Warsaw, 2026. While Russian drones probe the Baltic sky, conservator Natalia Wróblewska takes apart an ordinary Vienna regulator from the Polish town of Wegrów and finds a wheel no factory ever made: seventy-nine teeth, cut by hand. Seventy-nine is the atomic number of gold. The clock came with a fragment of a 1944 report by an SS chemist, describing a formula meant to create soldiers who cannot be killed.

Wegrów, 1938. Anshel Tsukerman, a clockmaker who once studied chemistry in Vienna, keeps eleven clocks in his shop and a hidden laboratory behind the chimney. As occupation, the ghetto and the transports close in, Anshel, his great-nephew Dovid and the people they love must decide what such a discovery is worth, and who must never be allowed to have it.

Moving from the Warsaw Ghetto to the forests around Treblinka and a present-day Europe on the edge of war, The Clockmaker is a novel about memory, resistance and the duty to bear witness. It honours the real people of Wegrów and Treblinka, and asks what we owe to those the world was meant to forget.

The Clockmaker

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