Interview with Dr. Allen Malnak, author of Hitler’s Silver Box
As a board-certified internist, Dr. Allen Malnak served as chief of medicine in Fort Sill, OK, and was medical director for several organizations, including the Emergency Department at Chicago’s Mount Sinai Hospital. During his long medical career in the Chicago area, he was also a clinical investigator in liver disease, as well as an assistant clinical professor at the Stritch School of Medicine and a practicing internist. After retiring, he and his wife Patricia moved to Bonita Springs, Florida. His interest in the Holocaust was sparked by the fact that all the men, women and children of his father’s large Lithuanian family were sent to an extermination camp by the Nazis and killed.
Thank you for this interview and congratulations on the release of your suspenseful thriller, Hitler’s Silver Box. What prompted you to write this story?
When my father came to the United States in 1906 at the age of 16, he had only one distant relative in this country. He left behind a large family in Kovno, Lithuania, including his parents, eight brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles. They ranged in age from elderly to infants.
Dad died of natural causes during World War II and immediately after the war my late brother Lewis and I began trying to locate our father’s European family. He was only 16 years old when the war ended. We wrote letters to everyone we could think of and after about a year we received a detailed reply from the International Red Cross. Nazi records, as well as witness reports, indicated that all members of Dad’s family had been killed in or near Kovno or after being transferred to an extermination camp. Every man, woman and child!
So the Nazis destroyed a whole side of my family. Of course, I became interested in the Holocaust and started reading articles about it even during my high school and college years. During my internship at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, I read a short book, doctors of infamy, which covered many horrific medical experiments performed on concentration camp prisoners by Nazi doctors. The book was so disturbing that after reading it, I threw it away. My next book on the subject was NIGHT by Elie Weisel. I then took care of my professional career and my growing family for many years. When I reached the age of forty, I decided that I owed it to my dead family members to participate in a real study of that terrible time. Then I spent maybe two or three years of my limited free time reading every book I could find on the Holocaust.
Years later, I retired from practicing and teaching internal medicine and my wife and I moved to Bonita Springs, Florida. I saw an article in the Naples Daily News describing a fiction writing course being taught at the Naples Philharmonic. The teacher was Hollis Alpert, a well-known novelist, biographer, short-story editor, and film critic.
I took classes with Hollis for a couple of years. He gave us assignments, often listing various topics that we should use as the basis for a short story. I critiqued each story and in the next weekly session I read some of them to the class.
One theme I chose was titled “A Silver Box.” For some reason, I decided to write it about a Theresienstadt concentration camp prisoner who was forced by a Nazi colonel to make a silver box that was to be a gift to Adolf Hitler.
After reading the story in class, Hollis suggested that this story could be expanded into a novel, and that started the process that eventually led to Hitler’s Silver Box-A Novel.
Which parts of the novel are actual historical events?
Weather Hitler’s Silver Box-A Novel is a work of fiction, loosely based on the fact that during World War II, Nazi scientists worked until the end of the war on a multitude of secret weapons on which Hitler pinned his hopes of one last victory.
These weapons systems ranged from very long-range rockets that could be fired from underground bases to alternative physics, robotic warriors, new energy sources, radical biological warfare, and of course nuclear weapons.
In the novel, the facts were altered to suggest that many objects later called UFOs were also developed by Nazi scientists in hidden locations, and various secret laboratories were established around the world, including in both Arctic and Earth waste areas. Antarctica where explorers had never walked.
What was your writing process like while working on this novel? Did you have a disciplined schedule?
Due to various acute and chronic illnesses, he was unable to maintain a writing schedule. I followed the mantra of “write, rewrite, do it right”. Unlike many expert suggestions, I was constantly re-editing my previous work and then editing it again and again.
From conception to writing ‘The End’, how long did it take you?
About ten years.
The story takes the reader from Chicago to Paris to the Czech Republic. Did you travel to Europe as part of the investigation?
I have visited many countries in Europe and Paris is my favorite city in the world. I had many plans to visit the Czech Republic, but like Max in the book, health problems kept canceling plans.
What was the hardest part of writing? Hitler Silver Box?
The dialogue and careful descriptions were difficult trades to understand and learn, but the hardest part was describing the conditions Max went through in the concentration camp using the “particular” silver, the provenance of which almost drove him and me crazy. . The dramatic emergency room scenes were easier because they were based on my personal experiences. Since, like Bruce in the novel, I also have claustrophobia in tunnels, writing that scene caused me some discomfort.
What’s on the horizon for Allen Malnak?
If my health holds up, I might write a sequel to Hitler Silver Box. If the Spielberg types come sniffing; to turn the novel into a movie, well, I might be forced to interview Charlize Theron to see if she’s “hot” enough to play Sari.
Any last words for my readers?
The incidents that prompted me to finish Hitler’s Silver Box were linked to the website of one of our local newspapers. Two anonymous neo-Nazis constantly hurled their racist and anti-Semitic slurs, boasting of their continued worship of Adolf Hitler and the murderous Waffen SS, while denying all aspects of the Holocaust.
I’ll end with a quote from a novelist, Jerry Ahern, who reviewed my book for “Gun World Magazine.”
“Future generations have serious responsibilities, the main one being not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Sadly, these days, there are still those who, out of ignorance or bad intentions, somehow revere the scourge that was National Socialism. So it’s good for the rest of us to be reminded from time to time, at least, how truly despicable the Nazis were.”
Book information:
Hitler Silver Box
by Allen Malnak
330 pages
Release date: 2011-11-10
Publisher: Two Harbors Press
Available in online stores