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!”
Mark’s story is unique and powerful – and his unwavering sense of humor will catch you off guard!
Let’s get to it. Dear Chanticleerians, meet my friend, Award-Winning Author, Mark H. Newhouse.
Chanticleer: Tell us a little about yourself, how did you start writing?
Newhouse: I was born in Germany two years and one day after Mom was freed from Auschwitz and my father from Buchenwald. I lost my grandparents and most of my family in the Holocaust. With my parents struggling as new immigrants and in a terrible marriage, I turned to writing. My pen was a magic wand where I could make the world better. I still think of that as my goal.
Chanticleer: Wow, there’s a lot there to unpack. I cannot imagine the trauma your parents must have gone through during that horrendous time. Ultimately, I believe to have a goal of making the world a better place is the best goal one could possibly have. When did you realize you that you were an author?
Newhouse: I think of myself as a ‘struggling author’ because I learn something new every day. It is the challenge of capturing my thoughts and ideas, and learning something new, that makes this so exciting. I feel like an author when I read reviews that tell me I touched a reader’s heart and soul and made a difference in their lives.
Chanticleer: Well, you certainly touched our souls and made a difference in our lives with your series, The Devil’s Bookkeepers. Your books have won a number of awards and the series as a whole is getting many great reviews. Why did you write this series that is so different than your other work?
Newhouse: My parents never told us about what they suffered during the Holocaust. They were focused on survival as immigrants. Mom gave me a copy of The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto published in 1984 by Yale University Press. Reading the anonymous entries, I was shocked by the true events. I realized few people knew about this incredible story and the efforts by its controversial chairman to save the ghetto by brutally forging it into a factory for the Nazis. I had to try and write this story so my children would know what I didn’t.
“My pen was a magic wand where I could make the world better. I still think of that as my goal.” – Mark H. Newhouse
When I read chapters of The Devil’s Bookkeepers to critique clubs, they encouraged me to publish it and enter contests. I was surprised and thrilled when we won. I think the suspense and unique love story keeps people reading. Unlike many Holocaust books, it is not about death and the gas chambers, but about people searching for friendship, love, and survival, in a time of terror. When its protagonist tries to save his loved ones from the tightening Nazi noose, readers ask themselves what they would do. I asked myself that question with every page. It will haunt you.
Chanticleer: I’m glad you told that story. It needs to be told! And you did it beautifully. What do you do when you’re not writing? Tells us a little about your hobbies.
Newhouse: I get in trouble. Actually, I was an elementary school teacher who loved working with my sixth graders. I have more than one thousand of my former students on Facebook with me sharing our lives, some more than 50 years after they left my classroom. I think it says a lot about their ‘crazy’ teacher, but also about them that they still care about me. I love feeling I am helping them and others, so I lead a writing group, write the Writing Bug monthly column mailed to thirty-thousand homes, and am Florida Writers Association’s Youth Chairperson and a Board of Directors member. I keep pretty busy. I also play lousy golf, read, swim, and drive my wife crazy.
Mark and Linda relaxing.
Chanticleer: Mark – that’s just – well, remarkable! The connections you forged with your students, the care and concern you gave them, means a lot. So much that they maintain contact with you! I don’t know of many teachers that have that same influence in their students lives. Good for you! And, dude, it doesn’t look like Linda minds you driving her crazy… How do you come up with your ideas for a story?
Newhouse: I wish I knew. Ideas drop from the sky—too many–I learned to focus on one at a time. I keep ideas in a file cabinet and carry a pocket notebook to grab ideas as they hit. I get a lot of ideas from news. For example, I read about an elderly woman evicted from her home to build a parking lot and turned it into The Case of the Disastrous Dragon, where a dragon is imprisoned for burning the butts of knights evicting him from his ancestral home. Welcome to Monstrovia, an award-winning comical mystery, started out as a play I wrote for my students. Most of my books started as my way to help my students have fun while learning.
Chanticleer: I love the covers! And who wouldn’t want to read a story about a butt-burning dragon? I know I would! How structured are you in your writing work?
Newhouse: I’m usually at the computer before 6:30 in the morning and work until breakfast. I also like to write after dinner. I’m not a t.v. watcher or video game player. Instead, I sneak into my office whenever my patient wife is busy. My biggest problem is forcing myself to stick to one project at a time. I never thought I had the discipline to finish The Devil’s Bookkeepers trilogy. It was a tough challenge, three years of hard work, but worth it.
“My advice: join a critique group and be willing to learn from and help others.” – Mark H. Newhouse
Chanticleer: I’ll say! It’s important to work on your craft. What do you do to grow your author chops?
Newhouse: When I was young, I thought I had to write by myself, as if in a jail cell. As a teacher, I realized when students worked together, they learned from each other and it was more fun. I join writing groups to improve my work and help others. I attend conferences, read articles. I challenge myself by entering contests such as those offered by Chanticleer. Contest deadlines help break through Writer Block. My advice: join a critique group and be willing to learn from and help others.
Chanticleer: Ah yes, the magical thinking strikes again. Writing is writing. Many authors get wound up in the notion that everything has What do you do in your community to improve/promote literacy?
Newhouse: As an author, especially for children, I work to create positive role models. My heroes are underdogs who solve problems with courage and intelligence, not violence and magic. I try to infuse plots with humor and suspense that make children want to read.
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
I love visiting schools, libraries, and other institutions to share my message: “Never Give Up.” I do presentations to help people learn about the Holocaust. I want to inspire others to end hate and prejudice as well as to preserve their family histories.
I originated and am ‘Top Cat’ of a club where we collaborate on books we donate to worthy causes. Our latest, SuperBudz, promotes literacy and fights pollution. I am the Florida Writers Association Youth Chairperson and a member of the Board of Directors. We offer clubs, webinars, contests, and a professional conference to help youth writers. I write the monthly Writing Bug column promoting local authors and inspiring writing, mailed to more than 30,000 homes. I’m pretty busy but love it. It keeps me out of mischief.
Chanticleer: You are an amazing man, Mr. Newhouse. You truly are. Tell me, what drives you to write for children?
Newhouse: Being abused and bullied as a child, I want my writing to help others solve problems without violence. I try to empower children, and adults, to face life’s obstacles with hope and faith that they can overcome whatever is thrown at them with courage and intelligence. They don’t need violence and magic to do magical things with their lives.
“I love visiting schools, libraries, and other institutions to share my message: Never Give Up.” – Mark H. Newhouse
Chanticleer: I appreciate that message. Give us your best marketing tips, what’s worked to sell more books, gain notoriety, and expand your literary footprint.
Newhouse: The best advice I give authors is: Don’t sell books, sell yourself. Think of your books as helping others, educating, entertaining, them. Seeing myself as performing a public service, and not just as a book salesman, helped me overcome my marketing phobia. It also steers me to groups and media that may be interested in my contributions.
Most important: make sure your book is the best it can be. Don’t rush to publish until you have tested your work with your critique group, beta (pre-publication) readers, and have it edited. A final test: enter a contest, especially where you get impartial feedback. Nothing hurts book sales worse than a poorly edited book.
Chanticleer:That’s good advice! What are you working on now? What can we look forward to seeing next from you?
Newhouse: I just finished, My Family Secret: The Holocaust, and it won a Silver Medal from the Florida Writers Association, so now I am back writing my multi-award-winning Defenders of Monstrovia comical mysteries. In Book 5, The Case of the Cruel Cyberbullies, a teenage boy and half-human girl face danger when they must solve a tricky case in Monstrovia, a secret sector of the USA where humans are rare. Will the cyberbully get away with murder? That’s the fun of this series. It teaches law in a land of monsters and fictional characters with edge-of-the-seat suspense. I love writing these fun mysteries.
Chanticleer:They sound hysterical! Congratulations on your Silver Medal from FWA. What a treat! I do hope we get to see it in our CIBAs… Who’s the perfect reader for your book?
Newhouse: That’s easy. The perfect readers for my books are children and adults who care. My books deal with things I care about, and I try to create page-turners for people who love humor and mysteries but most importantly, care.
Chanticleer:I’m raising my hand, can you see me? What is the most important thing a reader can do for an author?
Newhouse: Buy our books. Seriously, share your thoughts or endorse our books with your reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, or with your friends. Several years ago, a boy wrote me and said, “Rockhound is my favorite human being.” Rockhound, the hero of the Rockhound Science Mysteries, is a teenage dog detective, so that got a laugh, but the best was yet to come: “I know all authors are rich so can I come and swim in your pool?” I replied, “If I had a pool, I would invite you.” I really would.
Chanticleer:Oh, that’s so sweet. I agree with you – Everyone who picks up a book and reads it needs to review it! Simple as that. Do you ever experience writers block? What do you do to overcome it?
Newhouse: I have tons of ideas waiting for me, but everyone gets WB at some point. When I get it, I enter contests with a theme. I also have a few quick-tricks. I love titles, so I shake up a Boggle or Scrabble set and see if any of the words suggest a great title. I do a ‘blind’ search in a book: flip to any page, close my eyes and see what words my finger lands on. I then form a title and brainstorm a story idea. Goodbye WB. Hey! Not a bad title.
Chanticleer: I have never thought of that. How fun! What excites you most about writing?
Newhouse: Everything. But it is the passion for my story. I care about my subject and my readers. I am excited and proud when readers write about The Devil’s Bookkeepers.
What readers are saying about The Devil’s Bookkeepers: “I could not put it down.” “It kept me reading all night.” “I felt myself choking.” “One of the most powerful books I have ever read.”
When you feel you touched someone’s heart and soul, all the sweat is worth it. I get an amazing high when I hear a child laugh at my creations. I am honored and grateful for the awards and when someone shares how my work made a difference in their life.
Chanticleer:No doubt, that is a tremendous high. I love it! What other goals do you have?
Newhouse: I would love to work with a television/film producer to create a miniseries of The Devil’s Bookkeepers. It is an important and powerful story that needs to be shared so it never happens again to anyone. Readers root for the characters and are haunted by the true events. I can visualize the scenes with powerful performances that could win awards. I know it is a long shot but am going to try and send it to agents. The awards from Chanticleer will help open the door.
Chanticleer: It absolutely will. Thank you, Mark. You are a delight and we are honored to call you friend. You truly do make the world a better place.
Newhouse: Thank you for allowing me to share my journey and books with your readers. My books are available on Amazon/Kindle. The Devil’s Bookkeepers novels are also available as wonderful audiobooks. For more information, please contact me at www.newhousecreativegroup.com.
Mark’s view – nothing short of inspirational!
Chanticleer: Well, you heard the man! Go seek out Mark H. Newhouse’s works, read them and review them. Trust me, you’ll not be sorry!
Mark H. Newhouse, son of German Holocaust survivors, includes the very personal and poignant first-hand sourced materials made available to him by the Yale University Press in his important historical fiction series, The Devil’s Bookkeepers. This inclusion lends a ribbon of humanity and compassion that raise the series to premiere status – a study, if you will, of the immutable human spirit. Newhouses’ series should encourage all who read it that hope is a gift and kindness and understanding is the answer to hate. It is a gripping story of love and survival that will haunt you until it’s shocking climax.
From the first day of 1942, the conditions in the Jewish ghetto of Lodz, Poland, deteriorate. In Mark H. Newhouse’s historical fiction novel, The Devil’s Bookkeepers: Book 2, The Noose Tightens, those who thought their situation would get better now wish to survive and save their loved ones, But can they?
The narrator Bernard Ostrowski, an engineer, should have enjoyed the prime of his life. He married a beautiful young wife, Miriam, who gave birth to their newborn daughter Regina. Ostrowski landed a lucky position in the records office of the ghetto’s leader, Chaim Rumkowski (an actual historical figure drawn by the author in dark, realistic detail). Rumkowki uses brutal force to forge the ghetto prisoners into a manufacturing hub for the Nazis in a still hotly debated effort to save its residents as the Nazi noose inexorably tightens.
Ostrowski’s team includes a young man named Singer. And as the war continues to escalate, Singer urges Ostrowski to escape with his wife and child. Singer even promises to help them do so. However, Singer disappears, leaving an astonishing letter declaring his love for Miriam behind. The letter torments him as he tries to survive and save Miriam and his daughter.
In the meantime, the Nazis begin deporting Jews from Poland – to where, no one knows.
Rumkowski receives news that will shatter the bookkeepers’ faith in his leader’s basic decency. As the Nazis ramp up the expulsion of Jews from the city. Ostrowski, finally realizes that the noose is closing on everyone in the ghetto. Starving and weakened, he and Miriam must attempt to escape.
Newhouse opens each chapter with brief vignettes from the primary sourced materials that will chill the reader.
This book offers truth enmeshed with a well-crafted, imaginative, and credible story that will change and challenge readers. Newhouse wishes that in absorbing it, we may all say, “Never again to anyone.”
Mark H. Newhouse has created an intense, harrowing, story of love and loyalty surrounding life within the Lodz Ghetto in Poland, established to control a sizeable portion of the Jewish population under Nazi domination in the first book in the series, The Devil’s Bookkeepers: The Noose.
The author’s viewpoint is focused through the lens of Bernard Ostrowski, an engineer who will join three other men chosen for their related skills to report on daily happenings in the ghetto while secretly codifying incidents that the Nazis would not have wished to have recorded. Ostrowski and his cohort – the distinguished but embittered Oskar Rosenfeld, a noted Zionist, Julian Cukier, a journalist, and Oscar Singer, the youngest of the crew and the most impulsive. As Ostrowski opines privately, “Two Jews are a debate. Three, an argument. Four? A war.” Yet the four will co-exist, all trying in their separate ways to fulfill their assignment and please their highly controversial boss, Chaim Rumkowski.
Rumkowski was the real overseer of the Lodz Ghetto.
Some hated him since the people under his sway were starving and dying in disproportionately high numbers even as he commanded them to work for the German cause in German-run industries. Others, like Ostrowski and his companions, did their best to obey him despite many strong reservations, seeing him as the only hope, if faint, for their people’s survival. In their workday, the four men would learn of ever-increasing horrors taking place in the home where they’d been consigned. From very young people shot by German police or Jewish police under Nazi dominance to more people brought in by the thousand when all within the ghetto barely survived, strange, disturbing rumors arose about urns of Jewish ashes being sent to relatives in the ghetto from the concentration camp at Buchenwald.
Ostrowski has other palpable worries as the story evolves in the chaos around him.
His young wife Miriam wants a baby, and her pregnancy makes their deprivations even more distressing. Though they love one another, she is suspicious, as are many in the ghetto, of Rumkowski and his motivations. As her husband willingly works for and accedes to Rumkowski’s wishes, a line between them grows. In his role as “the engineer,” Ostrowski believes he is helping to keep his co-workers more concentrated on hard realities from an objective, constructive viewpoint. Miriam’s criticism torments him. Singer secretly suggests to Ostrowski that he take Miriam, their new daughter Regina and flee the ghetto. As the “noose” tightens, this begins to seem like the only realistic plan. But carrying it out would risk their three lives.
An award-winning writer and educator, Newhouse was born in Germany, the child of Holocaust survivors.
Gifted by his mother with a considerable narration entitled The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto (translated and edited by Lucjan Dobroszycki, Yale University Press, 1984) and seeing that his parents had had a personal attachment to the account, he read it, and within a short time, he had begun this trilogy, of which The Noose is Part One.
Much of the Chronicle was composed by unknown scribes. Newhouse decided on a fictional treatment speaking for its many authors and encompassing its vital, often horrific, truths. His wide-reaching story of conditions in and feelings about the Lodz Ghetto is educated and realistic. Newhouse deftly combines historical fact with a vibrant portrait of high-minded human beings caught in the trap of being “chosen” – but for what? – and trying their best to fulfill religious and family expectations while suspecting their efforts will all be in vain.
We met Mark H. Newhouse in Florida where he wondered whether or not he should enter his epic historical novel into our CIBAs.
