More of you wrote to us about this story than any we’ve published.
In sixty years of publishing, we have never run anything quite like it. Mountain Gazette has printed Hunter S. Thompson and Edward Abbey. But “Tombstones of Narol”, Ari Schneider’s account of tracing his family through the Holocaust across five countries, is, in our estimation, the most ambitious piece of journalism this magazine has ever put in print.
It made Schneider a finalist for the 2026 Livingston Award.
More importantly, it stayed with people.
Schneider’s grandfather was a hidden child in Fossano, Italy, a Jewish boy passed off as a Catholic student under the protection of a bishop. He survived. He also spent sixty years telling a story that couldn’t be verified, and refused to try. After his death in 2024, Schneider set out to write the true version: thousands of pages of archival records, hundreds of hours of survivor testimony, and a journey across Belgium, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Poland, through a Europe drifting hard to the right as he went.
What he found is an adventure story of ordinary people who risked execution to help strangers. And it’s the story of a mother who jumped from a moving train with a child under each arm in an endless effort to keep them safe, to survive.
Stolen Headstones is the expanded, standalone edition of Schneider’s “Tombstones of Narol,” originally published in Mountain Gazette 203. At more than 130 pages, the softcover book gives this extraordinary piece of reporting room to breathe beyond the magazine spread where it first appeared.
Eighty years after liberation, told accurately at last.
-
Limited first printing of 2,000 copies
-
130+ page softcover standalone edition
-
Expanded from Mountain Gazette 203
-
By 2026 Livingston Award finalist Ari Schneider
-
Printed in the U.S.
Pre-order Stolen Headstones now.
Limited first printing of 2,000 copies. Ships Holiday 2026.
