On December 13, 2016, Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, attended a meeting in a building not far from Trump Tower, in the Madison Avenue offices of Colony Capital. One month after Trump’s surprise win in the Presidential election, Kushner met with Sergey Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank, or VEB, a Russian state-owned development bank. Kushner, in later congressional testimony, said that his goals in the meeting were purely diplomatic. The Russian Ambassador to the U.S. had told him that Gorkov had a “direct line to the Russian President who could give insight into how Putin was viewing the new Administration and best ways to work together.”

That month, Vladimir Putin arranged an “ ‘all-hands’ oligarch meeting”—as one of the oligarchs in attendance, Petr Aven, described it to the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators—to discuss U.S.-Russia relations. At least three of Russia’s most prominent oligarchs subsequently tried to solidify ties with a man who seemed their perfect counterpart: a young American oligarch whose family had grown wealthy with a healthy assist from government programs—the President-elect’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Through the Russian Ambassador’s persistence, Gorkov got the meeting. According to Kushner, the two discussed U.S.-Russia relations—business was not on the agenda. But a VEB spokesperson told the Washington Post something altogether different. As described by the Post, “The bank maintained . . . that the session was held as part of a new business strategy and was conducted with Kushner in his role as the head of his family’s real estate business.” As most Americans struggled to discern what a Trump Presidency would bring, the Russians accurately predicted that Kushner would be an immensely powerful figure in the incoming Administration, and that talking business could be a route to political influence.

When questioned by Mueller’s investigators, Kushner went out of his way to convey the idea that he thought little of the meeting with Gorkov—seemingly in an effort to bolster his argument that he in no way conspired with Russian state actors during the 2016 Presidential election. According to the Mueller report, “Kushner stated in an interview that he did not engage in any preparation for the meeting and that no one on the Transition Team even did a Google search for Gorkov’s name.” But Gorkov had prepared. He carried with him two gifts that showed he’d conducted a careful and deliberate investigation into the young man he was meeting. As Kushner explained in a July, 2017, statement to congressional investigators, one was a piece of art from Novogrudok, “the village where my grandparents were from in Belarus, and the other was a bag of dirt from that same village.”

The selection of a bag of dirt as a gift was particularly resonant: Jared’s grandmother, Rae Kushner, was one of a few hundred survivors of the Nazis in the Novogrudok ghetto, in what is now Belarus but was then northeastern Poland. Thousands of Jews from the area had been murdered, shot as they stood on the edges of giant trenches, so that they would fall directly into their own mass graves. The survivors were imprisoned in a ghetto, enslaved by the Nazi war machine. To escape, the residents smuggled bits of wood, spoons, and any other implements they could find past Nazi guards and used them to dig a tunnel that extended beyond the searchlights and barbed wire. They put the dirt they dug up into bags and hid the bags in the walls of the ghetto, so that the Nazis wouldn’t discover their plan.

Mueller found that, during the Presidential campaign, dirt on Hillary Clinton was the currency the Russians had tried to trade with Kushner and the Trump campaign. Now the Russians were giving Kushner a literal bag of dirt, the symbol of the Kushner family’s miraculous survival story—a story that includes undeniable courage, irrefutable ingenuity, and lying about family relationships to enter the United States.

After the Second World War, anti-Semitic immigration laws sharply limited the number of Jews allowed into the United States. In 1949, in order to increase his chances of obtaining an American visa, Rae’s husband and Jared’s grandfather, Yossel Berkowitz, posed as his father-in-law’s son, listing Kushner as his name on U.S. immigration paperwork, and renaming himself Joseph Kushner. As a result, his son Charles was called Charles Kushner, not Charles Berkowitz, and his grandson was Jared Kushner, not Jared Berkowitz. Jared’s wife’s married name would be Ivanka Kushner, not Ivanka Berkowitz.

In the nineteen-thirties, a few years before half of the family was murdered, the Kushners, as they usually did, took a summer vacation in the tiny town of Novoyel’nya, then part of Poland. Amid the sharp scents of pine and spruce and fresh lake water, the Kushner children played in the forest. On Friday evenings, as the late-setting sun angled through the woods, the family gathered for Shabbat dinner. Parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, cousins sat in front of tall white candles to eat chicken soup, sweet kugel, the ever-present braided challah bread. “Summer camp” was how the surviving Kushners would later describe these trips. “Camping” and “going to camp” were among their fondest memories.

There’s a photograph that endures from one of these summers. The lower left corner is burnt, or chemically degraded, but the image in the center is clear: four children arrayed on a hammock around their father, tall trees standing like sentries in the background. There’s Esther, in her late teens, on the far left, wearing a short-sleeved, close-fitting white button-down shirt, parted sharply by a dark tie. On the right, with a hand draped behind her brother Chanon’s back and resting on her father’s shoulder, is the teen-age Reichal (Rae) Kushner. Her thick black hair is cut in a bob, and she is smiling. Her face, like everyone else’s in the family, is unworried, unlined. Her dark-brown eyes gaze forthrightly into the camera, yet to witness horrors.

Half a decade after the photograph was taken, three of six members of the Kushner family would be dead. Of hundreds of cousins, grandparents, sisters and brothers, uncles and aunts, only a handful, including Lisa, Rae, and their father, Naum, made it through: through the destruction of their home and the confiscation of their business; through family separations and multiple mass executions; through starvation, lice, beatings, forced labor, German dogs, and Nazi bullets; through barbed wire and months of hiding in the forest during the Polish winter, a trek across international borders, and years in a displaced-persons camp. The Kushners lost everything. The photo survived.

After years in the ghetto and that winter in the forest—during which they lived in ziemiankas, holes in the ground covered by trees—some twelve hundred Jewish partisans made their way back home to Novogrudok after the Germans retreated from the town. “You cannot imagine—I fainted twice,” Rae said, in later testimony, of the first time she witnessed the wasteland her home town had become. “We all wanted to run away from our town. We wanted to run any place—but, like, Russia took us in. We were afraid to move. We couldn’t move. You needed a passport. You needed papers. It’s not so easy.” They asked themselves, “Where should we run? Nobody wants to take us in.”