The Book of Lost Names

by Kristin Harmel

The book I last laid eyes on more than six decades ago.

The book I believed had vanished forever. The book that meant everything to me.

Epitres et Evangiles. It belongs to me—and to Rémy, a man who died long ago, a man I vowed after the war to think of no more.

She doesn’t understand what it means to love books so passionately that you would die without them, that you would simply stop breathing, stop existing.

Today, though, I have no time for her. All I can think about is the book. The book that held so many secrets. The book that was taken from me before I could learn whether it contained the one answer I so desperately needed.

The sky above the Sorbonne Library in Paris’s fifth arrondissement was gray and pregnant with rain, the air heavy and thick.

An Anglophile is a person who admires or loves England, its people, its culture, its language, and/or its various accents.

“Things will change, Mamusia. I know they will.” “Your generation and its optimism.” Eva’s mother sighed.

Could jealousy and greed have turned a neighbor into a traitor?

twin towers of Notre-Dame,

One day, he said, you will appreciate God’s gifts.

our library is one of our most treasured spaces.

This is my favorite place in the world, in fact, a place I come to when I need to find solace. I thought you might enjoy it, too.”

My room is lined with books, most of them stacked in precarious piles on the bowing bookshelves Louis assembled years ago. They are filled with other people’s stories, and I’ve spent my life disappearing into them. Sometimes, when the nights are dark and silent and I’m alone, I wonder if I would have survived without the escape their pages offered me from reality. Then again, perhaps they just gave me an excuse to duck out of my own life.

France may have turned her back. But did that mean that Eva could do the same when lives hung in the balance?

rue Visconti in the sixth arrondissement. Oh, and there’s a bus to Clermont-Ferrand that leaves the town square just past ten in the morning.

the longest she’d ever gone without reading, a thought that made her terribly sad. It was just another thing the Germans had succeeded in taking from her.

could you find out their names for me anyhow?”

“Please. It—it’s very important to me that they are not forgotten.”

“Have you ever heard of the Fibonacci sequence?” Rémy asked.

“I’ve always loved math. You see, the Fibonacci sequence starts with the number one, then the number one again. Add those numbers together to get two. Then add one and two together to get three. Two and three make five. Three and five make eight. And the series continues like that, adding the two previous numbers to get the following number. Do you understand?”

We can’t erase the children who might not be able to speak for themselves. We’ll keep a list of all of them.”

“But God is busy with many matters right now. Is there any harm in giving him a bit of help?”

“Remember that God’s plan for you might be different than the plan you have for yourself.”

Then again, hadn’t God’s hand been present in steering Eva here, to Aurignon, to a church where she’d somehow found a home and a way to be useful? She wanted to ask Père Clément if he feared, as she did, that God had turned his back on them, but she wasn’t sure she could bear the answer.

I reminded him that perhaps the best way to take on the enemy is not literally to his face, but beneath his nose.

“And I think, Eva, that you are one of the good ones, too. There’s danger in being principled in the midst of a war, but I believe that it’s more dangerous not to be.”

“I mean that I would rather die knowing I tried to do the right thing than live knowing I had turned my back. Do you understand?”

There’s something almost miraculous about seeing a child’s eyes light up when you hand him a book that intrigues him.

I’ve always thought that it’s those children—the ones who realize that books are magic—who will have the brightest lives.

well, it’s always nice when children love books. Books change the world, I think.”

“I mean about the Book of Lost Names.

“It’s important you understand that we are not taking away the children’s identities. The Nazis are doing that. We are giving them a chance to live. Never forget that.”

“We don’t change who they are.”

“You and I have changed our names, too, but it doesn’t change who we are in here.”

“It doesn’t change how we feel.”

“You’re still you. You’ve just found the strength inside yourself that was there from the start.”

“I think you’re extraordinary.”

I don’t even know who you’re becoming, Eva. Certainly you’re not who I raised you to be.”

Was it a betrayal for a Jew to find God in a Catholic church?

“We’re all pretending to be something we’re not, aren’t we?”

“Make all the jokes you want, but you can’t run from God’s will.

But tradition means something. Sticking together in hard times means something. Our faith means something,

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned since the start of the war, it’s that as long as we believe, we take our faith with us, whatever we do, wherever we go, if our motives are pure.”

Only you know what your relationship is with God, and you should never let anyone take that from you.”

“Le Magicien d’Oz.

“It is rather fun to read about such fantastical creatures.”

“I suppose, but that’s not what I meant. I meant that in a way, I’m like Dorothée, aren’t I? I’m on a great adventure, and one day, I’ll find my way home.”

“Well, Anne, would you believe that Mademoiselle Moreau once worked in a very large library full of books? I believe she loves reading just as much as you do.”

“Libraries are very magical places.”