THE FEELING OF IRON

Nearly 40 years after having been tortured in a German prisoner of war camp, two Jewish survivors pursue the SS officer responsible for their torment.

Shlomo Libowitz, a Polish native now living in Israel, and Anton Epstein, a Czech doctor, were victimized as young men in a converted castle in East Prussia, where Maj. Hans Lichtblau, a leading Nazi scientist, conducted gruesome medical experiments on children and adults alike. Born to German immigrants in Chicago, Lichtblau offhandedly compares the screams coming from the death chamber to noises coming from meatpacking plants in the Windy City. Flash forward to the early 1980s when Libowitz and Epstein, with the financial backing of an international coalition of Jewish businessmen, team up (awkwardly) with a young female KGB agent to track down and assassinate Lichtblau. Lichtblau turns out to have been captured in Italy in 1945 by partisan forces and turned over to the British, only to be drafted by the U.S. Department of Defense along with other Nazi scientists. Now going by Victor Huberman, he’s a CIA operative in Honduras who’s running guns and dealing cocaine with the Contras—when not hanging out in the U.S. with celebrities including Timothy Leary. Lichtblau/Huberman knows all about LSD, having produced it for Himmler as a miracle drug that supposedly would enable German soldiers to fight the encroaching Red Army for days on end without tiring. With its dispassionate tone and unhurried approach, the novel takes a while to sink in. But Alonge’s detailed efforts to trace the gradual development of the Nazis’ “final solution” are chilling. And as Libowitz and Epstein close in on their target, the novel gains speed and page-turning intensity, with a crushing irony that casts new light on the revenge motive.

A powerful Holocaust novel that goes to unexpected places.