When the sirens begin, the professor is sitting at the Astoria Café. The Astoria Café really did exist, but the professor is only a figment of a boy's imagination.

In this work of historical metafiction, our present-day narrator recounts the story of Viktor Bauman, a disillusioned academic forced into the notorious Lódź Ghetto, Elsa Dietrich, a captive Gestapo secretary, and Elsa's estranged fiancé, Lieutenant Carl Becker, a troubled policeman whose fixation with the past is pushing him towards unspeakable cruelty.

Set during the Nazi occupation of Poland, The Requisitions is about history, memory, and a novelist writing himself back into the lives of those who once lived.