As a child, Daniel Mendelsohn resembled his grandfather's brother Schmiel so uncannily that elderly relatives would burst into tears when he entered a room. He begins his amazing tale with this experience from his childhood, which led him to a lifelong journey of discovering what happened to Schmiel, his wife Ester and their four daughters, who disappeared without a trace sometime during the Nazi extermination of Jews during the Second World War.

Mendelsohn's book tells of how he investigated the history of his family, and in particular, these six family members, by travelling back to Bolechow in Poland, through Europe, Israel, the US and even Australia in an effort to find people who had known his family and may have known what happened to them.

He spends quite a bit of time telling us about his mother's father, Abraham Jaeger, and his wonderful storytelling. You soon come to see that he has adopted his grandfather's own convoluted style in this book, and that the way the story is told, and the places it takes you are going to be as important as what you learn on the journey.

As well as telling us about the many people he meets and how his family members were so brutally despatched, he also intersperses an exegesis of key sections of Genesis, based on his interaction with the medieval rabbi Rashi and Friedman, a contemporary Jewish scholar.

Black and white photos of the people in the story are inserted into the text, though they are not labelled and do not usually appear next to the precise part of the text which speaks of them. But you will mostly realise who they are, by thinking back over what you have read.

The book gives insight into the horrors of Hitler's final solution and shows how decent people can become involved in unspeakable slaughter of their own countrymen: one of the most disturbing things we are told is that sometimes the Germans were more "humane" to those they got rid of (by doing it quickly and without venom) than the Ukrainians and Poles and others they enlisted, because the Germans did not know the people they were exterminating. But some of the other nationalities would make their killing personal and drawn-out by, for example, taking delight in killing off a rival businessman.

Reading this long book is well worth your time, because it personalises six of the millions who were gotten rid of because of their cultural heritage and religion. It reminds us of how easily evil can take over seemingly respectable people. For Christians, it gives us an inside look at our Jewish brothers and sisters, the descendants of those from whom God was pleased to send our Lord and Saviour.

The book would have been made more "user-friendly" by the inclusion of a table of contents and index. But the family tree at the beginning of the book gives some assistance in helping readers see how the many people he writes about fit into his story.