The rhapsodizing about the death of young beauty and about the beauty of young death that had sounded a repetitive theme in The Elusive Embrace is here silenced by the awful nature of the truths uncovered. The aestheticization of death is obscene in the face of genocide. There is no beauty to be found in the degradations to which these Nazi-slain were subjected, no aesthetics in these lives reduced to the sheer animal instincts for elemental survival: hiding in haystacks, in holes dug with fingers in the earth. Though I’m not certain the author would agree, it seemed to me that the story he works toward in The Lost gradually renders him less a Hellenist, enthralled to an image of heroic, beautiful death, and more Hebraic, cherishing life for life’s sake and seeing death as defilement.

One can, of course, imagine the effect on an imaginative boy of being linked in the tears of his relatives to his murdered great-uncle. The epitaph to the book is the poignant response of Virgil’s Aeneas, the young Trojan prince who is one of the few survivors of the destruction of Troy, when, wandering far from the city, he visits a temple and sees a mural depicting the Trojan War. What is material for Carthaginian decorative art is the stuff of tragedy for the Trojan Aeneas, a deep truth that Virgil gives utterance to in the immortal line Sunt lacrimae rerum, which the author translates as “There are tears in things.”

There is a brief, lovely passage in which Mr. Mendelsohn links the story of Aeneas to his own quest in The Lost, and this linking reminded me, too, of the use that Louis Begley made of the Aeneas myth in his celebrated first novel, Wartime Lies. As it happens, Louis Begley plays a part in Mr. Mendelsohn’s book, but mostly for being the son of the indomitable “Mrs. Begley,” with whom the author, in the service of his recovery project, comes to share a quirkily loving relationship. Mrs. Begley had come from Stryj, a town neighboring Bolechow, and she helps the author to grasp her lost world. She accuses him—both dismissively and indulgently, he says—of being a “sentimental person.” She was—she died in 2004—the very opposite of a sentimental person. The survivors’ “amazing stories” elicit her leveling response: “If you didn’t have an amazing story, you didn’t survive,” she tells the author coldly.