Reply #28: Yes, The Lost...

[puebloknot]

...was written by a young Jewish man who started his book by saying that his elderly Jewish relatives would break into tears when they saw him because he looked *so* much like a brother of their family who was lost in the Holocaust, along with his wife and four daughters. That inspired him, Daniel Medelsohn, to begin exploring is family history, and he eventually went back to the small Polish village where his family had lived before the war.

It's the old, old story about how some family members got out, but one decided he wouldn't leave home, and ended up paying with his life.

Atonement is set in World War II, but is a novel rather than a historical/autobiographical piece. But it's a good taste of what life was like during that period in England.