HELL'S TRACES

A searing, powerful book about how memorials do —or do not— manage to commemorate the Holocaust, an unsentimental meditation on memory and loss.

IN JULY 1942, the French police in Paris, acting for the German military government, arrested Victor Ripp's three year-old cousin, Alexandre. Two months later, Alexandre was killed in Auschwitz.
In addition to this young child, ten other members of Ripp's father's side of the family died in the Holocaust. Meanwhile, his mother's family, several generations of nearly forty people who had come to Berlin over the years from Russia to flee the Revolution, escaped the Final Solution by moving to Palestine or westward. Without exception, they all survived.
In Hell's Traces, Ripp narrates the dramatically different paths of these two families in the course of visiting Holocaust memorials throughout Europe. Travelling through five countries, he encounters the artists who designed the memorials, local historians who recall the events that the memorials honor, and Holocaust survivors who had their own stories to tell. Throughout it all, Ripp attempts to see if he can ever find any mention of his cousin who vanished soon after his abduction over seventy years earlier.

VICTOR RIPP is the author of Turgenev's Russia, Moscow to Main Street, and Pizza in Pushkin Square. He has taught at Cornell University and the University of Virginia, and is currently the Director of International Programs at Princeton University.