The Lost is an odyssey in search of six ghosts. Over a period of five years, Daniel Mendelsohn traveled to nearly a dozen countries on four continents in order to learn the answer to a question he had first asked as a boy, entranced by his Orthodox grandfather’s tales of his family’s history in a small European town: What had happened, really, to his grandfather’s brother Shmiel and his family during the Holocaust? About this one subject, however, the grandfather kept silent, and it was only after his death, when a secret cache of desperate letters written in 1939 was uncovered, that the mystery resurfaced and demanded to be solved. Mendelsohn managed to track down and befriend the twelve remaining survivors from his great-uncle’s Ukranian town. He then pieced together the stories of who Shmiel and his family were and how they lived and died-although the full and devastating answer to the latter question was not revealed until he made a stunning discovery, during a final visit to Ukrai