The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel (2020)

 

Inspired by an amazing true story, a young woman with a talent for forgery helps hundreds of Jewish children flee the Nazis during World War II. Eva Traube Abrams is that woman.  When we meet Eve, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, she happens across an image of a book she hasn’t seen in sixty-five years—a book she recognizes as The Book of Lost Names.

The accompanying article discusses the Nazis’ looting of libraries across Europe during World War II and the search to reunite the true owner with these stolen texts. The book in question is an eighteenth-century religious text thought to have been taken from France near the end of the war.

The book is now housed in Berlin’s Berlin Central and Regional Library and appears to contain some sort of code, but researchers don’t know where it came from—or what the code means. Only Eva holds the answer, but it will mean confronting her buried past, a past not even her son knows about.

As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris after the arrest of her father, a Polish Jew. She finds refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone and begins forging identity documents for Jewish children fleeing to neutral Switzerland. But changing a person’s identity comes with a price, and along with a mysterious, handsome forger named Rémy, Eva finds a way to preserve the real names of the children who are too young to remember who they really are. The records they keep in The Book of Lost Names will become even more vital when the resistance cell they work for is betrayed and Rémy disappears.

The Book of Lost Names is an utterly captivating read.

4.36 stars on Goodreads, 4.7 stars on Amazon.