This talk explores the intrepid Mordkhe Tsanin, who unlike other journalists returning to Poland shortly after WWII had no interest in the survivors and their stories. Tsanin traveled where others would not dare, using a British passport to further his disguise as an English journalist. Relentlessly he pursued the physical remains of Jewish patrimony in Poland. After six months, he left, dismayed by the rapid disappearance of the physical traces of Jewish Poland but believing he had uncovered a lost treasure of Jewish relics, assembled by two men who hoped to sell the collection for a nominal sum. The story of his failure to arrange for the collection's transfer to Israel contains within it the tragic sense of the past becoming irretrievable even as it slips through the traveler's fingers.