The German Officer’s Boy

What really happened that afternoon in November 1938, when a young Polish Jew walked into the German embassy in Paris and shots rang out? The immediate consequence was concrete: Nazis retaliated with Kristallnacht—“Night of Broken Glass”—the beginning of the Holocaust. Lost in the aftermath is the story of Herschel Grynszpan, the confused teenager whose murder of Ernst vom Rath was used to justify Kristallnacht. In this historical novel, award-winning writer Harlan Greene takes Grynszpan at his word. Historians have tried to explain away the claim that he was involved in a love affair with vom Rath; Greene, instead, depicts the lives of the underprivileged and persecuted Grynszpan and the wealthy German diplomat vom Rath as they move inevitably toward their ill-fated affair.