Adam Czerniakow heads the governing body of the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto, the Judenrat. He is frustrated by his role of implementing irrational Nazi orders, by his inability to protect a half-million sick and starving ghetto inhabitants. Now he is being forced to help Hitler in a plot to defeat Russia.
Sam Bender, a 90s businessman and family man, has his own demons. He is haunted by his past relationships with a brother serving time for murder, and a father who died years ago leaving a trail of deceit and conflict. Suddenly, his father and brother are thrust to the forefront of his life.
These two worlds, separated by half a century in time and thousands of miles, suddenly collide.
Bender inadvertently acquires a long lost diary. Through it, he begins to learn about an isolated Jews struggle against overwhelming odds to stop German aggression. At the same time, Bender and others become targets of neo-Nazis bent on taking whatever steps are necessary - burglary, assault, kidnapping, murder - to recover the diary.
* * * * *
Bender is outwardly congenial and affable, ten years into a comfortable second marriage, devoted to his and Rivas kids. But demons gnaw at his gut. He silently reviles a brother who was his childhood tormentor. And he fights a constant urge to examine the residue locked in the wall safe in his den - the legacy of his father.
On a business trip to Rome, Bender ends up with a small, tattered notebook whose contents are scribbled in a language he can’t read. When he tries to return the book, he discovers its previous owner, Dominick Sorrento, has been murdered.
He asks Don Slatter, an English professor and part-time Eastern European translator, to look at the book. Slatter determines it is a Polish diary written during the World War II era, and agrees to translate it. But others want the book. Sam’s home is ransacked, a smoke bomb is planted in the Slatter house, and one of Rivas friends is bludgeoned to death.
Police on two continents are now actively involved in finding the murderers of Dominick Sorrento and Rivas friend. In Italy, a search gets underway for a former Sorrento employee, someone tied to the neo-Nazi German National Party. This search leads the police to a fatal stabbing at the Jewish Synagogue in Florence.
In Maryland, with Benders help, police discover the three murders are connected and are the result of the GNPs attempts to steal the notebook. In the meantime, Slatter’s translation reveals the book was actually a diary, written by the Chairman of the Warsaw Jewish ghetto, Adam Czerniakow, during the 1940-1941 time frame. It hints at an attempt by Hitler to use Czerniakow in a scheme to outwit the Allies, and a plan concocted by Czerniakow to outwit the Third Reich.
As Bender and Slatter begin to unravel the secrets of the notebook, Sam’s brother escapes from prison, Riva is assaulted, her daughter is kidnapped, and Bender is shot.
