Holocaust Remembrance Day

JANUARY 27, 2015
The UN General Assembly designated January 27—the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau—as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this annual day of commemoration, the UN urges every member state to honor the victims of the Nazi era and to develop educational programs to help prevent future genocides.

AUSCHWITZ
The Auschwitz concentration camp complex was the largest of its kind established by the Nazi regime. It included three main camps, all of which deployed incarcerated prisoners at forced labor. One of them also functioned for an extended period as a killing center. The camps were located approximately 37 miles west of Krakow, near the prewar German-Polish border in Upper Silesia, an area that Nazi Germany annexed in 1939 after invading and conquering Poland. The SS authorities established three main camps near the Polish city of Oswiecim: Auschwitz I in May 1940; Auschwitz II (also called Auschwitz-Birkenau) in early 1942; and Auschwitz III (also called Auschwitz-Monowitz) in October 1942.

UNSPEAKABLE PRAYERS
A novel about Lodzi Ashstein, a 19-year-old Jewish boy forced from Warsaw by the Nazis in 1942 to board the cattle train to Treblinka. A novel of evil, survival, overcoming, and hope. A look at one man's life from Treblinka to Chicago and a trial based on the Hate Crimes Act in reverse, for this time a Nazi captain from Treblinka has been murdered. An inquiry into the prevalence of hate toward a people chosen as God's own. The why remains a mystery at the end of the book--you will be asked to draw your own conclusions. Truth be told, there are probably as many conclusions to be drawn as there are readers of this incredible novel.

If you're looking for a novel fitting for Remembrance Day, this novel, released on that day, is suggested.

You will never forget Lodzi Ashstein, I promise you. -- John Ellsworth, January 2015.

Holocaust Nightmares

I always knew the Holocaust was real and I always knew that someday I would address it for myself and try to understand it for myself.

Well, that time has come. Unspeakable Prayers, the seventh of the Thaddeus books, opens in the Nazi extermination camp of Treblinka. The year is 1942 and the main character is a man named Lodzi Ashstein. He is a Jew caught up in the camp and pulled aside to help the Nazis process the endless stream of Jews who would die each day in Treblinka.

Read this twice: each day, the Nazis killed at Treblinka between 30,000-40,000 Jews. Now read it again.

That second figure is eight times the size of the town where I first began to practice law. Eight mayors in one day. Eight city councils. Eight police departments. Eight complete sets of 5000 residents. Every day.

Relating that number to something I understand, such as the size of the town where I first practiced law, helps me realize the scope of what was going on at just this one of many German death camps.

Auschwitz, by comparison, was a labor camp. And yet you've heard how unbelievably horrible that was. Treblinka expected no such production like labor. Treblinka expected only bodies of dead Jews.

Researching the story and reading the memoirs of these long dead heroes who scrabbled up out of hell and came round to tell the rest of us their story, researching that has given me nightmares. Like the main character says at one point, I see my dying breath leave my lungs as two white pigeons and I know I am hallucinating.

I know I must be hallucinating.

But I'm not.

Neither will you. Preorder this book now. It's going to be an incredible story that will be told and re-told, I promise you.