Plaszów is the concentration camp where members of Saul Burnstein’s family were killed. Its brief appearance in the novel gives the Burnstein family photograph a historical weight: survival across the Atlantic separated Saul from relatives who were later murdered in Plaszów and other sites of Nazi persecution.

The Burnstein Family’s Fate

The novel describes a photograph taken on 12 April 1919 in the dining room of the family home in Korczyna. Sixteen people posed for it; by 21 May 1946, only two of those pictured were still alive. The family’s history turns on emigration: Efraim accepted his elder brother’s offer to go to America after the pogrom, but waited until Saul’s Bar Mitzvah before taking him with him. That decision placed Saul beyond the fate that overtook most of the family.

The relatives who remained in Europe were killed in different places. Saul’s mother, his sister Agar, his brother David, and other members of the extended family died in Plaszów. Moshe, the husband of Linka, died in the Warsaw ghetto; Saul’s sister Rebeca and her family, as well as Linka and her family, died in Auschwitz. Only the three brothers who crossed the Atlantic survived among the Burnsteins of Korczyna.

Survival and Counterfactual History

Plaszów is presented as one possible destination in a devastating counterfactual: had Efraim not emigrated after the pogrom, and had he not delayed taking Saul until the boy’s Bar Mitzvah, Saul would not have become the American congressman elected to represent the American people for the Democratic Party. He, too, would have been vulnerable to the destruction that claimed his family. The novel does not treat this survival as a simple triumph; it places Saul’s public life beside the absence of those who never made the crossing.

The camp’s narrative significance lies in that contrast. A family photograph preserves the gathered people as they once were, while the account of their later fates divides them among Plaszów, the Warsaw ghetto, Auschwitz, and America. Plaszów thus marks both a concrete site of murder and the boundary between Saul’s survival and the loss that shaped his family’s history.