Now the elderly Alex is being punished by both sides, shadowed by Baltic fascists threatening him if he reveals Lobe's deeds and by Holocaust groups investigating him for being a collaborator.
Mark becomes his father's Virgil, guiding him through the underworld of his own past. He begins to dread each new revelation. "Was there something even darker, if that was possible?" he writes.
Father and son journey to Latvia and comb through state archives. As they search out the truth, Mark is torn between filial piety and anger as the old man hesitates, pulls back, terrified to learn more.
At one point, an Oxford historian tells Mark that his father's memories cannot be true. The historian doubts that his father could have survived in the forest and his account of the chronology of events. Perhaps he volunteered to go with the soldiers, he suggests, and is suffering from false-memory syndrome. (Kurzem writes that the Claims Conference in New York, which investigates accounts of Holocaust suffering, doubted his memories, too, but reversed its decision after a Jewish group in Minsk validated them.)
This is a book to keep you up at night. At moments the dialogue seems too smooth to be authentic. Mark, who has produced a documentary about his father, says he compressed events to make his account more readable, and changed some identities to protect people's privacy.
Like a great novel, it culminates in a remarkable scene. Alex Kurzem returns to where his mother, baby brother and sister were murdered. A monument commemorates the 1,600 people buried there in a mass grave. Just as he did the day he saw his mother and siblings standing naked on the edge of a pit and killed, he bites his hand to prevent himself from crying out.
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