The Shepherd’s Blade | A Novel by David Kleidermacher

About the Book

Inspired by the wartime survival and partisan resistance of Herschel and Ida in occupied Poland.

In Warsaw in August 1939, twenty-two-year-old Herschel Skolnik is a watchmaker’s apprentice, a rare Jewish captain in the Polish army, and a man with an unusual skill: pressing two blades of grass between his thumbs and blowing through them to mimic the call of a mistle thrush. When the German invasion shatters Poland’s defenses, Herschel strips his captain’s insignia to march into captivity as a sergeant, a gamble that buys his release from a German prisoner-of-war camp.

Returning to occupied Warsaw, he leads a unit of forest partisans who use his grass-blade birdsongs as battlefield signals to ambush German patrols. In the woods outside the city, he meets Ida, a resistance nurse who fights beside him as the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto close around their people and his family hides on a country farm.

As the Nazi grip tightens, their fight for survival spans a midnight partisan raid on a Treblinka-bound death train, the interrogation cells of a Gestapo prison, and the barracks of Auschwitz, where a hollow marsh reed in a camp cesspit becomes Herschel’s only chance at escape. Separated by war and captivity, Herschel and Ida risk everything to find each other again, settle a blood debt with the SS officer who murdered his family, and cross the winter Alps toward freedom.

Generative Biographical Illustrations

To accompany the text of the novel, The Shepherd’s Blade includes historical illustrations generated from surviving 1940s family photographs through the author’s Generative Biographical Illustration (GBI) method, preserving the real physical likenesses of Herschel and Ida across key moments of their wartime journey.

Ida shaving Herschel inside a forest partisan tent in the Kampinos woods

Featured Illustration

A Quiet Moment in the Kampinos Forest

Inside a snowbound partisan tent outside Warsaw, resistance nurse Ida shaves Herschel before a winter mission. Anchored to surviving wartime portraits of the author’s grandparents, the scene captures the quiet intimacy and devotion that sustained them through four years of war.

Captain Herschel blowing between two blades of grass in the Polish army barracks

The Shepherd’s Signal (1939)

Before the German invasion, Polish Army Captain Herschel demonstrates how two blades of grass pressed between his thumbs can mimic the call of a mistle thrush.

Jewish and Polish partisans gathered in the winter woods of the Kampinos Forest

Partisans of the Forest

Operating from hidden dugouts in the Kampinos wilderness, Herschel’s partisan unit uses birdsong signals to coordinate ambushes on German supply convoys.

Herschel and Ida beneath a wedding chuppah in liberated Naples, Italy, 1944

Beneath the Chuppah in Naples (1944)

After surviving captivity and crossing the Alps into liberated Italy, Herschel and Ida marry beneath a chuppah in Allied-occupied Naples.

In Memory of Herschel

Herschel survived three Nazi camps, fought as a forest partisan, and rebuilt a life from the ashes of occupied Poland, only to face the quiet theft of memory in his final years before passing away from Alzheimer’s disease in 1996.

To honor his life and help protect the memories of future generations, 100% of the author’s profits from The Shepherd’s Blade are donated to the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, where 100% of general donations go directly to laboratory research.

Visit Herschel’s Tribute Page at Cure Alzheimer’s Fund

About the Author

David Kleidermacher is a software engineer and writer whose career includes serving as Vice President at Google, leading security and privacy for connected devices and services such as Android, Pixel, Google Health/Fitbit, and Google Home/Nest. He is also the author of the textbook Embedded Systems Security (2012).

The Shepherd’s Blade is his debut novel. He lives with his wife, Tamara, in Santa Barbara, California, and writes at davek.substack.com.