Holocaust scholar publishes novel on Nazi hunters
Peninsula resident’s novel partially
inspired by her heritage
BY PATRICK WEBB
A retired protest singer who rubbed elbows with Joan
Baez and campaigned for farmworkers’ rights with Cesar
Chavez has published her fi rst historical fi ction novel.
Amber Rose is the author of “When I Am Ashes,”
released earlier this month. Rose, 74, moved to the Long
Beach Peninsula a couple of years ago after working around
the U.S. as a healer and social worker. In her younger years,
which coincided with the radical 1970s, she was a song-
writer and musician. Her Jewish heritage inspired a lifelong
research into the Holocaust.
The subject matter of her novel is not new to Rose,
although fi ction is. Other published books by Rose are about
healing arts, including acupuncture and treatments using bee
venom.
Rose and her husband, Barry Fruchter, wrote a play, “The
Bride of Auschwitz,” inspired by research on genetic exper-
iments at Auschwitz. The play has been staged on university
campuses and in synagogues. Rose and Fruchter’s research
included an emotional 2010 trip to the concentration camp.
Rose’s novel tells the story of Sasha, a woman who
encounters love in 1938 Paris, just before World War II
breaks out in Europe. She is besotted Anne-Louis Girodet’s
painting “Atala’s Funeral.”
The 1808 painting in the Louvre depicts a scene from
a novel by Chateaubriand. A young Christian woman has
taken her life rather than break a vow. Her action causes
heartbreak for Chactas, whose tribe is an enemy of Atala’s
family. The bereaved youth clings to her lifeless body while
a monk, who had off ered to marry the couple, supports her
head.
Sasha goes to the museum gift shop to buy a postcard
copy of the painting. She is smitten by the sales clerk. Their
brief romantic bliss is shattered when Sasha receives a tele-
gram to return to the U.S.
Her father was stabbed while observing a pro-Nazi rally
in New York. Sasha resolves to catch his murderer, despite
learning the man has fl ed to Poland.
Years pass. Sasha’s son (whose father is the sales clerk)
grows up to inherit his mother’s obsession and becomes a
Amber Rose
Read the book
‘When I am Ashes’
By Amber Rose
www.amazon.com, paperback, $18.99; autographed copies
at Time Enough Books in Ilwaco, Washington
A novella titled ‘Soul of a Rose,’ about a resistance member
in World War II occupied France, is available at
www.forever-amber-rose.com
Nazi hunter in Italy.
The climax features a war crimes tribunal with real-life
characters including Hannah Arendt, a magazine writer,
and Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal, a Nazi hunter.
Arendt later became a professor at multiple institutions and
was Rose’s undergraduate thesis advisor at the University of
Chicago in the 1970s.
Part of the plot highlights the secret paths — dubbed
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“ratlines” — that allowed Nazis like Holocaust coordina-
tor Adolf Eichmann and “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele
to escape Europe. Eichmann was traced to Argentina,
where Mossad agents seized him in 1961 and returned him
to Israel, where he was tried for war crimes and hanged.
Mengele died in Brazil in 1979.
As the tribunal gets under way, the accused Nazi is torn
between self preservation and pride in his warped beliefs;
he cannot seem to help incriminating himself. Two unusual
revelations involving key characters ameliorate some of the
tragedy that goes before.
Rose’s next book will be about the Nazi presence in
Chile after World War II.
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