...they provide him with graphic descriptions of what the first roundup of Jews in October 1941 was like. Ukrainian policemen carried a list with names of Jewish doctors, lawyers, and businessmen and pointed out their houses to the Germans. Eliminating the leading citizens was meant to demoralize the town. It's a method the Soviets used during their occupation when they either murdered much of the upper strata of the Polish society or deported its members with their families to Siberia or Kazakhstan. The more Mendelsohn talks to the survivors, the more he realizes how much can never be known. He will never know the color of a girl's dress as she was forced into a mass grave where she saw other women being tortured, raped, and killed—and there is no way we can reconstruct her state of mind. Still, for him, it is our moral duty to try to imagine what it was like to be in her shoes. Judging by the renewed enthusiasm for slaughtering the innocent today, many people never bother to do that.

What is the smell of a thousand terrified people being herded to their deaths? What is the smell of a room in which a thousand terrified people have been kept for a day and a half, deprived of toilets, a room in which the stove has been lighted, a room in which perhaps a few dozen people have been shot to death, a woman has gone into labor?

How can one write a story of six people who left so little trace of their existence? The answer depends on what Mendelsohn can learn about the world in which they lived from historical documents and from what the witnesses can tell him. At the Yad Vashem Center in Israel, he finds a transcript of the testimony a woman gave in 1946, which gives the fullest account so far of what occurred during the first Aktion in Bolechów in 1941 in which at least one of his relatives perished. Another deposition made in July 1946 by a certain Matylda Gelernter, thirty-eight years of age, describes the next roundup in which Ester, Lorka, and Bronia died:

On the 3rd, 4th and 5th of September 1942, the second action in Bolechów took place without a list: Men, women and children were caught in their houses, attics, hiding places. About 660 children were taken. People were killed in the town square in Bolechów and in the streets. The action lasted from before evening on Wednesday until Saturday. On Friday it was said that the action was already over. People decided to come out of hiding but the action started up again on Saturday and on that one day more people were killed than in the preceding days. The Germans and Ukrainians preyed especially on the children. They took the children by their legs and bashed their heads on the edge of the sidewalks, whilst they laughed and tried to kill them with one blow. Others threw children from the height of the first floor, so a child fell on the brick pavement until it was just pulp. The Gestapo men bragged that they killed 600 children and the Ukrainian Matowiecki (from Rozdol/y near near Zydaczowy) proudly guessed that he had killed 96 Jews himself, mostly children.

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