Lifetime Long Island Friends Self-Publish Tale Of Nazi Woman's Legacy

HEWLETT, NY—Ilse Koch was the wife of a Nazi commandant, and overseer at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Details of her alleged crimes are horrifying.

“She’s the woman who supposedly had a penchant for making lampshades out of human skin,” said author Wendie Pecharsky, a Long Island native.

Pecharsky and her lifelong friend Jill Merzon recently self-published a fiction book about Koch and her children, drawing on historical details to craft what they say is a fast-paced and thought-provoking Jewish historical narrative.

Pecharsky and Merzon have known one another since they met in theater at Hewlett High School. Now, Pecharsky lives in northern New Jersey and Merzon lives in Europe.

'Have We Not Learned Anything?'

In “The Bitch of Buchenwald: Her Tainted Legacy,” the authors weave a tale of Ilse Koch’s illegitimate son, who is coerced into starting a new Nazi party in modern-day London.

In this Jewish historical novel, Koch hid the numbers to her Swiss bank accounts — and a fortune in looted Nazi gold — inside two diaries.

The son needs to find his sisters, who were adopted by a Jewish family in Munich. They have the diaries, which can lead him to a fortune — and to lead a new Reich.

“I'm very proud of the book and its warning: those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it,” Pecharsky told Patch.

Both she and Merzon are Jewish.

"When you’re Jewish, you sort of have this heavy burden of history that weighs on you, of so many people who perished before you," Pecharsky said.

Some of the details of Koch's crimes and the atrocities of the Holocaust were difficult to handle, they said. And, it was hard to find a publisher for a work of fiction rooted in such troubling reality. So, they self-published it together.

“We’re both very proud of it (the book)," Pecharsky said. "We’re certainly not honoring (Koch). We’re exploring her. It resonates today, still.”

“The point is, have we not learned anything from that time period until now?” Merzon said. “All the hate in the world, it’s still happening. And you have someone like Ilse Koch...fast-forward to today where we are with Russia and Ukraine and the insanity of that.”

They wrote "Bitch of Buchenwald" before Russian president Vladimir Putin began attacking Ukraine, Merzon said. But there are other parallels: white supremacy groups and Neo-Nazis are active in parts of Europe now, as well as in the United States.

"That still exists and it’s very hard to accept and believe," she said. "But it’s true. And I think that’s also why we decided to show the parallels from back then to where we are now."

Buchenwald's 'Beast'

Ilse Koch was known for her "bestial cruelty and sadistic behavior" while her husband Karl-Otto was known to be greedy, according to the Jewish Virtual Library.

“She and her husband, between the two of them, were beyond the most horrific beasts, and abusive,” Pecharsky said of Koch. “The lampshade thing was never proven, but there’s tons of testimony from former prisoners.”

Koch was sentenced to life in prison in 1951, and hanged herself 16 years later.

Pecharsky is a retired professional writer and editor with three decades’ experience in the New York publishing industry. She said that while working on another project, she became curious about women in the Nazi party.

“The wives and daughters of the ‘big brass’ Nazis were basically left completely in the dark," she explained.

Merzon lived in Germany for a decade. She visited significant sites like Nuremberg, and lived near the town where Adolf Hitler had a vacation home in the Bavarian Alps. Merzon said much of her research was simply being present, noticing how Europeans remember World War II.

"(It) was all about how I lived and what I experienced and what I saw and where my feet were on the ground in these places.”

Merzon worked as a stage and company manager in theater. She also does tarot and energy readings, and said she writes parodies. Now, she resides in the Netherlands, meaning the two friends collaborated across six time zones and an ocean to finish their novel.

"Even today in Holland the interest is riveted on that period still," Pecharsky said.

“Bitch of Buchenwald” is currently featured in Publisher Weekly's indie newsletter, Booklife, and will also be featured in Hadassah Magazine's Jewish Literary Guide in May/June.

The book is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple Books, and Google Play Books.