Bruno Slept Here is a hybrid memoir/novel in which the author seeks to enter the silences of her father’s past using research-driven journeys and fictional techniques. In 1942, her father was involved with a clandestine yoga club in Nazi-occupied Riga before, at the age of 17, being conscripted into the Latvian regiment of the Waffen SS in 1944. He survived the vagaries of war thanks to a Vedic mantra, he claimed. The text combines research into collective post-war amnesia; examination of belief in the transcendental as mediated by a transcultural correspondence between Riga-based yogis and swamis in India and Los Angeles; fictionalized episodes in Bruno’s life; and the author’s personal confrontations with crisis. Beginning with road trips as a child in 1970s Germany, she returns to Europe as an adult to map her father’s escapes and imprisonments from Poland to Belgium and muses on themes of trauma and resilience