When I Come Back We Will Talk

A son’s powerful and deeply moving examination of how six weeks of imprisonment in a concentration camp rippled through his father’s life – and through his own life forever as well.

When I Come Back We Will Talk is a book about the afterwards. Leonard Diepeveen explores his relationship with his father, beginning with his father’s imprisonment as a boy during the winter of 1945 at Kamp Amersfoort, a Nazi concentration camp in the still-occupied Netherlands. In the eighty years that followed, the War would not let Len’s father go, holding him and their family unrelentingly in its grip.

Written with intense precision, in deeply moving vignettes, When I Come Back We Will Talk is at once acutely personal and highly observant. As one generation disappears, and their experiences and subsequent aftereffects become the fabric of future generations, Diepeveen’s writing is as much a tender search to understand his father’s life as a survivor and an immigrant as it is an mesmerizing examination of memory and self – and how to find meaning in the unspoken-but-ever-present realities that shape family histories.