The Book of Lost Names

by Kristin Harmel

There were soiled children, screaming babies, haggard elderly women, sobbing old men. Guard towers loomed over the crowd, and French policemen patrolled the perimeter, their expressions blank.

I’ve been to the Holocaust museum in DC and the silence you experience walking in says everything you need to know about how utterly devastating and sinister a time like this was and the affect it still has as we continue to hear the survivors stories. It’s hard to even fathom to have everything ripped from away you. To wake up one morning and no longer know home, all you’re belongings and treasures gone, your family die in front of you. Even more to lose your sense of self and identity, and even your pride.

Eva couldn’t imagine how she could pretend to the French police that all of this was fine. But then again, how were the guards here pretending it to themselves? There were dozens of officers walking around, more moving in the towers overhead, and none of them looked repulsed or even bothered by the atrocity. Could they all be that evil?

This is absolutely heart-wrenching. The one of the most horrifying things to even try to imagine is a time when people turned a blind eye to the slaughter of innocent children, and watching families torn apart. How anyone can even be human to stand by and watch thousands of people suffer is something I’ll never understand. This is why I find this story so powerful because it truly shows the incredible altruism and heroism of the hundreds of people that risked their own lives to save others.

“Remember that God’s plan for you might be

different than the plan you have for yourself.”

parents make all sorts of errors, because our ability to raise our children is always colored by the lives we’ve lived before they came along.

Then you must know that even when things seem darkest, there is hope.”

I love this!

Eva added him to the book anyhow, as she did with all the children. If he was captured or killed in the process of fleeing, at least there would be a record of his name. If a family member came looking for him one day, she’d be able to tell them at least part of what had happened, that for a time he had been embraced by a small town in the mountains.

when Rémy leaned in to kiss her, it felt like coming home.