Jonfaith's Reviews > The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

There may just be a vertical hierarchy in our popular understanding of the Holocaust. At the top, however uneasy, are the Survivors: it is through their testimony that we know to never forget. Their achievement, their survival is also a measure of merit in having outwitted or simply survived the minatory machinations of the Nazis. Below them are the victims, particularly present, they are too commonly discussed in terms i.e. when the doltish ask "why they went like sheep, why they didn’t fight back, why they didn’t heed the signs in the 1930s?" Below that mound of evidence is the nefarious albeit ambiguous mass of perpetrators, willing executioners, ordinary men, the devil incarnate and the betrayers.

If only life was that fucking simple.


Mr. Mendelson constructs a marvelous investigation sixty years after the fact. His training as a classicist lends a unique angle to his research. The idea of using Dido as an apt metaphor is astonishing: victim and exile, she prospers from her wits only to kill herself. If ever an example anticipated the Survivor, then this is it.