Silent Battlefields: A Novel

by Hugh Rosen

Selig Kruger, once a dedicated Hitler Youth and committed Nazi soldier, confronts his past when he meets Eva, the woman whose life he spared nearly thirty years ago. She remembered learning from the bear man shortly after the incident that two German soldiers were killed by a third. Perhaps he was the one who took their lives. She believed that if she were ever to find out the answers, now was not the time to deluge him with her emotions and questions. Her persistent gaze released a rush of memories flooding Selig's mind. In the secret space of his consciousness he saw a young, frightened girl huddling on the floor of an attic closet. Without even thinking about it Selig placed his index finger vertically against his lips. It was the same gesture Selig had performed twenty-eight years ago on the attic floor of a house in a Polish village. "It's really you then?" Eva asked in astonishment. Selig was stunned at the realization that this was, indeed, the same young girl whose life he had spared. The same girl whose destiny he had obsessed about over almost three decades.

248 pages, Paperback

First published July 11, 2005

Reviews

[Tami · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two unlikely friends realize that they have more in common with each other than most people would believe. Matthew Eisenstadt is the only son of two Holocaust survivors. His mother's parents had been murdered by the Nazis but her life had been spared by a young soldier who suddenly had second thoughts about what his role in the situation. His father had been the family's lone survivor of Treblinka.

Matthews's new friend, Thomas Kruger is the only son of a German couple. His mother had had Nazi sympathizer parents and his father had been one of Hitler's youth.

Both boys know almost nothing about their respective parents' life during the war. It is a subject that is just not broached. Yet both individuals feel that without knowing what really happened that they can't understand a piece of their own history, a piece of themselves.

Silent Battlefields craftfully illustrates both sides of survivor's guilt from the war. I was pleased that the different experiences actually had a great deal of similarities in the feelings and reactions after the fact. However, I really didn't like the direction that the book took in the last hundred pages or so. I felt that these events were out of sync with the rest of the story taking it in a whole different type of story.