What does Empyrean mean?
Dante’s highest heaven, the word’s Greek origins, and its use as the title of Chapman’s Holocaust novel.
Read about the title →The story
“Beauty is the wildest weed, it grows in cracks mortars forgot.”
Recovering from a German bullet in the Ardennes, an American captain receives word of a newly discovered concentration camp: starving prisoners, stacked bodies, rooms filled with shoes and hair.
With Soviet forces closing in on Berlin, Allied commanders intend to press ahead, leaving few soldiers to care for the prisoners. The Captain warns that survivors will die without treatment. Guards may escape, and the soldiers may lose the evidence needed to identify them.
He joins Operation Mercy Torch with Sabina, a French nurse who treats patients according to their injuries, and Chaplain Pierson, who ministers to the wounded while struggling to answer their questions about God.
Inside the camp, Jewish poet Ionel Abramovich and his wife, Esther, search for their daughter, Miriam. An SS physician forces Ionel to assist in experiments on fellow prisoners. Ionel tries to protect his family through his work for the doctor, knowing that other prisoners may judge him for accepting the role.
