WHAT THEY DIDN'T BURN

Laytner, a former foreign correspondent for NBC News and United Press International, attempts to reconstruct his father’s experience as a Polish Jew during the Holocaust.

While growing up in New York City, the author often heard his father, Josef “Dolek” Lajtner, recount his World War II–era experiences, which included time spent as a prisoner in concentration camps. However, the younger man worried that these accounts didn’t provide him with facts but merely the “memories of facts”—his “father’s vague vignettes in a vacuum.” The author embarked on a mission to piece together a fuller tableau, tracking down those who might have known his late father by traveling to Florida, Poland, and Germany. Rigorous historical research requires documentary proof, and he discovered that the Nazis had left behind a detailed paper trail. However, even as he solved some mysteries, he encountered new ones. For example, he discovered that his father was a diamond smuggler—a fact that likely helped keep him alive but that he declined to share with his family. He also apparently survived a foiled escape plan, but how he did so remains unknown. The biggest mystery, however, was how his father, a “unspectacularly ordinary” man, managed to weather 53 months and 18 days in forced-labor camps; one friend called Dolek a “tough bastard,” but this wasn’t the man that Laytner knew. In these pages, the author presents his findings with a remarkable blend of meticulousness and unabashed emotion, movingly communicating what he experienced during the process. Recalling the discovery of a particularly important document, for instance, he writes: “I feel proud, and frustrated. Proud, because I had found another tangible link to my father’s past, another incontestable piece of Dad’s timeline of survival through the war. Frustrated, because I hadn’t made the time as an adult to talk to him about so very much.” Readers are likely to experience something similar while reading this extraordinary text—feeling heartache about a grim era of modern history but also joy to find a story so affectingly and intelligently conveyed.

A scrupulously researched and dramatic remembrance.