The Outfielder: How the Dreadful Secrets and Lies of an Auschwitz Death Camp Survivor Almost Destroyed His American-Born Son, the Outf — Carl L. Steinhouse

Dr. Bernie Feld, a well-known and successful psychiatrist in New York City, embarked on a journey to uncover the horrible secrets of his father's past as an inmate in Auschwitz and learn the tragic fate of his mother who seemingly abandoned him at age twelve. The quest almost destroyed his medical career and the relationship with the woman he loved. From childhood, Feld knew his father was a survivor of the infamous Auschwitz, but not much more, certainly not the horrible secrets his father harbored. As a young boy and a teenager, Bernie's real dream was to become a major league baseball player. It was not the usual child's daydream because Bernie had the talent, drive, desire, and the passion to become a professional. However, Bernie's father, now a tailor in New York, forbade Bernie from pursuing baseball and an athletic scholarship. A Holocaust survivor, his father had been a former inmate doctor at the Auschwitz. Now, he pushed Bernie into becoming a doctor, impressing on Bernie how he sacrificed his own chance to for a medical career in America to send his son to the finest medical school to become a successful doctor just as he, his father, had been in Germany before the Holocaust. A fateful meeting with an Israeli Mossad agent, however, caused Bernie Feld to abandon his lucrative New York psychiatry practice and his patients, and destroy the relationship with the woman he loved, by embarking on a quest to Israel to uncover the truth. He found an ostracized Auschwitz survivor, exiled to a remote and lonely Judean Desert, who reluctantly revealed the horror of the Gestapo roundup of his father's family and the incomprehensible and devastating facts about what his father did in Auschwitz as an inmate doctor. Further, he also learned for the first time what had actually happened to his mother, who had supposedly abandoned him. Feld now faced the daunting task of trying to put back together his shattered life.