The Book of Lost Names

by Kristin Harmel

  “You got the library wrong, Eva,” the man says in French, his voice cracking with emotion.

  There are tears in my eyes now, for it’s a voice I was sure I would never hear again. “Rémy? How can it be?”

  He smiles, and then he’s walking toward me, too, and there are tears streaming down his face. “We were supposed to meet on the steps of the Mazarine, Eva,” he says, taking my hands in his. They’re rough with age now, but somehow they fit around mine in just the same way they did a lifetime ago.

  “I waited for you there,” I murmur. “I waited a long time.”

  “I thought you were dead,” he says. “I went back to Aurignon at the end of 1947. Père Clément had passed away, but a few people in the Resistance who knew who you were told me you’d been killed during the war.”

  I close my eyes. In the aftermath of the war, chaos, confusion, and misunderstanding had reigned. “I was told you were dead, too.”

  “I confronted a traitor—a gendarme named Besnard, if you remember him—and I was gravely wounded in ’forty-four. I was evacuated to England. I was in the hospital for a very long time, and then, because of a diplomatic snafu, it was 1947 before I was cleared to return to the Continent. I went to the Mazarine, Eva, for months, just in case you were alive. But you never came.”

  “I waited there for two years,” I whisper. “I convinced myself that you were trying to leave me a message in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It’s what kept me holding on.”

  His eyebrows go up. “You found the book? It was a message, Eva—I intended to fake my death if things went wrong with Besnard. I just didn’t count on being laid up in the hospital, and then tangled in visa paperwork, for so long.”

  I wipe my cheeks, but my tears are still falling. “I thought I was crazy. I finally convinced myself I was wrong, that I was holding on to a ghost. I left for America at the end of 1946.”

  “America? Where?”

  “Florida.”

  “Well, imagine that. I’ve lived in New Mexico since 1951.” He smiles. “It turned out that Los Alamos had a place for a chemist like me after I completed my degree in England.”

  I shake my head in disbelief. “But what are you doing here, Rémy?”

  “I saw the book in the New York Times article. I came right away.” He takes a deep breath, never breaking eye contact. “I came back for the book sixty years ago, Eva, before I confronted Besnard, the day I left you the Twain book. You were gone already—I assumed you were on your way safely to Switzerland—and I was praying that you’d left me one last message. But the Nazis had already looted the library. I realized I would never know.”

  I stare at him. This feels like a dream, but it’s not. Otto Kühn is on the steps behind me, silently watching this fairy tale unfold, and Mila has retreated to the shadows. We’re in Berlin, the very heartland of our old enemy, and we’ve found each other again, despite the impossible odds. “I did, Rémy. I left you a message.”

  “You did?” He holds my gaze, his eyes warm, familiar. “What was it, my Eva?”

  My Eva. After all these years, I am still his, and he is still mine. “Épouse-moi. Je t’aime. That’s what I wrote. I—I love you, Rémy. I always have.”

  “I love you, too, Eva. And if the offer is still open, my answer is yes.” And then he closes the final inches between us, and his lips are on mine, and I’m twenty-five again, my whole life ahead of me rather than behind, all the chapters still unwritten.

  Author’s Note

  While researching my previous novel, The Winemaker’s Wife, which is set in the Champagne region of France during World War II, I came across a few mentions of the important role that forgers played in the Resistance. It was something I hadn’t considered before, but as I read about champagne caves and the smuggling of arms, in the back of my mind lingered images of the brave people who used their artistic ability and scientific ingenuity to produce convincing documents that allowed innocent people to survive.

  By the time I finished writing The Winemaker’s Wife, my curiosity was fully piqued, but I still wondered whether writing about forgers could be the basis for a book. Then I read Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life by Sarah Kaminsky and A Good Place to Hide: How One French Community Saved Thousands of Lives During World War II by Peter Grose—two excellent nonfiction books that explore forgery during the war—and I knew I was onto something. There was so much more to the life of a World War II forger than I had imagined.

  But it still felt like something was missing—that is, until my agent, Holly Root, emailed me a New York Times article about the Nazi looting of books—and the fact that most major German libraries are still full of books stolen in the waning days of World War II. As I read the article, penned by art writer Milton Esterow, the final piece of the puzzle clicked into place: I could write a novel about forgery, framed by a story about a looted book that meant everything to someone. It would allow me to dive deep into the research about both forgery techniques and the fascinating history of Nazi looting and share that with you, all wrapped up in a story about love, loss, courage, and the highest stakes.

  This is my fifth book about World War II, and one of my favorite things about writing about the war is that I’m able to dig deep into subjects many of us may not be familiar with. In my 2012 novel, The Sweetness of Forgetting, for example, part of the story revolves around Muslims helping to save Jews in Paris after the German invasion, something that many readers had never heard about. When We Meet Again, my novel published in 2015, talks about the more than four hundred thousand German POWs in the United States in the 1940s, a piece of our history that has slipped away with the passage of time. And in 2019, in The Winemaker’s Wife, I wrote about the resistance that occurred beneath the earth and among the twisted vines of the picturesque Champagne region. I’m always thrilled when people tell me they’ve read one of my books and learned about something they’d had no idea about before. Being able to share fascinating historical facts while (hopefully) entertaining you at the same time is so very rewarding.

  And that brings me to The Book of Lost Names. Otto Kühn, the German librarian in the story, is fictional, but the work he’s doing is based in reality. In Berlin’s Central and Regional Library, for example, researchers estimate that nearly a third of the 3.5 million books were stolen by the Nazis, according to the New York Times. Researchers such as Sebastian Finsterwalder—a real-life Otto Kühn—and Patricia Kennedy Grimsted of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University are working tirelessly to reunite looted books with their owners, but it’s an uphill battle, especially now that the war is more than seventy-five years behind us. Sadly, very few of the people who owned and cherished those books are still alive today.

  Incidentally, if you’re interested in finding out more about looted books and the search for their rightful owners, pick up The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance by Anders Rydell, which was also very helpful in my research.

  In my novel, librarian Eva travels to Berlin to reunite with the eighteenth-century tome that was stolen from her decades earlier. This story is the framework for a tale in the past that is based, in part, on the real-life stories of forgers such as Adolfo Kaminsky and Oscar Rosowsky, both of whom were young Jewish men who stumbled into forgery out of necessity—much like a young Eva does in The Book of Lost Names—and consequently saved thousands of innocent lives in the process. Kaminsky narrowly escaped deportation and became one of the primary document forgers for the Resistance in Paris, ultimately helping to save an estimated fourteen thousand people, though he was just a teenager at the time. Oscar Rosowsky, whose story Peter Grose tells in A Good Place to Hide, was just eighteen years old in 1942 when he was forced to flee his home, and by a stroke of good fortune, wound up in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a tiny village in the mountains of France that hid thousands of people wanted by the Nazis, including many children whose parents had been deported. Much like Eva, Rosowsky began by
forging identity documents for himself and his mother—but when he found himself among like-minded people, he began to develop new forging methods that were quicker and more efficient. By war’s end, he had helped rescue more than thirty-five hundred Jews.

  Lest you think that all forgers were male, there were plenty of women working in forgery bureaus, too, including Mireille Philip, Jacqueline Decourdemanche, and Gabrielle Barraud in the area of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, and Suzie and Herta Schidlof, sisters who worked in Kaminsky’s Paris lab.

  Many of the details that appear in The Book of Lost Names are based on real methods of forgery during World War II. Rosowsky, for example, often used the Journal Officiel to search for suitable false identities. Kaminsky, who had a chemistry background, like Rémy does in this book, stumbled upon the secret for erasing Waterman’s blue ink with lactic acid. It was Gabrielle Barraud who came up with the idea for using a hand printing press to mass-produce official stamps. Rosowsky even makes a covert appearance in The Book of Lost Names; when Geneviève arrives in Aurignon, she mentions having worked for a man named Plunne in an area called the Plateau. Jean-Claude Plunne was, in fact, Rosowsky’s alias; Geneviève is talking about working for him.

  During the writing of this novel, my desk was piled high with real-life examples of the kinds of documents Eva, Rémy, and Geneviève would have relied upon and forged. I have dozens of tattered copies of the Journal Officiel from 1944; like the forgers in the book, I even plucked a few character names from the pages of the newspaper. I have an old French baptismal certificate from June 1940, complete with official stamps, and a German-issued Ausweis laissez-passer travel permit stamped in Paris in December 1940. Perhaps most important, I have the real-life, leather-bound Epitres et Evangiles, printed in 1732, upon which the titular Book of Lost Names is actually based. As Eva and Rémy encoded names and messages within its pages, I was using the real pages of the real book as a guide.

  As an amusing side note, I was a big math buff as a child; in fact, I used to lie in bed at night and try to puzzle out unsolvable math problems. I dreamed of being famous for being the first kid to solve equations that the world’s most prominent mathematicians couldn’t figure out. (Admittedly, I had strange aspirations! Don’t worry; a few years later, I had much more normal fantasies about marrying Donnie Wahlberg and one day being a pop star.) It was during that phase of math obsession that I learned about the Fibonacci sequence, and I fell asleep each night trying to add the numbers in my head. When I had the idea of using the sequence as part of the code in The Book of Lost Names, I was tickled; all those nights of lying in bed and running numbers in my head hadn’t been a waste after all!

  These are just a few of the real-world elements that came together to inspire The Book of Lost Names. If you’re interested in learning more about France in the first half of the 1940s, I’d heartily recommend the aforementioned Kaminsky and Grose books. Caroline Moorehead has also written a fascinating book about Le Chambon-sur-Lignon called Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France. I relied on some of my old favorites—including Jews in France During World War II (Renée Poznanski), Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France (Agnès Humbert), and The Journal of Hélène Berr to round out some of my research, too. And, of course, I lived for a time in Paris and have traveled back to France countless times for research. The town of Aurignon is fictional, but it’s based on several similar towns in the area south of Vichy.

  I hope you’ve discovered something new in The Book of Lost Names—and that you’re reminded that you don’t need money or weapons or a big platform to change the world. Sometimes, something as simple as a pen and a bit of imagination can alter the course of history.

  Thanks for coming along with me on this journey—and for being a person who finds something special in books. As Eva says in The Book of Lost Names, those “who realize that books are magic… will have the brightest lives.” I wish you the very brightest days ahead.

  Acknowledgments

  Oh my goodness, what a whirlwind of a year! All I do is write the words—my incredible agent, Holly Root; my magnificent editor, Abby Zidle; my amazing publicists Michelle Podberezniak (Gallery) and Kristin Dwyer (Leo PR); and my literary miracle worker Kathie Bennett (and her husband, Roy Bennett) are the ones who do the real magic. I’m forever indebted to all of you for your friendship and your hard work on my behalf. It’s a joy to be surrounded by people whom I genuinely adore so enormously. Though I don’t say it often enough, please know how much I appreciate all of you. I’m truly very lucky.

  To my foreign rights agent, Heather Baror-Shapiro: You are such an absolute treat to work with, and I’m so grateful to you for all you have done. Thanks, especially, for your continued guidance this year—and the great new home at Welbeck. Dana Spector, you continue to be an astonishing rock star of film rights. I’m also very glad to work with marketing specialist Danielle Noe, who is as lovely as she is talented. And to Scott Moore and Andy Cohen: We are going to make a movie together one of these days—I know it! Thanks, too, to Susan McBeth and Robin Hoklotubbe, two women who run amazing events that bring authors and readers together.

  To Jen Bergstrom: I couldn’t be prouder to be a Gallery Books author. It has been such an honor to be part of the Gallery family since 2012, and I am forever grateful for the way you’ve helped me grow as an author during that time. You run a wonderful ship, and I’m just happy to be aboard. Thank you so much for all your support and kindness. Thank you, also, to the rest of my Gallery team, including Jen Long, Sara Quaranta, Molly Gregory, Sally Marvin, Anabel Jimenez, Eliza Hanson, Lisa Litwack, Chelsea McGuckin, Nancy Tonik, Sara Waber, Ali Lacavaro, Wendy Sheanin and the rest of the incredible Simon & Schuster sales team, and, of course, Carolyn Reidy. And thanks as well to my awesome team at S&S Canada, including Catherine Whiteside, Greg Tilney, Felicia Quon, Shara Alexa, Kevin Hanson, and Nita Pronovost.

  A special thank-you to a handful of people who helped out with the research for this book, including researcher and author Renée Poznanski, French translator Vincent, Polish translator Agrazneld, Russian translator Michael, German translator Jens, and of course my dear old friend Marcin Pachcinski, who swept in with Polish terms of endearment exactly when I needed them.

  I mention in the dedication that this book is partially in honor of booksellers and librarians everywhere. I can’t say enough about how much I’ve been impacted by the magic of bookstores and libraries. Books can change lives, but it is the people who love them, who dedicate their lives to them, who make the real difference. If books can’t find their way to the readers who need them, who will be touched by them, who will be transformed by them, they lose their power. So thank you from the bottom of my heart to anyone who works in a bookstore or a library—and especially to those of you who have been courageous and adventurous enough to become bookstore owners, which must be as perilous at times as it is rewarding. Books are more than just words on a page; they are bridges to building communities and to developing more compassionate, more aware citizens. Those of you who love books enough to want to share them are truly changing the world.

  I’d also like to acknowledge five very special writers: Linda Gerber, Alyson Noël, Allison van Diepen, Emily Wing Smith, and, especially, Wendy Toliver, the writer who brought all six of us together several years ago for the first of what would become an annual writing retreat. We write together only once a year, but that week always means a great deal to me, as does the friendship we’ve built over the years. I consider the five of you some of my closest friends. Being around you makes me a better writer and a better person. And to Jay Asher: Though you haven’t been to the retreat in a few years, you’re one of us, too! I can’t wait to read the next books from all my Swan Valley friends!

  The best writers also tend to be supportive of other writers, and I’m glad to be part of a community of women and men who work to build each other up. A special thank-you to “Mary Alice and the Kristies”—fellow authors Mary Alice Monroe, Kristina
McMorris, and Kristy Woodson Harvey—just for being awesome human beings and the best fake bandmates and steam room sisters I could ask for.

  A special thank-you to all the book bloggers and reviewers, who do such a wonderful job of building an online community—especially to Melissa Amster and the queen bee, Kristy Barrett, both of whom went out of their way this year to help a fellow author when I asked! All of you are incredible, and I’m so grateful to you for sharing my books with readers—and for promoting reading in general.

  Thanks to my whole family, especially my mom (and favorite Disney World/DVC companion), Carol; my dad, Rick; and my siblings, Karen and David, along with their families. Wanda and Mark, you are amazing in-laws: I’m so lucky. A special shout-out to Aunt Donna, Courtney, Janine, and all the Sullivans and Troubas/Lietzes, too!

  To Jason (the best husband in the world) and Noah (my fun, amazing, kind son): I love the two of you more than words can say. I’m sorry that I’ve had to spend time away from you this year while promoting my books. I miss you every moment that I’m gone! And to Lauren Boulanger as well as Bridget, Kristy, Dayana, Rachel, Dinorah, Debbie, and Cindy: Thanks for being so wonderful with Noah. I couldn’t do what I do without you. Thanks, too, to Shari Resnick for your help and generosity this year.

  Finally, thanks to you, the reader, for coming on this journey with me (and yikes, for reading to the end of these long-winded acknowledgments!). I know you have a lot of books to pick from, and I am so grateful when you choose to spend some of your time with one of mine. I hope to meet more of you on the road this year.

  The Book of Lost Names

  Kristin Harmel

  This reading group guide for The Book of Lost Names includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.