Mayer begins his storytelling in 1959, when — as a 16-year-old he performed in The Diary of Anne Frank, wearing his father’s long coat made from cellulose from his parents’ 1938 escape from Nazi Germany. After his performance over breakfast, he asked his parents, Paul and Margaret, about what really happened. His father’s silent scream revealed depths of trauma that took both father and son decades to process.

So began young Mayer’s journey to understand his father’s lifelong angst and the wide chasm between them – what he calls “the fearsome wounds of memory.” But he also treads the psychological path to comprehend the often-incomprehensible history of the last century and its two world wars – a personal trek that took him 40-plus years to unravel and understand. He explores his father’s legal career to avenge the Nazi persecution by becoming a WWII U.S. Army Intelligence “Ritchie Boy” and a postwar reparations lawyer desperately seeking justice for the Nazis’ extermination of his parents at Auschwitz.

Today, after writing from Mayer’s second home in Amsterdam, just around the corner from his “sister” Anne’s home in hiding, Mayer has pieced together five generations of his family’s haunting and heroic story through recovered documents, legal papers, and travels into his German heart of darkness.

My Father Against the Nazis is a story of intergenerational trauma and love, and a deep work of remembrance, resistance, and reconciliation—layered with the author’s own reckoning as the son of a man silenced by trauma but stirred by justice.

“My Father Against the Nazis” can be purchased in paperback or e-reader from Amazon, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble and other digital platforms in the United States and other parts of the world. It can also be requested from U.S. public libraries, and it is noted on an increasing variety of registries of historical books and publications.