Auschwitz is named as one of the places where members of the Burnstein family were murdered, binding the family’s history of migration and survival to the Holocaust. In the novel, the name appears within a contrast between those who escaped Europe before its destruction and the relatives who remained behind.

A Family Photograph and Its Aftermath

A photograph taken on 12 April 1919 shows sixteen members of the Burnstein family gathered in the dining room of their home in Korczyna. By 21 May 1946, only two of those pictured were still alive. The photograph’s ordinary family arrangement—parents, siblings, spouses, and children together at a table—becomes a measure of the scale of the loss that followed.

The account distinguishes among the family members’ fates rather than treating their deaths as a single undifferentiated event. Some died in Plaszów, including Saul’s mother, his sister Agar, his brother David, and other close relatives. Moshe, the husband of Linka, died in the Warsaw Ghetto. Saul’s sister Rebeca, her husband and children, and Linka and her family died at Auschwitz. The place is thus one point in a wider geography of persecution and destruction.

Emigration and Survival

The surviving Burnsteins were the three brothers who crossed the Atlantic. Efraim had accepted his elder brother’s offer to emigrate to America after the pogrom in Korczyna, but he waited until Saul’s Bar Mitzvah before taking him along. The narration makes that choice a decisive contingency: had Efraim not emigrated, and had he not brought Saul with him, Saul would not have become the American congressman elected to represent the people of the United States.

The counterfactual is sharpened by the roll call of relatives who did not escape. Saul might have died in Plaszów, like his mother and siblings, in the Warsaw Ghetto, or at Auschwitz. Survival is presented not as a family-wide rescue but as the consequence of a narrow route out of Europe that only three brothers took. Auschwitz marks the terrible alternative against which their eventual lives in America are measured.

Narrative Significance

The family photograph first serves as an intimate object that Saul repeatedly looks at; its domestic scene preserves the presence of people who are otherwise known through the places and circumstances of their deaths. The narration then counts the survivors and names the camps and ghetto where the others perished, turning a private image into a record of historical rupture.

Auschwitz’s significance here is specific and relational: it is where Rebeca and her family, and Linka and hers, were killed. Its mention sits alongside Plaszów and the Warsaw Ghetto, locating the Burnsteins’ losses within distinct sites of Nazi persecution. The surviving brothers’ emigration does not undo those deaths; it explains why Saul’s family history contains both a life made possible in America and a vast absence left behind in Europe.