The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel

They were facing away from the disappearing sun, and the sky ahead of them had already turned to thick molasses. “Which way is East?” Mamusia asked in a whisper, and Eva followed her gaze outside. Her mother turned away and moved to the window. When she asks her daughter where her husband has been sent to, Eva tells her to the East, “to a work camp called Auschwitz. While Eva learns to accept her father’s loss, Mamusia’s spirit is splintered––an agony Harmel describes with a searing touch. From here, the reader is propelled into the story, which is paced like a spy thriller but characterized by a tenderness such novels often omit.įleeing on false documents convincingly forged by Eva, she and her Mamusia (Polish for “mother”) land in the provincial town of Aurignon, in a part of France considered a Free Zone.

In what forebodes the fierce persecution of Jews in Vichy France, Eva’s dignified father is dragged away as she watches, paralyzed, from a nearby apartment. One night in 1943, there is a knock at the door of the apartment of Eva’s family, Poles who emigrated to Paris years ago. The collector has found a curious code in its pages. The story begins when the 85-year-old Eva reads a New York Times article: an important book from her past has been rediscovered by a collector in Germany. The book jumps between Eva’s years as a forger in 1943––as she fights to remember and record the thousands of identities erased by the Nazis––and a graying Eva in 2005, as she fights to remember her own.

The heartrending story grapples with the contortion of morality, of faith and hope under duress, and the inimitable power of love. Kristin Harmel’s fifth novel, The Book of Lost Names (400 pages Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster), is a tour de force––a stirring testament to stoicism and courage in the face of “nightmares of monsters dressed as men.” Harmel’s story takes readers back to Nazi-occupied France, where the protagonist, a young, willful Jewish woman named Eva Traube, forges documents for the hundreds of Jewish children to be smuggled from France to Switzerland.

The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel