Daniel Silva: A Death in Vienna

Olga Lengyel, in her landmark 1947 mémoire of survival at Auschwitz, wrote: “Certainly everyone whose hands were directly, or indirectly stained with our blood must pay for his or her crimes. Less than that would be an outrage against the millions of innocent dead.” Her impassioned plea for justice, however, went largely unheeded. Only a tiny percentage of those who carried out the Final Solution or served in an ancillary or collaborationist role ever faced punishment for their crimes. Tens of thousands found sanctuary in foreign lands, including the United States; others simply returned home and carried on with their lives. Some found employment in the CIA-sponsored intelligence network of General Reinhard Gehlen. What impact did men such as these have on the conduct of American foreign policy during the early years of the Cold War? The answer may never fully be known.

A Death in Vienna, like the previous books in the Gabriel Allon series, could not have been written without the support, wisdom, and friendship of David Bull. David is truly one of the world’s finest art restorers and historians, and our consultations, usually conducted over a hastily prepared pasta and a bottle of red wine, have enriched my life.

In Vienna, I was assisted by a number of remarkable individuals who are working to combat Austria ’s newest outbreak of anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, because of the seriousness of the situation, I cannot thank them by name, though their spirit and courage have certainly found their way onto the pages of this story.

In Jerusalem, I made Gabriel’s journey through the memorials of Yad Vashem at the side of Dina Shefet, a Holocaust historian who has recorded the memories of numerous survivors. To demonstrate how one can locate and print the Pages of Testimony stored in the Hall of Names, she used as an example her grandparents, who were murdered at Treblinka in 1942. The staff at the Yad Vashem Archives, especially Karin Dengler, could not have been more helpful. Gabriel Motskin, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his wife, art historian and curator Emily Bilski, took good care of me and deepened my understanding of contemporary Israeli society.

A special thanks to the library staff at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; Naomi Mazin of the Anti-Defamation League in New York; Moshe Fox of the Israeli Embassy in Washington; and Dr. Ephraim Zuroff, a real-life Nazi-hunter from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem who, to this day, is tirelessly seeking justice for the victims of the Shoah. It goes without saying that the expertise is all theirs, the mistakes and dramatic license all mine.

My friend Louis Toscano read my manuscript and made it immeasurably better. Dorian Hastings, my copyeditor, spared me much embarrassment. Eleanor Pelta, though she didn’t always know it, helped me to better understand what it means to be the child of survivors. Marilyn Goldhammer, head of the Temple Sinai religious school in Washington, D.C., taught me and my children the lesson of the Midrash of the Broken Vessel. Dan Raviv, author of the groundbreaking history of the Mossad, Every Spy a Prince, and his wife, Dori Phaff, were an indispensable resource on all things Israeli. The actor and entertainer Mike Burstyn opened many doors for me, and his wife, Cyona, allowed me to borrow the Hebrew version of her beautiful name.

I consulted hundreds of books, articles, and Web sites during preparation of this manuscript, far too many to name individually, but I would be remiss if I did not mention Christopher Simpson’s ground breaking Blowback, which documented the use of Nazi war criminals by American intelligence in the years after the Second World War, and The Real Odessa, by Uki Goni, who has almost single-handedly forced Argentina to reexamine its past. Many survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau summoned the courage later in life to record their experiences-in book form, on videotape, or in depositions given to Yad Vashem and other repositories of Holocaust memory-and I borrowed from them to create the fictional testimony of Irene Allon. Two works were particularly helpful: Five Chimneys, by Olga Lengyel, and Rena’s Promise, by Rena Kornreich Gelissen, both of which documented the journeys of young women through the horrors of Birkenau and the death march.

None of this would have been possible without the friendship and support of my literary agent, Esther Newberg of International Creative Management. Also, a heartfelt thanks to the remarkable team at Penguin Putnam: Carole Baron, Daniel Harvey, Marilyn Ducksworth, and especially my editor, Neil Nyren, who quietly helped me turn a few random notions into a novel.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Daniel Silva is ex-CNN TV executive, whose first book The Unlikely Spy was sold in 14 countries. He is married with twins.