Opening
Chapters 6–10 shift the novel from uneasy confession to full confrontation. Sage Singer weighs a dying request from Josef Weber as her grandmother, Minka Singer, breaks a lifetime of silence and begins to speak. The three narratives—Sage’s moral crisis, Josef’s past as Reiner Hartmann, and Minka’s hidden history—tighten around a single name: Auschwitz, testing the limits of Forgiveness and Justice and the power of Memory, History, and Storytelling.
What Happens
Chapter 6: A Grandmother’s Secret
Sage listens as Josef details his indoctrination into the Hitler Youth. She challenges his “following orders” defense, insisting choice is always possible. He counters with the seductive promise of a better future and confesses he longs for death without fearing judgment because, for some, “death must be heaven.” Afterward, Sage contacts Leo Stein, who explains that Hitler Youth membership alone is not prosecutable. He labels Sage both Josef’s “assassin and his priest,” crystallizing her dilemma within Forgiveness and Justice.
Shaken, Sage bakes babka with Minka. Baking unlocks family memories—coded fillings, a daily “minkele”—until Sage asks about their great-grandfather’s death. Minka shows her tattoo, revealing she is a Holocaust survivor. She recounts trying to speak to a class before a denier silenced her, then offers Sage a small leather notebook: a rewritten-from-memory tale she composed during the war. Minka says the story—not the catalog of atrocities—matters most because it “kept [her] alive,” establishing Memory, History, and Storytelling as a lifeline.
Chapter 7: The Death Mask Slips
Sage immerses herself in Minka’s folklore: a Polish vampire, the upiór, and a narrator named Ania. The writing probes The Nature of Good and Evil, equating human-made monsters with mythical ones. Sage reads for biographical echoes—Minka in Ania, Nazis in the monster—and arrives late to pick up Josef for grief group.
When a member’s husband dies, Sage asks whether we must mourn “horrible” people, deliberately invoking Hitler and Nazis. Josef bristles. In the hallway he hisses that she has betrayed his confidence and orders her never to speak of his past. For a flash, Sage sees the SS officer beneath the kindly façade. She answers, calm and steady: “I am not one of your victims,” then walks away.
On the drive home, Josef apologizes and tells the legend of Der Ewige Jude—the Wandering Jew cursed to walk the earth. He sees himself the same way, condemned to relive his crimes, a private purgatory of Guilt, Sin, and Atonement. He repeats an anti-Semitic trope about weeds, then admits he once believed “there are some weeds that are just as beautiful as flowers.”
Chapter 8: The Upiór’s Story Begins
Minka’s embedded tale opens in the woods. Ania senses a presence, mistakes a doe for safety, and is dragged down by a hidden assailant who bites her neck. Hoofbeats thunder. A voice calls her name. She wakes in the arms of Damian, the captain of the guard, as he carries her home.
At the cottage, Ania’s brother, Aleks, takes over. He cleans the wound, gives her whiskey, and stitches the gash—a quiet, intimate ritual that forges their protective bond. When she wakes, Aleks strokes her hair and jokes, “If you wanted my attention, all you had to do was ask.” Violence, care, and competing masculine energies—Damian’s force versus Aleks’s devotion—frame the story’s moral terrain.
Chapter 9: The Making of a Monster
Josef drops the mask and names himself: Reiner Hartmann. His first cruelty is small and chilling: he kills his brother Franz’s pet mouse while claiming he was “only following orders” from their mother—a miniature of the excuses to come. Reiner rises in the Hitler Youth under Herr Sollemach and visits Wewelsburg Castle, where Heinrich Himmler notices him. With a whispered prompt from Franz, Reiner answers correctly about the castle’s history, and Himmler hails him as the “future of Germany.” Reiner decides to join the SS.
Before he leaves, Hitler Youth boys are mobilized for a “spontaneous” retaliation: Kristallnacht. Reiner joins the mob as they wreck Jewish shops in Paderborn. When a woman begs him to stop the soldiers tormenting her husband, he kicks her aside. He later calls the night a message of dominance. Franz pleads that he doesn’t have to believe Nazi doctrine. Reiner’s reply seals his path: he does.
Chapter 10: Anus Mundi
Reiner serves in the Death’s Head Units in Poland and commits his first murder, shooting a teenage boy in the back. He helps execute 800 Polish intellectuals from a death list and learns not to look at faces. On leave, he discovers Franz is helping Artur Goldman, a Jewish friend. Reiner threatens Franz and arranges the Goldmans’ removal, rationalizing it as protection and career preservation.
Promoted to the 1.SS Infantry Brigade in Ukraine, Reiner organizes cleansing actions: herding thousands of Jews into pits and shooting them. He drinks heavily; soldiers break. One memory haunts him—a girl humming a lullaby beside her mother’s corpse—until Hauptsturmführer Voelkel silences the song by killing her. When Voelkel abuses his mistress, Annika, Reiner intervenes; the next day, drunk and unraveling, he sleeps with Annika and is caught. Demoted to a penal unit, he is gravely wounded and “redeemed” by his sacrifice. Deemed unfit for combat, he is reassigned as Schutzhaftlagerführer of the women’s camp at Auschwitz—“Anus Mundi.”
Sage reels. Her grandmother and her tormentor have shared the same ground. She drives to see her married lover, Adam, glimpses his intact family, and, swerving to miss a deer, crashes her car. Her boss, Mary DeAngelis, retrieves her from the hospital, assuming heartache is the cause. Sage calls Leo again and again. The next day he arrives; she tells him everything. To deport Reiner, Leo needs classified knowledge only Reiner would know or an eyewitness. Minka is the key.
Sage brings Leo to Minka. He coaxes her gently, sharing his grandfather’s story until she agrees to speak. Interleaved are pages from the upiór tale: Aleks is falsely accused and publicly whipped for the monster’s crimes—proof of scapegoating—until another murder occurs mid-punishment, exonerating him and enabling his escape.
Key Events
- Minka reveals her Auschwitz tattoo and gives Sage her wartime story.
- Sage provokes Josef at grief group; his SS persona surfaces and cracks.
- Reiner confesses to Kristallnacht, mass executions in Poland and Ukraine, and his role at Auschwitz’s women’s camp.
- Sage crashes her car after seeing Adam with his family.
- Leo arrives, outlines the legal standard, and identifies Minka as the crucial eyewitness.
- Minka agrees to testify after Leo’s careful persuasion.
Character Development
At the midpoint, façades fall. Roles harden: witness, hunter, perpetrator, and the descendant who must decide what justice requires.
- Sage Singer: Moves from passive listener to active seeker of accountability. She resists Josef’s intimidation, involves Leo, and risks reopening Minka’s wounds.
- Josef Weber / Reiner Hartmann: The amiable elder gives way to the officer beneath. His “orders” defense and self-styled penance reveal a self-serving quest for absolution.
- Minka Singer: Breaks decades of silence, reframing herself from survivor-in-hiding to central witness whose art sustained her.
- Leo Stein: Emerges as the narrative’s legal and ethical anchor—empathetic, meticulous, and unwavering about public justice over private forgiveness.
Themes & Symbols
The chapters braid three voices to test who gets to tell history and to what end. Josef’s confession is a curated self-defense; Minka’s fiction is a survival engine; Minka’s testimony is the long-suppressed record. Storytelling preserves the past, but it also contests it, forcing Sage to decide whether to honor a dying man’s request or a murdered people’s memory.
Forgiveness collides with justice. Josef seeks release; Leo insists accountability belongs to society, not just the harmed individual. The novel interrogates how indoctrination, ambition, and choice co-produce evil. Minka’s upiór renders monstrosity legible: a predator hiding in plain sight, echoing the camouflage of ordinary men who become executioners.
- Babka: Family warmth and coded memory; baking becomes the doorway to revelation.
- Minka’s journal: Art as shelter—an object that carries life across annihilation.
- The upiór: A folkloric mirror for the Nazis—familiar, insinuating, and ravenous.
- “Anus Mundi”: A brutal sobriquet that strips away euphemism and names the abyss.
Key Quotes
“Death must be heaven.” Josef frames death as mercy for the damned, foreshadowing both his desire for release and Minka’s testimony about living through the “hell” he helped build. The line exposes the moral inversion at the core of his plea.
“I am not one of your victims.” Sage rejects Josef’s attempt to reassert control. The declaration marks her turn from listener to challenger and signals that any confession must meet consequences.
“The thing is, Franz, I do.” Reiner’s admission during Kristallnacht shuts the door on doubt. Belief, not mere obedience, drives his violence, complicating the “orders” defense he rehearses later.
“There are some weeds that are just as beautiful as flowers.” Josef’s revision of an anti-Semitic slur masquerades as tolerance, yet it centers his gaze. Even his “compliment” exposes a need to narrate Jews through his terms, not their humanity.
“It’s the one that kept me alive.” Minka’s credo recasts fiction as an instrument of survival. Her story is not escape but endurance—proof that imagination can hold a human core intact when the world seeks to erase it.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters anchor the novel’s moral engine. Reiner’s confession supplies the mechanisms of atrocity; Sage’s choices reframe confession as a beginning, not an end; Minka’s voice becomes the indispensable counter-history that can pierce denial. All threads converge on Auschwitz, turning a private reckoning into a public pursuit and shifting the book from philosophical debate to a high-stakes confrontation with documented truth.