Tatae’s Promise by Sherry Maysonave and Moises J. Goldman; Manchester, Vermont: Dart Frog Books; © 2023; ISBN 9781959-096948; 516 pages plus 20 pages of appendices; $28.52 on Amazon.
SAN DIEGO – Six spoons, stamped with an emblem of Nazi Germany, form a Magen David on the cover of this book of Holocaust “historical fiction,” symbolizing the spoons Auschwitz inmates were issued after surviving the initial selection process.
It’s a compelling and absorbing story cowritten by professional author Sherry Maysonave and by Moises J. Goldman, an aerospace scientist who is the son of the book’s protagonist, Hinda Mondlak Goldman.
Moises transcribed and translated an oral history taped in Spanish and Yiddish by his mother. Sherry blended Hinda’s account with historic research and fictional characters whom she extrapolated from Hinda’s remembrance into a rich and suspenseful novel.
However, a word of caution: While historical, Tatae’s Promise is not history. Many of the conversations among principals are imagined, and the surnames of some characters are made up.
Among the characters whose last name was supplied by the authors, rather than by the historical record, is that of Walter Zeilhofen, an anti-Nazi medical doctor drafted into the service of the infamous Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele.
If Zeilhofen was real, his life deserves an entire biography for he is depicted as defying again and again Mengele’s psychotic, murderous instructions and taking life-affirming measures to save the lives of as many Jewish prisoners as he could.
At any rate, Zeilhofen was instrumental toward the end of the war of arranging the escapes from Auschwitz of Hinda and her younger sister, Rachel. His kindness, as recorded by Hinda, stemmed from their mutual attraction, which could have resulted in their intermarriage had Zeilhofen not been executed as a traitor by the SS. I’ll not spoil readers’ experiences by divulging details of the sisters’ escape.
Authors Maysonave and Goldman also follow, in less rich detail, the life at Buchenwald Concentration Camp of Wolf Yoskowitz, who for purposes of immigration to Mexico City had to change his name to Samuel Goldman. He married Hinda and fathered Moises.
After their concentration camp experiences, Hinda and Rachel and their respective husbands remained close as contributing members of the Jewish community in Mexico City. Initially, they were aided by Hinda’s six older brothers and grudgingly by an elderly sister, all of whom had resettled in Mexico prior to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland.
Salomon Mondlak — called “Tatae,’ a Yiddish name for “Father” — was arrested and captured by the Nazis during the ghettoization phase of the Holocaust, before they started sending people to concentration camps. Knowing his murder was imminent, he got Hinda to promise that she would be both a mother and father to her sisters, Rachel and the youngest Sara, who was gassed soon after reaching Auschwitz.
In a note written from the detention center shortly before his execution, Tatae predicted to Hinda that she would survive the Nazis and tell the world what they did. Her oral history was a start; Maysonave’s and Goldman’s work is the completion of that assignment.
*
Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World