Silent Battlefields

Silent Battlefields
Hugh Rosen
iUniverse, Inc
ISBN: 0-595-34773-8
Fiction, Historical
Reviewed by Dr. Tami Brady

Two unlikely friends realize that they have more in common with each other than most people would believe. Matthew Eisenstadt is the only son of two Holocaust survivors. His mother’s parents had been murdered by the Nazis but her life had been spared by a young soldier who suddenly had second thoughts about what his role in the situation. His father had been the family’s lone survivor of Treblinka.
Matthews’s new friend, Thomas Kruger is the only son of a German couple. His mother had had Nazi sympathizer parents and his father had been one of Hitler’s youth.
Both boys know almost nothing about their respective parents’ life during the war. It is a subject that is just not broached. Yet both individuals feel that without knowing what really happened that they can’t understand a piece of their own history, a piece of themselves.
Silent Battlefields craftfully illustrates both sides of survivor’s guilt from the war. I was pleased that the different experiences actually had a great deal of similarities in the feelings and reactions after the fact. However, I really didn’t like the direction that the book took in the last hundred pages or so. I felt that these events were out of sync with the rest of the story taking it in a whole different type of story.