Don LoCicero

The Twisted Star Don LoCicero

The Twisted Star, LoCicero's first work in a historical trilogy (The Twisted Star; Fate's Marionettes; The American War) that covers the years from W. W. I to the war in Vietnam. The novel depicts the sufferings of a German-Jewish family and the disintegration of the German nation under Adolf Hitler's dictatorship. From an underground hiding chamber in Nazi-occupied Poland, Heinrich Hartstein recounts the horrors he endured in the infamous death-camp Treblinka, and the events that tore his life and the lives of millions of others apart during Hitler's brutal Third Reich. In the course of his narration, Heinrich poses the questions: How could a civilized nation like Germany have spawned so unthinkable a horror as the Holocaust? Why, he wonders, did so many whose lives were in jeopardy hesitate to flee until it was too late? Finally, where was God as the gas chambers snuffed out the lives of innocent millions?

The reader will be unnerved to see the parallels between events during the years leading up to the Third Reich and what is taking place in the United States and other countries in 2018. The Twisted Star can serve as a warning that complacency is a powerful enemy of democracy.