5 star reads: “We Are Only Ghosts” by Jeffrey L. Richards

Something about Jeffrey L. Richards’ We Are Only Ghosts hooked me fast and it’s going to stay with me for a very long time.

I might think it was the cover, because of the concentration camp tattoo on the waiter’s forearm, but it probably wasn’t that. I think that probably made me wary when I first came across the novel, and I did have it for a little while before I read it, because fiction set during World War II and involving even the potential for romance in Auschwitz or any of the other camps usually strikes me as… unnecessary.

What I did like when I read the summary of We Are Only Ghosts is that at least part of the story was promised to take place in 1968 and I thought that might be the balance I needed to see it through.

And it was.

The title of Richards’ novel is explained throughout almost every sentence of the novel, the idea that a person can be countless things and still never quite know even themselves or be known with any certainty. And so a person can be a ghost.

Charles Ward, he of New York City in 1968, was Charles Werden in Poland and Germany in the latter part of World War II and the first years after. Charles Werden was Karel Benakov from the moment of his birth in Czechoslovakia until he was forced to become Charles Werden by Obersturmfuhrer Berthold Werden, the Nazi Auschwitz officer who both destroyed and saved the Jewish teenager from Czechoslovakia.

The relationship between the Nazi officer and the Jewish boy is a sexual one. It seems almost like the idea of Stockholm Syndrome, in that Karel is given a choice to die as soon as possible in the camps or to live with the Werden family and become Berthold’s lover and maybe not die for awhile yet. He agrees to become his lover in the hopes that it will help his mother and sisters in the womens’ camp.

It does not help them.

And still Karel finds himself carried away the idea that he might mean something to Berthold, that there must be a deeper reason that he was chosen to survive in the particular way that he did.

Left alone at the end of the war, Charles ends up in America where the story starts twenty-plus years later when he recognizes the man in the cafe where he works as the war criminal he lived with for years.

And he wonders if they might rekindle what they had then.

The true beauty of the story lies in Charles’ realization that it was all a mirage and that he has to see the other man for what he is and what he was. He has to do it for Karel, for his younger self, and for his family who are only ghosts now. His journey of self-discovery and self-reflection is simple and it is profound.

The one small issue that I have with an otherwise perfect story is that Richards’ decision to make Berthold’s American fake identity to be a Jewish jeweler seems to be a unnecessary and borderline disrespectful. I understand the logic of making a Nazi in hiding choose that ironic of an identity in a story about figurative ghosts, but I think the story could have had the same impact without that part.

The novel still gets five stars from me because it’s Charles’ story, not Berthold’s, and Charles’ story is deeply and powerfully moving.

• cw: rape, murder, mental abuse, physical abuse, all other Nazi-era truth-horrors
• I received an early copy of We Are Only Ghosts through NetGalley & Kensington in exchange for an honest & original review. All thoughts are my own.