There is a particular kind of silence that comes with a family archive. Not the silence of things withheld, but of things never asked. You inherit the boxes, and inside them are the answers to questions nobody thought to put while the people who could answer were still in the room.

The first is a 1961 Doubleday first edition of The Hunter, the autobiography of Tuviah Friedman, the man who spent fifteen years searching for Adolf Eichmann. On the half-title, in blue ballpoint, in a hand that hurries: “To my best friend Harry Brill from the Kibbutz.” Then a line of Hebrew. Then a signature and a date: 10.III.1985.

The second is Nazi Hunter, Friedman’s own summary of forty-two years of his work, published by his institute in Haifa. On the title page, in a clearer hand: “To my friend Harry Brill and his Lady. With Compliments. Yours, Tuviah Friedman.” Beneath it: “N.Y. 22. May 1987.”

Harry Brill was my father-in-law. Edna, the “Lady,” was my mother-in-law. I knew Harry for thirty-eight years and Edna for thirty-seven.

Neither of them ever mentioned Tuviah Friedman.

Friedman was born in Radom in 1922 and lost most of his family in the Holocaust. After the war he devoted himself to tracking Nazi perpetrators. In Vienna, working in the same postwar world as Simon Wiesenthal, he helped identify and locate war criminals. He later moved to Israel, directed the Haifa branch of Yad Vashem, and in 1957 founded his own Institute for the Documentation of Nazi War Crimes. He contributed to the long effort to trace Adolf Eichmann and spent decades pressing........

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