Hitler's Pawn

Herschel’s story is not really about another victim among six million victims. It’s about a naïve but intense kid suddenly trapped in the spotlight of world politics, and moreover world politics on the edge. It is about fame and obscurity. About the fall of France, and the first phase of World War II. It has a murder, political intrigue, a chase through France, a kidnapping by the Gestapo, and a very young man who from his Gestapo prison, enters, and wins, a battle of wits with Goebbels and Hitler himself. A backstory when selling this book: Author Stephen Koch was researching a possible book about Frank Lloyd Wright, and the more he learned about him, the less he liked him, including that, like his friend Charles Lindberg, Wright was all wrong about Hitler. And who was right about Hitler? Dorothy Thompson. Koch began researching Thompson, and found she had set up a defense fund for a once world-famous, now forgotten Jewish teenager in Paris. His name: the unspellable and seemingly unpronounceable «Herschel Grynszpan» (It’s really simple: «Greenspan.») A kid whose rash act was used by Hitler as a trigger for the Holocaust. And thus Koch's Pawn Marketing and outreach to NAIBA as well as to the National Jewish Book Council and JBC Opportunities for cross-promotion with Junior Library Guild and historical and Jewish book clubs Formerly the chairman of the Creative Writing Division in the School of the Arts at Columbia, Koch wrote a classic text on writing, The Modern Library Writers’ Workshop.