NEW TO PUBLICATION

Tai Chi at Auschwitz

“But ready or not, the birds came for my father: cardinals, sparrows, robins, bluejays, crows, hawks, and even the yellow finches. All the Birds of the Midwest descended upon him, doggedly trying to deliver a message.

Is it possible to reconcile with the dead?”

In this powerful memoir, Peter flies head first into reckoning and reconciling with his personal and collective trauma.

To hear him tell it, Peter’s life was normal up until about a decade ago, when he found himself perched at the edge of a metaphoric catapult, taut and ready for release.

One moment, he was sitting at a conference on PTSD by psychologist and poet Edward Tick, Ph.D. And the next, he was internally airborne, flying through the memories of his life and arriving at these two thoughts simultaneously: I have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and I have to go to Germany.

Peter, with his daughter and co-author Maura, explores the powerful evolution that is accessible to us when we turn towards, instead of away from, our pain. We travel with Peter as he meditates in sites of atrocity, spanning from Auschwitz and Buchenwald to the Lynching Memorial in Alabama.

Tai Chi at Auschwitz is study in erasing the lines between victim and perpetrator, and in finding the Self in the Other, as a practice of becoming a more whole and loving human being. This unexpected reconciliation journey invites the reader alongside and into Peter’s history and experiences of transformation, as well as Peter and Maura’s dual process writing a book together.

A story for our times, readers will laugh, gasp, and grieve, as they watch Peter and Maura come home to themselves.

A remarkable story of transformation, generational trauma, and the unseen hands that guide our healing

Excerpts

“What a gift Auschwitz and Buchenwald are because he can go to the most abjectly Unfriendly places on Earth, where the ground is stained with depravity, and then find love, and forgiveness, and friendships, and a wedding.

‘You want to face the Unfriendly Universe, Peter? We’ll show you Unfriendly,’ I can imagine these sites of atrocity saying to him. And let the miracles begin.”

Maura, Tai Chi at Auschwitz

“Yes, that’s right; it was hard to leave Auschwitz. The barriers I spent my life behind had come down. I watched a lifetime of hate and paranoia within me crumbling in the moment. I saw myself in De-Nur and every victim, in Eichmann and every perpetrator. The split state sustained by hate and paranoia was healed by the horrible awareness of my identification with everyone.

Auschwitz, for me, had become a place of love.”

Peter, Tai Chi at Auschwitz

  • "I would recommend this books to people looking to overcome their own shame and trauma, those interested in the Holocaust, and those interested in reconciliation and healing. It is a powerful deep dive."

    Savannah

  • Maybe you want to launch a business

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  • "...a breathtaking journey into understanding that despite humanity's obsession with categorizing the world in duality, it is never that simple. Not even good and evil can escape the reality of nuance and context. I can honestly say I am transformed by reading this book."

    Stav

  • "... saturated with the essence of life and healing, that is how I feel right now after finishing Tai Chi at Auschwitz. Marveling at the jewels in your trauma treasure chest tasting, once again, the very marrow of reconciliation."

    Kathleen B.

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