The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel

When she meets him, she sees that Faucon is just an alias for Joseph Pelletier, one of her close friends from childhood. Gérard Faucon, one of the leaders of the resistance, asks to speak with her. They nickname it the Book of Lost Names, hoping that one day it can be used to find the truth.Īs the Germans become suspicious of potential forgery activities in the area, Eva and the rest of the workers must be protected. She uses an old Catholic theology book, Epitres et Evangiles, and a secret coding system developed by Rémy to keep track of all the true names of the children. At the same time, she does not want the true identities of the Jewish children to be lost along with everything else in their lives. The news sends her mother into a spiraling depression, but Eva is resolved to help as many people escape these atrocities as she can. Rémy escorts Eva back to Paris to seek news of her father, only to find out that he has been taken to Auschwitz-a probable death sentence. Not long after she begins forging documents in the church library, Eva meets Rémy, a fellow forger whose charm and confidence immediately intrigue her.

Her artistic talents help her make a name for herself forging false documents for Jewish children to move them safely across the border to Switzerland. There, she meets Père Clément, a Catholic priest and liaison for the French resistance movement. Using her father’s connections, she brings her family to Aurignon, a small town in Free France. Her mother sinks into depression, yet Eva does not have time to grieve. The sudden arrest of Eva’s father during a mass roundup by the Nazis leaves Eva as the head of the family. The story then flashes back to young Eva, a Jewish student at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1942. She recognizes the book he is holding as one that belonged to her 60 years before and immediately books a flight to Berlin to reclaim it. The novel opens in 2005 with 86-year-old Eva Traube Abrams, a widowed librarian who spots a picture in the newspaper of a German librarian attempting to reunite books stolen by the Nazis with their previous owners.

The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel