Product Description

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.

An elegiac tale of regret from both sides of a cataclysmic war. Rosen, a professor and psychotherapist, infuses the narrative with graceful candor and palpable physical and psychological conflicts. The author does not brand any of his convincing characters as villain, martyr or victim, and by weaving together Eva and Selig's parallel lives as saved and savior, he offers pointed, well-drawn insights about war and its terrible, protracted aftermath. A complex blend of memory, cultural identity, the ties that bind us and the ghosts that haunt us.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #870026 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-11
• Released on: 2005-07-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 248 pages

About the Author
Hugh Rosen is a professor emeritus at Drexel University. He has authored and coedited a total of six nonfiction books. At age seventy, Hugh earned an MA in creative writing from Temple University. Hugh lives in Philadelphia with his two cats, Bandit and the Kid.

Customer Reviews

A Compelling Read
As soon as I got Silent Battlefields, my teenage daughter took it from me. She is a history buff, and she thought this looked like a book she would enjoy. Actually, she loved it. The way the author brings together the son of holocaust survivors and the son of a former Hitler youth is well done, and really makes the reader think. Highly recommended.

Silent Battlefields: A Novel
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.

A riveting new look at blind bigotry relevant to our times
Like all German teens when Hitler was in power, Selig Kruger was indoctrinated into the "Hitler Youth", a mandatory program to train and screen the country's next generation of German soldiers. While he enjoyed the comradeship and pagentry, he was disturbed by the blanket hatred of Jews and the violence directed toward them. On his first assignment in the German Army, he and two other soldiers were assigned to expose German families who were hiding Jews in their homes. In searching a home, he saw a terrified young Jewish girl hiding in a closet, but spared her life by keeping silent about her. Shortly thereafter, sickened by the reality of the violence he had been trained to inflict, he fled the scene, and had to kill the other two soldiers who would have shot him as a deserter.

Fast forward about 25 years, and Selig is a physician in a Philadelphia hospital, married to a German woman who knows his secret. Their son Thomas, whom they have not told about his father's past, strikes up a friendship with a young Jewish man, Matthew, whom he meets at a college discussion and reconcilation group about the Holocaust. Matthew invites Thomas home to have dinner with him and his parents, Nathan and Eva, who are both Holocaust survivors. Eva is stunned by a flash of recognition in meeting Thomas, who bears an erie resemblance to the German soldier who spared her life so many years before. The boys become very close, and Eva takes it upon herself to meet Selig. Their reconcilation is complicated by the appearance of a Nazi hunter, a former patient of psychologist Eva, who targets Selig due to his assumed atrocities committed while in the German army.

"Silent Battlefields" is a highly original, riveting, well-written and thought-provoking debut novel, one which not only raises significant issues about that period in history, but exposes how dangerous bigotry and blind hate can be in any context. I give it a full five stars out of five.