In many ways, the fruits of Dr. Mayer’s professional life among social justice movements and organizations and the German-Jewish experience explored through his family history and the historical events of WWII all come together in his latest work, My Father Against the Nazis.

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 parent’s 1939 escape from Nazi Germany. The next morning over breakfast, he asked his parents, Paul and Margaret, about what really happened: his father’s silent scream revealed depths of trauma that would take decades for the son 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. That included the discovery of his father’s legal career to avenge the Nazi persecution and especially the death of Paul’s parents in a concentration camp by becoming a WWII U.S. Army Intelligence “Ritchie Boy” and a postwar reparations lawyer.

Today, after writing from Mayer’s second home in Amsterdam — his and his parent’s city of refuge — 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.