An intimate memoir recounting a woman’s quest to solve the mystery of her Holocaust survivor father’s death.

As a child growing up in Vancouver in the 1950s and early ’60s, Diana Wichtel knew there was something different about her family. Her parents were far from forthcoming about the harrowing details of her Jewish father’s journey from Poland to Canada during the Second World War, often leaving young Diana with more questions than answers.

What she was told was that during the War, Benjamin Wichtel and several members of his family were herded onto a train headed for the Treblinka extermination camp. Along the way, Benjamin seized the opportunity to jump off the train, leaving behind his mother and five of his brothers and sisters, along with their spouses and children. Against all odds, Benjamin managed to evade the Nazis for the remainder of the War, eventually making his way to Canada and new life in Vancouver with a wife and three children of his own. But the past haunted him, and the pain of what he had gone through increasingly began to infiltrate his home life. When Diana was thirteen, her mother took the three children back to her native New Zealand, with the plan that Benjamin would at some point follow them. However, the family never saw him again.

After decades of unanswered questions, Diana (now a journalist), set out on a journey of her own to uncover what happened to her father after they left him behind in Canada. The search became an obsession as she painstakingly uncovered information about his large Warsaw family and their fate at the hands of the Nazis, scoured archives across the world for clues to her father’s disappearance, and visited the places he lived. This unforgettable memoir is a deep reflection on the meaning of family, the trauma of loss, and the insistence of memory. It asks the question: Is it better to know, or more bearable not to?