"With this act of memory and imagination, Mr. Ripp transforms his cousin from a ghostly memory to a vivid presence whose loss he--and his readers--can more fully grasp." --Diane Cole, Wall Street Journal

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. In Hell's Traces, Ripp examines this act through the prism of family history. In addition to Alexandre, ten members of Ripp's family on his father's side died in the...