Cover image of "The Threads Remain," a dual-timeline story

The tagline on the cover is tantalizing. “A young man uncovers a hidden past,” it reads, “while another becomes its echo.” The resulting dual-timeline story, grounded in 1957 and 1941-45, traces the experiences of two German teenagers and their families. One seeks 12 years after World War II to find his birth parents. The other, born a dozen years earlier in Germany, struggles with the demands of a regime gone mad. We know that eventually their lives will intersect. But that event is a long time coming as we gradually get to know these two sensitive young men and the families that brought them into the world. In his searing rendition of their lives, The Threads Remain, novelist Glenn Shapiro artfully delivers up a fresh and original take on the Holocaust at a time when we thought we knew everything there was to know about it.

A complex dual-timeline story

Shapiro tells a complex tale that lurches back and forth through time.

  • He opens the story in 1944 as a three-year-old boy named Friedrich hides behind a wall panel while an SS Sonderkommando team rages through the building.
  • Then comes a flashback to 1928 as young Max and Dora Biermann help out in his parent’s variety store. Max has a plan to convert the shop into a toy store, building on the potential of their best-selling items. They have a child, a son also named Max.
  • Now we flash forward to 1957. Sixteen-year-old Friedrich Becker visits his dying mother in the hospital after Gymnasium every day. He knows he’s adopted and is determined to find his birth parents.
  • Finally, a flashback to 1941. Fifteen-year-old Josef is the only child of Karl and Ingrid Zohren. He’s a giant, towering above his schoolmates, and boasting powerful shoulders and arms. Conscripted into the army, he is transferred to the SS after training.

Shapiro gradually weaves all these four threads together, following each of his principal characters—Friedrich, the younger Max, and Josef—as the war unfolds and Friedrich later pursues his search through the records for the couple who had given birth to him.

The Threads Remain by Glenn Shapiro (2025) 279 pages ★★★★☆

Photo of a Nazi death squad shooting Jews in a ditch in WWII, a scene that does not appear in this dual-timeline story
If you’re familiar with the history of the Holocaust, you may think of the Nazi death squads called Einsatzgruppen in scenes like this. They’re shooting Jews herded into a ditch, where they can be buried (sometimes still alive, if barely). Glenn Shapiro shows us a different take of the Einsatzgruppen. Image: Yad Vashem

Finely drawn characters in a twisty WWII tale

The tragic dimensions of this story are slow to emerge. Shapiro introduces us to Friedrich, Max, and Josef in depth. Eventually, though, one of them emerges as a member of a Sonderkommando team of killers. Others are Jews struggling for survival in the maelstrom of Nazi Germany. In the process, we learn about one of the less familiar aspects of the SS death squads that stormed through Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He shows their operation within Germany’s borders as well.

But there are four principal characters, not just three. The fourth is a toy bear named Bärli, which plays a central role in our understanding of the events in the novel. As Shapiro reveals in an author’s note at the conclusion of the novel, “Bärli is the only character in the book who is not fictional. In fact, we still have the little bear, which sits in a glass case in my granddaughter’s bedroom. My mother, who is eighty-four at the time this book is being published, is thrilled to see her childhood toy bear, made by her grandmother, still having a place in our family. In that way, those real threads remain.”

About the author

Photo of Glenn Shapiro, author of this dual-timeline story
Glenn Shapiro. Image: LinkedIn

Goodreads’s biographical blurb for author Glenn Shapiro reads in full as follows” “Glenn Shapiro was born and raised in New England. He is a lifelong writer of poetry and short stories, but made the leap to novels as part of his ‘second act’ after retirement.

“His first novel, the gold rush era historical fiction Cold Spring, met with acclaim from both critics and readers. He is the son of a Jewish father and German-catholic mother who was born in Germany during the war and raised there, post-war, through her adolescence.

“For his second novel, The Threads Remain, he tackled that tragic time in history through characters inside Germany before, during and after the war.”

This is one of the Good books about the Holocaust.

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