The Book of Lost Names(108)

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!