[2] The book starts with a chapter called "The Place" in which, on 2 August 1947, a 24-year-old man arrives via train at the industrial town of Södertälje.

He learns to downplay his foreign background, and at one point, he writes with regard to one of his teachers, "I never let Mr. Winqvist find out that I knew a few words of Yiddish".

[5] The chapter "The Stop" describes David Rosenberg's early years in Sweden, as well the story of his wife, Hala Staw, during the war and afterwards in Poland.

He describes Rosenberg as suffering from Rentenneurose [pension neurosis], a psychological sickness motivated by the wish for insurance benefits and the application is declined.

[8] He makes a new application and in the following years several doctors, many saying that his ability to work is reduced by 60% due to psychological illness that can be related to the wartime experiences.

The book recounts these important details exemplifying how in the 1950s postwar Germany further victimised, albeit not so to the same extent, Jewish Europeans it had already so wronged during the 1940s.

There is not one complete narrative of the Holocaust but a growing set of fragments that improve our grasp of what occurred during this most shameful era of European history and its immediate aftermath.

[11][12][13][14] Writing in the Financial Times Philippe Sands describes the book as "a towering and wondrous work about memory and experience, exquisitely crafted, beautifully written, humane, generous, devastating, yet somehow also hopeful".

[4]In a more critical review, Thomas Harding in New Statesman sees the book as a non-fiction narrative and finds that it relies too much on speculation.

[1] Readers are invited by this narrative technique to consider how we reach an accurate depiction of past times and situations that are as vast and horrific as the Holocaust.