Ben is a middle-aged Jewish chemist working on the cure for various viruses and living comfortably in Hampstead in London.
As a nine-year-old boy he spent a few months in the notorious concentration camp, Dachau, an experience which he only survived because a kapo, a prisoner who himself survived by doing some of the guards’ dirty work, in this case, shovelling human remains from the prison furnaces, took him under his wing.
Ben just about survived until Dachau was liberated, and was eventually adopted by an English Jewish couple. As he grew up, he surrounded himself with the good things in life and did his best to eradicate all his nightmarish memories. Even when the kapo went on trial, Ben kept quiet.
Ben went back to his comfortable life, He retired and tried to fill his time helping homeless refugees. Then one day a man who had been at school with Ben while Ben’s family were in hiding with a Christian family of vineyard owners landed on Ben’s doorstep and faced him with an unwanted and unforeseen moral dilemma.
I was sure this book would turn into a novel, but it stopped halfway and ended as a novella, and nothing I could do would persuade it to do otherwise.
If you like the sound of the book, and are an agent or a publisher. please get in touch with me via my contact page. (Please note: I am not interested in self-publishing.)
If you just like the sound of it, and would like to know if it gets published, you can do the same, and I will let you know if it succeeds.