Dalton Trumbo’s posthumous work, this novel tells the story of an old unrepentant Nazi official named Grieben. Former chief of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the protagonist is motivated by a boundless desire for power & by what seems to be an inability to receive love. In autobiographical form, Grieben ensnares us in the sadism of his youth, the cruelty of his relationship with a woman who was half-Jewish & the indescribable horror of the Holocaust.