The Book of Dirt

They chose not to speak and now they are gone. And we cannot find the pieces of the puzzle that make up those few years of their life, for they too are gone...What's left to fill the silence is no longer theirs. This is my story, woven from the threads of rumour and legend.The Book of Dirt is a love story, a riveting survivors' tale, and a grandson's quest to learn about his grandparents' extraordinary lives. The author's family built myths around them: Jakub was a teacher in the camps, keeping the children busy until it was their turn to be killed; Daša laid the railway sleepers on the tracks that brought her fellow Jews to their deaths. When they died, their stories went with them. Then came the cracks. Everything the author thought he knew was wrong. In this story of two unlikely survivors, Bram Presser brilliantly imagines the fate of Jakub, deported to Auschwitz and to Theresienstadt, where it was rumoured after the war that he had sorted...