Hitler's Silver Box

Every family has a secret, but Uncle Max’s could wreak havoc on the world.

MAX BLOOMBERG’s home in a Chicago suburb is invaded by strangers in the middle of a cold winter night. The elderly Holocaust survivor is dragged from his bed and brutalized in an attempt to learn the location of a silver box he made some fifty years before. 

Max’s closest relative, Dr. BRUCE STARKMAN, chief ER resident at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital is shocked when he learns his Holocaust survivor uncle is dead—his body already cremated, a violation of Uncle Max’s Orthodox Jewish views. A number of other puzzling circumstances surround the death.

 When Bruce finds his uncle's hidden journal detailing Max’s ordeal in Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he was forced to make the box for Adolph Hitler’s birthday using silver extracted from the teeth of prisoners, some of the weird incidents begin to make sense.  

Recognizing the death as murder, the young physician also realizes a worldwide Nazi resurgence is imminent unless he finds and destroys the secret document written by Nazi leaders and hidden in the silver box, which his uncle buried in a forest near Prague. 

While physically fit, Bruce has difficulty crossing over from a person of peace—a healer—to one of violence.  The search takes Bruce and Miriam, a tough, attractive Israeli woman, with military training who becomes Bruce’s ally to Paris and the Czech Republic. On this journey the two are incessantly pursued and attacked by groups of Nazis, led by a particularly clever and vicious German Nazi.  

Written with an eye for detail and a dramatic sense of timing, Allen Malnak’s Hitler’s Silver Box is the kind of story that grabs its readers by the collar and tells them to hold on tight.