Holocaust Stories: Create a Book Cover for My Short Story Collection

Bernard Otterman

My name is Bernard Otterman, PhD. This contest is for a book cover (and back) I've written called "Inmate 1818 and Other Stories." The target audience is anyone who enjoys reading short stories and short-form fiction – an increasingly popular literary format. According to The Bookseller, the trade magazine of the publishing industry, short-story sales rose 35 per cent in 2013. You can read more about the rise of short stories here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/…story.html

The secondary target audience is any reader who has an interest in the Holocaust. The short stories in this collection, Inmate 1818 and Other Stories, are set in the ghettos and concentration camps and in the aftermath of Hitler’s war against the Jews.

The designers should create a cover inspired the title story in the collection. The title story is called, “Inmate 1818,” and is about a young boy in a Nazi work camp. Prominent imagery in the story includes the eight-year-old boy, the boy’s older male friend who is very tall and skinny, a brass tag with the number 1818 imprinted on it, a window that the young boy looks out from, a full moon, and the square at the work camp where roll call is taken every day, and Nazi SS guards. If you would like to read the story to gather additional cover ideas, please contact Bernard. Otherwise, here is a full description of the story:

Risking their lives by disobeying the orders of the Nazi SS guards, a mother and father smuggle in their eight-year-old son into a slave labor camp in Radom, Poland. In this camp, each inmate is identified by a number inscribed on a round brass tag worn around his or her neck. The tag must be clearly visible at all times. Since the boy does not have a number, he must stay hidden inside his mothers’ barrack when his parents leave for work. He is bored and restless as he watches through a window at the going-ons inside the camp.

One day he spots children playing near his barrack. These are children of the Kapos who oversee the activities of the camp. They have brass tags. Disobeying his parents, the boy decides to leave the barrack and sits outside on the front stoop. One older boy, the son of Rabbi from Radom, befriends him. The older boy is very tall and skinny. The young boy is amazed and delighted by the knowledge of his newfound friend. The Rabbi's son predicts an upcoming lunar eclipse during which he plans to escape and return to the nearby Radom ghetto to be with his parents. Before escaping, he gives his brass tag to the boy. The tag is inscribed with the number "1818". But the boy is still afraid to leave the barrack. The following morning the usual roll call is held. The SS guards are upset and threatening violence because an inmate is missing. A Kapo fetches the boy and beats him for being late in order to pacify the SS guards. His mother, however, is happy. She believes that the double 18 – a lucky number in the Jewish religion because when it is written in Hebrew letters it spells life – insures that both he and the Rabbi son will survive.

For your reference, this is a link to images of metal tags worn by Nazi prisoners:

http://collections.ushmm.org/search…mit=search

And this is an image of concentration camp inmates holding up their metal tags for the camera:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped…s_1945.jpg

Finally, here is an article with photos about Radom:

http://www.holocaustresearchproject…radom.html

Also, below is text to be used on the back cover of the book. Ideally, blurbs and the full description can be incorporated. If space is limited, please contact Bernard and we can discuss what to include.

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Praise for Bernard Otterman:

“Polish born writer Bernard Otterman portrays the textured worlds of pre, during, and post World War II. These are stories of inherent drama, yet there is no exploitation of events here. Often understated, frequently macabre, Otterman’s observant narrators see the world, as it is, surreal, yes, otherworldly, unbearable, and somehow wry.” - Martha Rhodes, Director, Four Way Books.

“Here is historical fiction at its finest, concise and penetrating. Otterman’s vivid tales of life during and after history’s darkest hour explore complex issues such as complicity, denial, and shame with sensitivity and skill.” - Joshua M. Greene Author, Justice at Dachau and Witness: Voices from the Holocaust

“Holocaust survivor, Bernard Otterman, locates some of his stories in the ghettos and the camps, others in the aftermath of WWII. This double narrative perspective greatly enriches his collection, whose stories are often chilling but always powerful and imaginative.”- Patrick G. Henry, author of Banishing the Coercion of Despair: Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and The Holocaust Today.

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The release of Inmate 1818 and Other Stories, a collection of twelve short stories inspired by the Holocaust and its aftermath, marks a new milestone for a celebrated writer with unusual skill and vision. Dr. Bernard Otterman’s stories are set in the ghettos and camps of World War II and in the difficult days following Hitler’s war against the Jews. Dr. Otterman writes: “As a child survivor, the Holocaust forced itself in the manner of an unwelcome relative into my writings.” The collection’s dual perspectives, in the past and present, form a unity Dr. Otterman refers to as “the ever-present past.” This haunting presence defines the lives of all characters in the stories—survivors as well as their children.

In the title story, “Inmate 1818,” a young boy is smuggled into a work camp, a place where only children of the camp’s “privileged” are allowed. The boy struggles with his isolation and a deep desire to participate in what he perceives as the benign normal life of the camp. After being befriended by an eccentric teenager, a Rabbi’s son, he is able to come out of hiding. His mother, however, must pay a heavy price for his privilege.

Dr. Otterman’s stories are replete with sacrifice, anger and remorse. In “Days of Rage,” married survivors are tormented when their son believes and spouts a neo-Nazi ideology. A survivor in “Lotto Fever” is both upset and obsessed by winning the lottery using numbers very similar to those tattooed on his arm. A German boy is determined to redeem his family’s Nazi sins by recreating the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp using plastic toy bricks in “Lego Lager.” In “Golem of Auschwitz,” a survivor is haunted by the memory of the Golem that he and a Rabbi’s son created while in captivity. And in the recently revised “Black Grass,” the author turns to the rich tradition of magical realism to respond to the phenomenon of the Holocaust, where the darkness born by this tragedy slowly envelops the world.

Taken together, these finely crafted stories provide a riveting, tightly constructed reading experience. While taking his readers into uncharted regions, Otterman's authorial voice is a strong tether throughout. His stories and poems have received global recognition and have been published by leading journals and magazines. His poems have been published in Poetry, Jewish Currents and other compendia “Golem of Auschwitz” was first published in New Millennium Writings, while “Lotto Fever” was printed in Word-Slovo. His short-story collection, Black Grass and Other Stories, was published in 2008 by Jewish Heritage, one of the world's oldest and most active organizations dedicated to enriching the literary bookshelf with works of literature related to Jewish history and culture.

Critics declare that Otterman writes with the deftness and moral complexity of Chaim Grade and Primo Levi, Ida Fink, and Henryk Grynberg. When his imagination takes flight into the surrealistic regions, his work is akin to the crafted conceptual stories of Bruno Schulz and Franz Kafka. Inmate 1818 is not to be missed—and once read, never forgotten.