Apparent from the very first few pages, THE BOOK OF LOST NAMES promised to be one of the best stories of the year. So many tales of a monstrously evil time in our lives with the Holocaust or Shoah. You might wonder why there are two names associated with the extermination of six million Jewish souls. Holocaust includes the word of sacrifice in its definition. Jews were not a sacrifice. They were a targeted group of people as citizens of Poland, Hungary, France, and Germany. Within a very short amount of time, they were stripped of their citizenry, property, human rights and ultimately their lives. There are so many stories of the atrocities cast upon men, women, and children who by nature of their religious beliefs became enemies of the state. It was scary the way survivors managed to live and move to North America, South America or Israel, while trying to alert people by inserting a simple phrase into society – Never Again. Never Forget. Unfortunately, we must face the fact that there are still those who would not hesitate to label a group of people – citizens – as others once again. It is happening in 2021. I can only hope that, by reading books like THE BOOK OF LOST NAMES by Kristin Harmel, folks remember that monstrous time in the 1940s in Europe and stand against it recurring here in America and elsewhere.
You know it is going to be a powerful read when a story grabs at your gut almost immediately. Pulled from actual events Kristin Harmel constructs a vivid tale about what lengths brave folk go to save other people. Assisting those required to wear the yellow star came with danger. But those that stepped up to the challenge and faced the consequences of their actions were heroes to the souls that they saved.
The odds against them they had the intellect to design ways to stymie the evil forces as best they could since they were so outnumbered. But try they did. In THE BOOK OF LOST NAMES, we are told of one such valiant effort to save many Jews. This is Eva Traube Abrams, story to tell. Eva is now a semi-retired librarian who, after six decades, finds herself facing the events of her past exploits in Nazi Germany.
It was an ingenious plot to foil Hitler’s goal to obliterate Jewish life. Falsified documents gave the hunted a means to leave – and hopefully end up in a more humane place. Eva was a young woman when she and Remy created these documents. But Eva was concerned with the future of those they helped vanish. How would they find their families? How would their families find them? Thus, THE BOOK OF LOST NAMES was conceived. Again, ingeniously in a religious text embedded with codes to the people they helped.
Eva begins as a relatively naïve young woman who clings onto vague optimism facing the initial challenge to find her father. What Eva finds would destroy most people but there is an inner strength in Eva that she never acknowledges. It is that strength, the aid of a few good men, talent as an artist, and guts, that provide the stimulus to work toward a lofty goal.
Many years after the war, a man looked to return lost volumes to their rightful owners. It’s a huge task considering that many owners perished at the hands of the murderers of the Third Reich. Eva noticed in the news article a picture of her book. After all these years Eva, now in her eighties, has to decide how she can retrieve it, and just what lives could be impacted by the names listed.
Have I captured your attention yet? Well, I was hooked by the beginning of chapter one. Kristin Harmel moved me to tears as I traveled page by page through this wonderful expose on the heroic steps taken to save human beings virtually being hunted down. THE BOOK OF LOST NAMES is a captivating read. Kristin Harmel once again captures the very essence of a time that we would all like to forget ever happened. But we must not ever forget. Lives hang in the balance.
Inspired by an astonishing true story from World War II, a young woman with a talent for forgery helps hundreds of Jewish children flee the Nazis in this unforgettable historical novel from the international bestselling author of the “epic and heart-wrenching World War II tale” (Alyson Noel, #1 New York Times bestselling author) The Winemaker’s Wife.
Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books one morning when her eyes lock on a photograph in a magazine lying open nearby. She freezes; it’s 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 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 will she have the strength to revisit old memories and help reunite those lost during the war?
As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris after the arrest of her father, a Polish Jew. Finding refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, she begins 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.
An engaging and evocative novel reminiscent of The Lost Girls of Paris and The Alice Network, The Book of Lost Names is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of bravery and love in the face of evil.
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