Why I Wrote This Book... 

House of Ghosts grew out of my interest in World War II and the Holocaust, but it was also shaped by a personal connection. My mother-in- law, Irene Lederer, was deported from Hungary along with nearly 1 million other Hungarian Jews and taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944.

As the war entered its closing stage and was without a doubt certainly lost, Berlin ordered the Nazi killing machine to complete the total destruction of European Jewry. With an insatiable appetite for murder and depravity never seen in the history of human existence, Auschwitz became ground zero for Hitler’s Final Solution.

Irene Lederer was one of the “lucky” ones. She was chosen for slave labor instead of being sent immediately to the gas chambers along with most of the other women and children.

She lived to see the planes fly overhead that terrible August. She saw American bombers flying toward the I.G. Farben factory less than five miles away, and watched them recede in the distance.

“Ah, your friends are overhead today,” a nearby guard taunted.

Decades later, Irene recalled that day she saw the Allied planes flying away from the camps. She told me her story, and it haunted me.

Spurred on by her memories, I delved into the official record trying to find the answer to the questions she asked then, the question that still lingers today: why didn’t the Allies bomb the gas chambers or the rail lines into Auschwitz? Why didn’t they stop the mass murder when they had the chance? If they had, they could have saved the lives of at least 300,000 Hungarian Jews who were about to be gassed.

I buried myself in research, reading anything I could get my hands on, including Martin Gilbert’s book, “Auschwitz and the Allies.” Gilbert’s recounting of the Allied pilots and their reconnaissance trips over the Polish countryside pointed me in the right direction. American pilots flying reconnaissance missions are believed to have taken the firest photographs of the death camp at Auschwitz in May of 1944.

According to the U.S. government, those pictures were filed away and never really examined. It wasn’t until 1978 that two aerial photo-analysts who worked for the CIA examined them again and realized what they showed.

What if one of those pilots on the mission to bomb the I.G. Farben synthetic rubber plant was determined to stop the slaughter? That’s the premise upon which I built House of Ghosts.

The story begins in 2000: a World War II veteran has died in Westfield, NJ. At the estate sale to dispose his worldly possessions, a retired alcoholic local cop—Joe Henderson—discovers time-worn documents detailing 1944 bombing raids into Poland and yellowed diaries describing a rogue attempt by a Jewish-American flyer to destroy the Auschwitz gas chambers and the counter-measures ordered by the Assistant Secretary of War to stop him.

Henderson’s curiosity launches him on a crusade for the truth and leads him to a shocking revelation when he tracks down the last living witness who can solve the mystery of why the Auschwitz raid never happened.

Why didn’t the world stop the death machine? That is not an idle question, consigned to the dusty shelves of history. It still echoes today in many parts of the world. While the Holocaust is over, genocide continues.

It happened in Rwanda in the 1990s. The world stood by and did nothing.
It’s happening in the Sudan. The world stands by and does nothing.
Nothing has changed.

That is what makes House of Ghosts and the questions Joe Henderson asks about the past still pertinent to today’s world.

Larry Kaplan