He was adopted by an elderly Welsh Nonconformist preacher and his sickly wife and spent his childhood near Bala, Gwynedd,[1] before attending a minor public school.

The elderly lady tells him the fate of his mother, an actress and opera singer who was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp.

From Prague, Austerlitz travels to Theriesenstadt, and after returning to England via train, with an emotionally difficult journey through Germany, manages to obtain a 14-minute video compilation of highlights from Theresienstadt.

Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet, the 1944 Nazi propaganda film, in which he believes he recognizes his mother.

He meets up with the narrator and tells him of his first sojourn in Paris in 1959 when he suffered his first nervous breakdown and was hospitalized; Marie de Verneuil, a young Frenchwoman with whom he became acquainted in the library, helps nurse him back to health.

[2] During the novel the reader is taken on a guided tour of a lost European civilization: a world of fortresses, railway stations, concentration camps and libraries.

The discovery of her real identity propels Susi on a painful and courageous quest in search of her past and the surviving members of her natural family.

The Orthodox rabbi Heshel Melamed's sudden death in 1919 had provided an opportunity for his widow and nine children to leave Lithuania for South Africa, which, in light of events two decades later, had been a gift of life.

"On his travels in Lithuania Jacobson finds scarcely any trace of his forebears, only signs everywhere of the annihilation from which Heshel's weak heart had preserved his immediate family when it stopped beating.

A broad and pervasive theme of the novel is the metaphor of water as time, a metaphor which helps explain two (arguably three) appearances of Noah's Ark in the novel: the first a golden picture (reproduced on page 43 of the text) in the Freemasons' temple of the Great Eastern Hotel, London; the second a toy Noah's Ark in the hermetically sealed billiards room of Iver Grove, a then abandoned estate on the outskirts of postwar Oxford (later home to Tom Stoppard); and the third (arguably) the new Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.