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, the boy was killed in Auschwitz. To try to make sense of this act, Ripp looks at it through the prism of family history. In addition to Alexandre, ten members of Ripp's family on his father's side died in the Holocaust. His mother's side of the family, numbering thirty people, was in Berlin when Hitler came to power. Without exception, they escaped the Final Solution. Hell's Traces tells the story of the two families' divergent paths. To spark the past to life, Ripp visits Holocaust memorials throughout Europe. A memorial in Warsaw that includes a boxcar like the ones that carried Jews to Auschwitz made him contemplate the horror of Alexandre's ride to his death. A memorial in Berlin invoked the anti-Jewish laws of 1930s. This allowed Ripp to better understand how his mother's family escaped the Nazis. Ripp sees thirty-five memorials in six countries. He encounters the artists who designed the memorials, historians who recall the events that the memorials honor, and Holocaust survivors with their own stories to tell. Hell's Traces is structured like a travel book where each destination provides an example of how memorials can recover and also make sense of the past.

An unsentimental meditation on memory and loss that recounts the author's search for a Holocaust memorial that speaks to the death of his young cousin.

About the Author
Victor Ripp is the author of Moscow to Main Street, Pizza in Pushkin Square, and Turgenev's Russia. His fiction has appeared in Ontario Review and Antioch Review.He has taught at Cornell University and the University of Virginia.


Book Information
ISBN 9780374537487
Author Victor Ripp
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
Publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
Weight(grams) 266g
Dimensions(mm) 206mm * 140mm * 14mm