"A novel" - cover.

Poem - front matter.

"Winner of the National Book Award" - cover.

In the late autumn of 1996, more than a hundred people gather at the site of a former death camp. Throughout that week, they offer prayer and witness at the crematoria and meditate in all weathers on the selection platform. They eat and sleep in the sparse quarters of the Nazi officers who, half a century before, sent more than a million Jews to their deaths. Clements Olin, an American academic of Polish descent, is there to complete research on the strange suicide of a survivor. As the days pass, tensions both political and personal, surface among the participants, stripping away any easy pretense to healing or closure. Caught in the grip of emotions and impulses of bewildering intensity, Olin is forced to abandon his observers role and to bear witness, not only to his family's ambiguous history but to his own as well.