The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million is a non-fiction memoir by Daniel Mendelsohn, published in September 2006, which has received critical acclaim as a new perspective on Holocaust remembrance. It was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Prix Médicis in France. It was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper History Prize in the UK and placed second for the 2006 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for Nonfiction. An international bestseller, The Lost has been translated into numerous languages, including French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, German, Romanian, Turkish, Norwegian, and Hebrew. The Lost tells of Mendelsohn's world-wide travels in search of details about the lives and fates of a maternal great-uncle, Samuel (Shmiel) Jäger, his wife, Ester, and their four daughters who lived in Bolechow and were killed during the Nazi occupation. According to the author, the book "is about trying to find out exactly, specifically, what happened to those people." In writing The Lost, Mendelsohn notes a debt to Marcel Proust, telling Salon.com, "Clearly, the book is in some large sense about the possibility of recovering the past, so it's automatically a Proustian book."

Reception

On Bookmarks November/December 2006 issue, a magazine that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a (4.0 out of 5) based on critic reviews with a critical summary saying, "In the end, however, "By honoring these six relatives, Mendelsohn has paid homage to all of those who perished in Hitler’s Final Solution" (San Francisco Chronicle)".