Ben­jamin jumped. A Pol­ish Jew escapes from a train car­ry­ing his fam­i­ly to Tre­blin­ka. It’s around this mirac­u­lous act of sur­vival that his daughter’s mem­oir of a lost father cir­cles. One of three of a vast War­saw fam­i­ly to live through the Holo­caust, Ben Wich­tel made a new life in Cana­da only to lose every­thing a sec­ond time. Diana Wich­tel was 13 when her moth­er took the chil­dren to her Catholic fam­i­ly in New Zealand. Her father was to fol­low. She nev­er saw him again. Her quest, decades lat­er, to unrav­el her family’s secrets and silences took her across the world — Poland, Ger­many, Cana­da, Israel — as she pieced togeth­er frag­ments of infor­ma­tion about the fate of her fam­i­ly at the hands of the Nazis and made shat­ter­ing dis­cov­er­ies about her father’s final years. Cling­ing to hope and humor, the book is also about the pow­er of love, the insis­tence of mem­o­ry and the trans­mis­sion of the lega­cy of the Holo­caust down the gen­er­a­tions. They tried to erase him but Ben­jamin jumped. This is his story.