This turned out to be such a haunting, moving story. The last two paragraphs brought me to tears. It's a novel about Theo, a young man who was released from the camps in the Ukraine. He planned to walk by himself across Europe to his home town of Baden-bei-Wein in Austria. Along the way, he tried to avoid other survivors, but he did encounter them from time to time. His exchanges of conversation, hot coffee, and cigarettes, were fraught with a heaviness of spirit. On many occasions, he remembered or imagined conversations with his mother, a beloved free spirit but mentally ill, and with his dad, a serious rather distant paternal figure.

This is a story of the Holocaust, but not a story of atrocities. It is a story of feeling and what it was like to be a survivor. It gives the sense of alienation and the uncertainty if there was or was not something for which to hope. ( )