Attic Whispers from The Blue Mountains; Fact or Fiction #8
[October 2026 Edition]
In the death camp, he found one small act of defiance. Eighty years later, it is about to change everything.
Greetings from my attic in the Blue Mountains, my friends!
Last newsletter I asked you whether the observable universe accounts for only about five percent of what exists — and whether the remaining ninety-five percent, composed of dark matter and dark energy, has never been directly observed.
Here is your answer.
Fact. Entirely.
The figures vary slightly depending on the measurement method, but the consensus among cosmologists is that ordinary matter — the stuff that makes up stars, planets, gas clouds, and everything we have ever detected — accounts for approximately five percent of the total energy content of the universe. Dark matter accounts for roughly twenty-seven percent. Dark energy accounts for the remaining sixty-eight percent. Neither has ever been directly observed. Dark matter is inferred from the gravitational behaviour of galaxies. Dark energy is inferred from the accelerating expansion of the universe. What they actually are remains one of the deepest unsolved problems in physics.
Now. Before I tell you about Novella #3- The Postmaster of Treblinka – here is today’s statement:
The Treblinka extermination camp, located in occupied Poland, was operational between July 1942 and October 1943. In that period, between seven hundred thousand and nine hundred thousand people were murdered there — almost all of them Jewish. On 2 August 1943, prisoners staged an uprising. Several hundred escaped. Most were recaptured and killed. A small number survived. After the uprising, the camp was dismantled by the SS, the ground ploughed over, and a farmhouse built on the site to conceal what had happened there. For years after the war, the full scale of the killing at Treblinka was not widely known.
Fact or fiction?
The answer is coming in the next newsletter.
But first, let me tell you about The Postmaster of Treblinka.
David Herzl is a forger. Not a criminal — or not only a criminal. He is a craftsman of extraordinary ability, a man who can look at a painting and reproduce it so perfectly that experts cannot tell the copy from the original. In the Warsaw Ghetto, that skill made him valuable. In Treblinka, it kept him alive.
The Postmaster of Treblinka is the story of what Herzl did with that skill at the worst moment in human history — and what the consequences of that act turned out to be, eighty years later, when his diary fell into the wrong hands.
I want to tell you something about writing this novella. The history of Treblinka is not easy to research. It is not easy to sit with. The scale of what happened there — the speed of it, the deliberateness of it, the almost complete destruction of the evidence — is the kind of historical fact that resists comprehension. I did not want to write about it sensationally. I did not want to use it as backdrop. I wanted to find, within that history, a single human story — one man, one act, one small piece of defiance in the middle of an industrial process designed to leave nothing behind.
Herzl’s act of defiance is small. It is also, as it turns out, enormous. The consequences of what he did in Treblinka in 1943 reach forward across eight decades and land, with full force, in the present day — in a darknet gambling empire, a chain of murders across Europe, and a missing masterpiece that Jack Rogan has been asked to find.
This novella is the bridge between Book #5 and Book #8. Read it before you read The Stolen Altarpiece. You will understand why.
The answer to today’s statement is coming in the next newsletter.
P.S. The Postmaster of Treblinka introduced David Herzl — a character who never appears in person in the novels but whose shadow falls across everything that follows. Some of the most important people in a story are the ones who are already gone.
If you haven’t read The Postmaster of Treblinka before, you can get it here right now: https://geni.us/
STAY SAFE, STAY CHEERFUL, and please STAY IN TOUCH.
Sincerely,
Gabriel Farago
