For decades, Monika Sznajderman lived in the shadow of silence. Her father had never wanted to speak about his odyssey through concentration and extermination camps, his escape, and his return to Warsaw. Until the photos from overseas arrived: sent by relatives of whom she had known nothing. She begins to research. A few documents in the city archive of Radom and the account of the only survivor, her great-uncle Eliasz Sznajderman, at the Holocaust Museum in Washington - this is all the trace the large family left in Poland. In contrast to them, "ordinary people without a history," her mother's Polish ancestors were members of the upper class, nationalistic and anti-Semitic landowners and entrepreneurs who lived according to the rules and laws of their class. Monika Sznajderman is far along in her research when she...