Once We Were Brothers

Once We Were Brothers is told across two timelines and settings: Poland in the 1930s and 1940s, and Chicago in 2004. The first eight chapters introduce the major characters and conflicts of the 2004 timeline. As the protagonist, Catherine Lockhart also serves as an audience surrogate evaluating the plausibility of Ben Solomon’s claims that Elliot Rosenzweig is a former Nazi SS officer masquerading as a Jewish camp survivor. Members of the SS were distinct from German citizens and members of the German armed forces in their cruelty and inhumanity. The SS—and specifically the Gestapo secret police to which Elliot is accused of belonging—were most responsible for enforcing Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic policies and committing genocide against European Jews. For this reason, the accusations against Elliot would result not only in public humiliation but also prosecution for war crimes.

Catherine—and by extension the reader—is unsure about Ben’s claims, believing he may be delusional or simply mistaken. In considering the plausibility of Ben’s claims, it’s instructive to look at the historical record. According to Mary Fulbrook, a professor of German history at University College London, there were at least 200,000 and up to a million perpetrators of Nazi war crimes alive at the end of World War II. Of these, 140,000 individuals were tried for war crimes, and only 6,656 were brought to justice. (Fulbrook, Mary. Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice. Oxford University Press. 2018.) That left tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals who either fled to countries like Argentina, which routinely blocked extradition attempts, or hid by changing their identity. While there is no record of an ex-SS officer rising to Elliot’s level of professional and financial success, there are many examples of former Nazis hiding in plain sight for decades before being exposed and brought to justice. One of the most famous examples is John Demjanjuk, a former Soviet soldier captured by the Germans and recruited to become an extermination camp guard. After lying on his US immigration papers, Demjanjuk lived in Cleveland, Ohio, where he labored as an auto worker for over 20 years before being put on trial in Israel for Nazi war crimes. With these facts in mind, it would be surprising though not entirely implausible that a man of Elliot’s stature was a former SS officer.

The first eight chapters also introduce some of the novel’s most salient themes. One of these is the ever-present risk that atrocities on the scale of the Holocaust can happen again. Ben’s crusade to bring Otto Piatek to justice is not necessarily one of vengeance or retribution. Rather, he considers it a preventative bulwark against future atrocities. When Catherine suggests that Ben plead insanity, he responds:

“Insane? Should I plead insanity? You have no idea what insanity is, young lady. I’ve known insanity and it can happen again; the next rip in the fabric of humanity. And if it does, the minions of evil will crawl through it—the incomprehensible evil—the next Auschwitz or Cambodia or Bosnia or Darfur. This generation’s Himmler, or Pol Pot or Milosevic. The next Aktion Reinhard” (19).

The book also begins to explore how such atrocities come about in an otherwise civilized world. When Catherine expresses skepticism over Ben’s accusation, he replies, “The bigger the lie, the more the people will believe it” (19). When she asks who said that, Ben says, “Adolf Hitler” (19).

Finally, these chapters introduce Catherine’s internal conflict. While she considers herself a person of strong moral and ethical fiber, she keenly understands the pragmatic and professional risk to her livelihood of taking on a man as powerful and beloved as Elliot. In Chapter 8, she tells Liam that Ben would be better off taking his case to a group of young idealists at a law clinic, saying, “Kids have no fear. I have a career” (32). This tension between ethics and careerism is explored more thoroughly as the book progresses.