Announcing Lew’s 7th novel … AFTER AUSCHWITZ
Posted by Lew Weinstein on June 21, 2021
An overview of the trilogy
AFTER AUSCHWITZ completes a trilogy of novels which also includes A FLOOD OF EVIL and A PROMISE KEPT.
These three novels explore the unrelenting efforts of the German Catholic Berthold Becker and the Polish Jew Anna Gorska as they seek to oppose Hitler and his atrocities while also maintaining, often from afar, their intense love.
A FLOOD OF EVIL covers the years 1923 to 1933 as Berthold and Anna grow up in Munich and Poland respectively, meet and fall in love, and begin their efforts to tell the world what Hitler is about to do.
A PROMISE KEPT advances the story from 1934 to 1946, from Hitler’s early years of power through the war, the Holocaust, and the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.
AFTER AUSCHWITZ explores the postwar lives of Berthold and Anna from 1946 to 1961, set mostly in Spandau Prison and the new State of Israel.
The first two novels also include scenes which take place in 1990, when Berthold and Anna look back and are finally able to tell their stories.
COMMENTS FROM EARLY READERS OF AFTER AUSCHWITZ
… I loved, loved, loved the book!! Thank you so much for writing it and also for allowing me to be an earlier reader!
… The book was very educational for me, while also a gripping read. I only wish I had paid more attention in history class! I think your novels should be required reading for all high school students.
… during one of Berthold’s garden conversations at Spandau you asked the most profound question: Is it possible that Hitler was using the diversion of war in order to carry out the mass murder of Jews, which had always been his higher priority? … Lew, chills went down my spine when I read those words! I’ve never heard anyone say that before … Dear God, what if it was a true statement?
… I finished the book, and enjoyed it very much. I found it to be very emotional, and I had to pause a lot to dry my eyes; Often it was the parts about the good in people that brought the tears, not the evil … but also I felt bad for the tragic misery of Berthold despite the fact that he did so much good at such danger to himself.
… Berthold’s prison sentence seemed so unfair, but in the end it seemed necessary for him to do more good, and to help with his eventual healing.
… I think the book is a great ending to the trilogy, and ties many things together, although it can also be read first or as a standalone.
… even some of the things I knew were fictional seemed real; such as the meetings with Elie Wiesel.
Lew's AUTHOR BLOG 
JUDIE AMSEL said
Mazel tov!
Lew Weinstein said
thahk you
JUDIE AMSEL said
Ordered.
Lew Weinstein said
thanks
Sher Patterson said
Congratulations on completing the trilogy. Each one of the books is a treasure. You are a wonderful story-teller, and I look forward to reading your other books. Enjoy your travels!
Peg Gregory said
Having been a little girl in America during WWII, I was inundated with the war – before the Saturday movie matinees, on the radio, in the newspapers, during the blackouts in Cincinnati when we’d all gather in the hallway and be very quiet with all the lights out. It left a deep impression upon me. In my six to eight year old mind, I’d imagine that when we turned out all the lights and stood in that hallway, we’d hear the bombs falling from the planes overhead and one of them might hit the house in which we lived. What would we do? Would some of us die? Would all of us die? Perhaps that’s why I’d cry so easily when I’d see the images of those who’d been at Auschwitz, all the bodies piled upon that giant heap where it didn’t matter to the Nazis that these were once human beings who lived, breathed, wore clothing to cover their bodies, loved, and were once happy. They were nothing to these Nazi monsters.
Weinstein’s After Auschwitz had me in tears, taking me back to those times of putting myself in the place of those who suffered through all the bombings, torture, gassing, shootings. I suffered along with Berthold in that prison, living and breathing yet having no life. Weinstein took us all back there, all of us who were living at the time these humans were suffering. Even a child can understand how painful it must have been for these people who did nothing to deserve any of it. These people who were rounded up and put through a living and then dying hell for no other reason than that they were Jewish. It seemed so unfair that after going through so much to be together, Anna and Berthold found in the end that it wasn’t enough to love each other, that they had much to do apart after the Eichmann trial was in the past. It had consumed their lives so completely for so long and then it was as though the giant balloon that was their lives together deflated and they knew they had to part in order to do what remained for them to do to continue to fight against elements such as the Holocaust deniers. That they tried so many times to write their stories but found it too unbearable, yet in their 80s, they continued to meet and talk about it and never stopped trying to do it without tainting the love that was still so strong for each other. That even though they lived apart to try to make things better in their world after the hell that tried to tear it apart permanently, and yet that it made no difference in how they felt about each other was remarkable. That they so much more than many understood how Hitler came to be was remarkable. Weinstein has written a book that gets to the heart of the matter of how a country can create a fertile atmosphere for a monster to take over so easily. He has taken us into the world after Auschwitz has ceased to be, by letting us experience how fervently people like Anna and Berthold fought back to destroy this poison that took over the world they loved. Everyone who cares about freedom and liberty needs to read this book.
Sher Patterson said
I am truly amazed about your experiences in the midwest during the war. Maybe living in a city was different. But I don’t recall my mother (on a farm) talking about the war except for rations and my uncle returning, never really ‘right’ again. (My father was off in the Pacific in the war.) But it so saddens me that I didn’t learn about the Holocaust (or lots of negative happenings) in history classes. As a child of the 50s, maybe the Holocaust was something most people wanted to ignore at the time. Eventually I learned, first through movies and then books. It so worries me today that history is still so undervalued and often distorted. Many kudos to authors, such as Lew, who have the talent and desire to teach us history through their stories.