Stolen Headstones
The acclaimed true story—originally published in Mountain GazetteOne night in September 1943, a Jewish mother took her nine-year-old son in one arm and five-year-old daughter in the other and jumped off a moving train to save their lives. Decades later, the town of Fossano, Italy, still celebrates the local heroes who found the mother and her children by the tracks and risked everything to hide them from the Nazis. But the whole story—where they came from and how they got there—remained a mystery until now.The past and present converge in this deeply reported narrative as award-winning writer Ari Schneider travels across Europe, retracing his family's Holocaust story amid a global resurgence of far-right nationalism. His journey takes him to a cemetery in Poland where generations of his ancestors were buried, and a new mystery arises.Praise for Stolen Headstones"Ari Schneider hunts down the truth with the tenacity of a journalist and the urgency of someone whose own family history was nearly lost—to war, to mythmaking, and to a grandfather who survived the Holocaust but chose embellishment over fact. Stolen Headstones is both an investigation and an inheritance, a deeply reported account of survival, memory, and the fictions we tell to endure. A remarkable debut." —Laurie Gwen Shapiro, bestselling author of The Stowaway and The Aviator and the Showman"Ari is one of the brightest young journalists working today. Stolen Headstones is his most impressive work yet—a thrilling exploration of WWII, one family's legacy, and the traces we all leave behind." —Daniel Lombroso, director of White Noise and Nina & Irena"Schneider's research is impeccable—this is a remarkable example of relentless journalistic investigation... An enthralling study of generational trauma created by the Holocaust." —Kirkus Reviews"The official account of his family's Holocaust story... Ari fact checked every detail he could, cross-checking his great-grandmother's memoir with thousands of pages of documents and hundreds of hours of testimonies from other survivors." —The Forward
