April 1945: Daniel, a young American rabbi, arrives at the Ohrdruf concentration camp with the Allied troops. They have been warned about a dramatic situation. Gathering the stories, requests, and anguished pleas of the just-liberated inmates, still dazed with hunger and despair, Daniel becomes emotionally attached to a mute, inflexible five-year-old, and assigns himself the mission of finding the child’s parents in the next camp, Buchenwald.

What he finds there will remain engraved forever in Daniel’s memory, as in the minds of all of his contemporaries: an encounter with absolute evil. Along with it comes an unanswerable question that leaves him no peace: how could God have allowed such a negation? How can anyone go on believing, loving, or even living after seeing what mankind is capable of inflicting on itself?

The author manages to render the atrocity of the camps and the incredulity of those who saw it first. But above all, he has written a novel suffused with humanity, incarnated by the child whose eyes have been opened too wide, who, without speaking a word, convinces Daniel that life is surely stronger than horror.

Daniel, a liberal young American rabbi, is one of the first liberators to reach Buchenwald. This text, which is all the more essential in that the last eyewitnesses to the horrors of the camps will soon have passed away, explores a subject that has rarely been addressed in literature: discovering the death camps.