The Book of Lost Names
Book Description:
Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books when her eyes lock on a photograph in the New York Times. She freezes; it’s an image of a book she hasn’t seen in more than sixty years—a book she recognizes as The Book of Lost Names.
The accompanying article discusses the looting of libraries by the Nazis across Europe during World War II—an experience Eva remembers well—and the search to reunite people with the texts taken from them so long ago. The book in the photograph, an eighteenth-century religious text thought to have been taken from France in the waning days of the war, is one of the most fascinating cases. Now housed in Berlin’s Zentral- und Landesbibliothek library, it 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 does she have the strength to revisit old memories?
As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris and find refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, where she began forging identity documents for Jewish children fleeing to neutral Switzerland. But erasing people comes with a price, and along with a mysterious, handsome forger named Rémy, Eva decides she must find 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.
Review:
I read this one for Book Club, and it was a hit with everyone. If you like historical fiction about World War II, this one is for you.
Some of the most interesting things I found in this story were the different ways people fought back against the Nazis. There was every kind of person in this book: from people who ignored evil and got what they could out of it, people who didn’t fight back, people who were just holding on to the past and hoping it would come back, to the fighters: people who took in strangers, who were kind, who worked hard to help people they never met. The main character becomes a forger, first for her own family, but then for the underground that were smuggling people, especially children, out of occupied France and into Switzerland.
I loved so many characters in this book, especially:
Elizabeth, who is torn between her own family and the children in need.
Rémy, the forger who Elizabeth falls in love with, but who feels like he can do more and becomes a rebel fighter and smuggler.
Père Clément, a Catholic priest who invites Elizabeth into the resistance, and gives the forgers a safe place to work.
It’s a whirlwind of a book, and gives a new perspective about WWII I haven’t read about before. If you like Historical Fiction from a women’s POV, this is a great read.
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