An Unexpected Novel – AFTERMATH BOY by Robert E. Honig

For twenty years, I’d stayed away from the Washington, D.C. Holocaust Museum.  Their repository of SHOAH Foundation testimonies and video recordings of survivor interviews included contributions by my two surviving aunts. Their older sister, my mother, had died at age 53 when I was a young man. Forty years later, this survivor’s only child, a transfer trauma recipient with history engrained in my DNA, had finally prepared himself to discover what the whispers of childhood were all about. Of course, I already knew quite a bit, whispered references to Dachau, Bergen Belsen, and ‘death marches’ peppered my ears when I eavesdropped from the top of the stairs in my childhood home. 

            Over the course of my life, and having reached senior citizen status, I’d continually thought about the missing pieces.  Three sisters had survived the war, but how, when, where, and why? As the years passed, I refined these questions, but I left the answers to my imagination or the insights of Schindler’s List. Perhaps I thought I had no time to extensively research my own family history. Still, with the MAGA movement’s rising tide, a gnawing apprehension brought me to the second floor of the Holocaust Museum, where an annoyingly perky young lady set me up with a DVD player and a monitor. As my aunts appeared on the screen, I began to take notes. Six hours later, I had two legal pads filled with their narrative—an outline of events with gaping holes that begged more questions.

            As Googling and extensive research filled in the blanks, I wrote down the narrative. I felt embarrassed about how much I didn’t know about the Vienna Death March from Budapest in No ember 1944, the conditions at Dachau in the winter of ’44 that Bergen Belsen’s horrors exceeded. How timelines, from the Allies’ onslaught from the West and the Soviets from the East, played into the survivors’ fates. And then I discovered the damning Morgenthau report, The Acquiescence of the U.S. Government to the Murder of the Jews. The land of the free, the home of the brave and the complicit.

            On a September morning in 2019, I stared at the accumulated stack of sheets on my desk, and my wife, placing a steaming mug of coffee in front of me, asked, “So? Are you going to write a book?”  I laughed, “who wants to read another book about the Holocaust?”  Then it hit me.  The story I had to tell could reveal something more universal; how the waves of history caught up with families in their wake. It needn’t become a story of ‘transmission trauma’ from the survivor to the child but a broader probe into my mother’s tight-knit family devolving into abject dysfunction.  Still, I felt hesitant about putting any family members or their offspring on the spot. The more I wrote, the more I realized that the only form this saga could take would be a Roman ά Clef. I could not create a consistent narrative without projecting what might have happened. I also wanted to place the reader in the shoes of the two narrators, mother and son, in alternating chapters by using the first-person present tense throughout. 

            By the Spring of 2021, and nearly 30 rewrites of the manuscript that had ballooned to 450 pages, I had covered enough history of 1930s Europe to realize that the MAGA movement, despite Trump’s loss in 2020, had already reprised many of the fatal steps that had plunged German and its conquest into dictatorship and its unthinkable consequences.  My story seemed incomplete. It required an overlay of contemporary consequences, how current events might confront us with the grinding injustice of decaying democracy, and a withering Justice system trying to sort out a 2024 election with no clear winner. Back to the drawing board and another ten rewrites later, I finally felt I’d said something worthwhile and important.   Many, no doubt, will bog down in the grim aspects of the mother’s story and her heartache as her beloved sisters grow distant and hostile to her only son.   For the lad, surfing through history’s absurdities limns his life in comic relief. 

            In the aftermath of WWII, millions of Germans emerging from the rubble of obliterated cities, most of who rallied behind their beloved Fuhrer, lamented, “We didn’t know! How could we believe such evil possible?”  For those who have helped engineer the destruction of this nation’s two-party system, who seek redress of their grievances through the perfidy and self-serving interventions of a madman, I hope my book provides a glimmer of insight into how ignorance of history threatens us again.

–Robert E. Honig 5/22/24  Available on Amazon/Kindle