Timothy Ryback first came to Dachau in 1992 on assignment from the "New Yorker". He wanted to know how the older generation dealt with a past they knew first hand, and how the younger lived life under its shadow. Ryback's first impression was that Dachau's residents were odd, small-minded and self-pitying, but he left the town unsettled by his own summary conclusions, by questions left unanswered and by aspects of his family's past in Austria before and during the war. When he returned to Dachua two months later, the focus of Ryback's search for answer shifted to Martin Zaidenstadt, a man who claimed to be a Holocaust survivor, and who became both guide and gadfly. In this complicated and troubled man, Ryback found a living symbol of the paradox that is Dachua - a place so imbued with death that it has become impossible for anyone who resides there to live a normal life. The book is a portrait of a town defined by an abominable past. It is also an account of the legacy of the Holocaust on life in a modern Germany and a moving story of one man's relationship with his history.