We Are Only Ghosts
Another novel on the Holocaust… Holocaust survivors… survivors meeting their persecutors after the war. The literary landscape is replete with scores of volumes narrating all manner of horrific details of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Is there room on this tableau for another, even one with a unique and intriguing perspective?
Charles Ward exists as a respected waiter at a well-known New York City coffee shop. His life revolves around his role and customers as he does his best to blot out past events that enveloped him as a teenager. Swept off the streets and sent to Auschwitz in 1944, Charles avoided possible torture and death due to the cunning of a Nazi officer who sequestered him in his home as a domestic. This officer not only kept the young man from the main camp (thus saving him from the gas chambers) but introduced him to another slice of life – that of same-sex entanglements.
When his long-lost, but never completely forgotten, tormentor and lover, Berthold Werden, walks into Café Marie in late 1968, Charles is confronted with a dilemma that he kept hidden but feared: reconciling his past.
As the story is narrated in segments alternating between New York City and Germany, the reader is drawn into an intimate world where death and destruction coexist with love and safety. Can such an atmosphere be balanced, and what might be the long-term consequences? With the insertion of Werden back into his life after so many years, Ward must now not only confront this sorrowful past but untangle desires for revenge.
