In 1941, SS Major Hans Lichtblau is put in charge of a research program that uses concentration camp prisoners as guinea pigs, but also as lab assistants, organized into a unit known as the Kommando Gardenia. The experiments are conducted as part of the infamous 'final solution to the Jewish problem' and with the Nazi advance in Russia and the colonization of the Eastern territories as the backdrop. The Kommando includes Shlomo Libowitz, born in a Polish shtetl and converted to Zionism in the Lager, and Anton Epstein, an assimilated Jew from the Prague bourgeoisie, convinced that the only possible answer to barbarism is socialism. Shlomo and Anton survive the war and Lichtblau's treatment of them to become inconvenient witnesses of a world that has ended and yet still determines the present. Forty years later, on behalf of different and apparently irreconcilable clients, the two veterans set out on the trail of Lichtblau, who is fighting the Sandinistas on behalf of the CIA, raiding villages and trafficking in drugs. Anton and Shlomo's manhunt is a race against time, because one life may be too short to settle all accounts. At once a thrilling spy story that spans two continents and two eras and a novel of ideas about a civilization in crisis, 'The feeling of iron' is Alonge's English-language debut.--Inside cover flap.
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