In The Noose Closes, book three of the award-winning series, The Devil’s Bookkeepers, author Mark H. Newhouse continues the story of his compelling characters and their difficult predicaments in the closing months of World War II in occupied Lodz, Poland.
Newhouse is a gifted writer and educator, born in Germany to Holocaust survivors. His series is a fictionalized account of what happened in the Lodz ghetto, a barbed-wire enclosed slum in Poland during the Nazi occupation. As he deftly utilizes the first-hand accounts of those who were there, we witness the ribbon of humanity and compassion woven through each book. This raises the series to premiere status – an exceptional if sobering examination of the immutable human spirit. His series should encourage all who read it that hope is a gift and kindness is the answer.
Jewish engineer Bernard Ostrowski records the daily events for the ghetto chairperson, whom many call the Devil. Bennie and his small team find the information more terrifying with each passing hour. They compose their reports in a manner that will mollify the infamous ghetto boss, Chairman Rumkowski. Rumkowski and his embattled assistant, Neftalin, must please their Nazi handlers. Rumkowski oversees every aspect of the city and forces its residents into BECOMING factory workers for the German military. He hopes to keep the Nazis from taking control of Lodz by doing so.
Even Ostrowski and his educated co-workers struggle to comprehend the desperation and death in the place they once called home. The sight of bony children fighting in garbage heaps for anything edible is unfathomable. How can this be happening in their city? Surely Rumkowski will help them.
Ostrowski doesn’t quite know what to make of the masses of used shoes and other clothing that arrive via trucks, while Lodz Jews are shipped out of the ghetto almost daily. Are the Germans shepherding the Jews out of Lodz to safety from the war, as they and Rumkowski say?
Rumors begin to slip in. The Jews are being taken to camps where only death awaits.
The novel continues to weave in the story of Ostrowski’s love for his wife. Nearly defeated by the shocking events in book 2, Ostrowski longs for any news about his wife Miriam and his daughter Regina. The couple had become estranged when Bennie suspected Miriam of having an affair with the young and reckless Singer before the man disappeared.
When Singer returns, now a resistance fighter, he attempts to enlist Ostrowski into an underground Jewish resistance movement. What follows are acts of bravery and sacrifice readers will remember long after the book is put down.
Newhouse’s parents were among the 5,000 Jews of more than 200,000 trapped in the Lodz ghetto who survived the Nazi occupation. Will any of the novel’s characters survive as The Noose Closes around them?
Newhouse utilizes the shocking events described in The Chronicle of The Lodz Ghetto (Yale University Press, 1984), placing sobering quotes from the historical account at the beginning of each chapter. Readers will feel as if they are on the streets of Lodz due to the vividly depicted sights, sounds, and smells during this bleak and desolate time. The Nazis’ wanted to annihilate an entire race of human beings. The incontestable proof became all too clear only as WWII came to a close.
In The Noose Closes and the other books in The Devil’s Bookkeepers series, Newhouse interjects the ironic humor that brings the epic tale to life, gallows humor, if you like. These people are real – and readers feel it. Newhouse skillfully weaves into the story the profound depth of faith and belief that enabled desperate people to cling to hope, despite their dire circumstances.
In fact, this bold human spirit enables the residents to find courage in the face of danger that rests at the heart of the series. His characters believe that relying on faith overcomes fear, and above all else, love will always be triumphant. This powerful series reminds us that the more we learn about the Holocaust, the more we remember this time of terror, the more likely it is that we can genuinely say, “Never again – to anyone!”
The Devil’s Bookkeepers series won Grand Prize in the 2020 CIBA Fiction Series Awards and is a series that is not only timely, but one we highly recommend.
Please read our reviews of the first two books in The Devil’s Bookkeepers by clicking on their titles, The Noose and The Noose Tightens.
Katrina Shawver, a journalist for a Phoenix newspaper, was seeking a story for her weekly column. She had heard from a friend that a Holocaust survivor named Henry Zguda and his American wife, Nancy, lived in Phoenix. She called Zguda and was invited to come to his home, only a few blocks from her own. Shawver quickly bonded with both Henry and Nancy. Then she and Henry decided to have a series of weekly interviews, which she would draw on for her column and, later, for a book—this biography.
