt. Han er selv den utløsende årsak til at det ble nettopp dem. Hver gang Daniel kom inn der slektningene satt, begynte de å gråte. Han var som å se den avøde som barn.

They would cry because of his startling resemblance to a distant relative among the dead, his great-uncle Shmiel Jäger, a meat shipper in Bolechow who was murdered by the Nazis along with his wife, Ester, and their four daughters.
Mendelsohn’s initial quest to find out what actually happened to Shmiel and his family – the details of the fate they shared with millions – begins with normal, if death-inflected, genealogical curiosity. But when he discovers a series of increasingly desperate letters from Shmiel to his family in America, written in 1939 as events close in on Bolechow’s Jews, he is drawn into an obsessive multicontinent search that recreates the life of the Lost as well as their annihilation. The result is a new way of telling a story we thought we knew.

Before long one begins to grasp Mendelsohn’s method, which draws on both the classical and the Biblical modes of storytelling.

How has the literature of the past coped with inconsolable tragedy from the flood to the fall of Troy? Homer, he reminds us, «will often interrupt the forward motion of the ‘Iliad,’ his great poem of war, spiraling backward in time and sometimes space in order to give psychological richness and emotional texture to the proceedings, or to suggest, as he sometimes does, that not knowing certain stories, being ignorant of intricate histories that, unbeknownst to us, frame the present, can be a grave mistake.» And so Mendelsohn spirals back by means of letters, diaries and family photo albums, which cumulatively recreate the world of prewar Bolechow, a place caught between medieval spirituality and modernity, a lost world once shared by Jews, Poles and Ukrainians in deceptive comity.

Mendelsohn forsøker å finne ut «hvordan det var». Han minner om at det er noe ganske annet å befinne seg på stedet, enn å se det på avstand i et museum, hvor dyktig det enn er laget. Fremveksten av Holocaust-museer er ikke ensbetydende med større forståelse.

But Mendelsohn also seems to suggest that we can’t look forward until we look back, until we know how we came to be who we are – until we know what we have lost. He tries to look back – to see the horror of annihilation – through the eyes of the single family he has brought back to life. He speaks of «what it would have been like, as a 16-year-old, perhaps over-sheltered girl of a certain era, to witness other people being killed, tortured, raped, shot. To watch, for instance, as the rabbi you have known since you were a young child has his eyes cut out, has a cross cut into his chest, and is then forced to dance naked with another terrified young woman.»

And if one thinks one has lost one’s capacity for horror at the depths of human nature, consider this, from an eyewitness deposition he finds about the second roundup of Bolechow Jews: «A terrible episode happened with Mrs. Grynberg. The Ukrainians and the Germans who had broken into her house found her giving birth. When the birth pangs started she was dragged onto a dumpster in the yard of the town hall with a crowd who cracked jokes and jeered and watched the pain of childbirth. The child was immediately torn from her arms along with its umbilical cord and thrown. It was trampled by the crowd and she was stood on her feet as blood poured out of her with her bleeding bits hanging.»

It’s an episode that raises questions about the limits of representation. After giving us an excerpt from another eyewitness account – of Jews packed in cattle cars on the way to the death camps – Mendelsohn writes: «Whatever we see in museums, the artifacts and the evidence, can give us only the dimmest comprehension of what the event itself was like. We must be careful when we try to envision ‘what it was like.’ It is possible today, for instance, to walk inside a vintage cattle car in a museum, but simply being in that enclosed, boxlike space is not the same as being in that space after you’ve had to smother your toddler to death and to drink your own urine in desperation, experiences that visitors to such exhibits are unlikely to have recently undergone.» The power of eyewitness testimony suggests that sometimes words are worth a thousand pictures.

The Lost. A Search for Six of Six Million. By Daniel Mendelsohn. 512 pages. $27.95. HarperCollins.

The Holocaust retold in life of one ‘lost’ family
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/09/22/features/IDLEDE23.php