How strange, I think, to be speaking French in Germany, a country that not so long ago tried to wipe my people from the map. I tell her in French that I’m here to see Otto Kühn, and I’m surprised to hear the tremor in my own voice.

“Certainement.” She reaches for her phone and asks me if she can tell him who is here to see him.

I take a deep breath. It feels suddenly as if everything has been leading to this moment. “Je suis…” I hesitate, because it doesn’t matter who I am. It matters what I am here to do. So instead I tell her simply that I’m here for the book.

She tilts her head to the side. “Le livre, madame?”

“Oui.” The world seems to stop spinning. “I’m here,” I tell her in French, “for the Book of Lost Names.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

January 1944

By January 1944, darkness had fallen on Aurignon, and Rémy still hadn’t returned. The winter was cold, one of the coldest Eva could remember, and rations were in short supply. Germany was suffering losses now, with the Allies heavily bombing Berlin and the Red Army entering Poland, pushing the Germans back from the east. The worse the situation became for them, the more they seemed to take their anger out on the French. Here, in the mountains of southeast central France, there was never enough fuel, never enough heat, never enough food. Even the farmer who had supplied Madame Barbier had vanished, meaning that the days of occasional roast chicken feasts at the boardinghouse were long gone, too. Most of the people Eva knew in the underground gave up a portion of their rations each month to keep the residents of the children’s homes nourished for the eventual journey they would take across the mountains, and that meant that they all seemed to be withering to skin and bones. Eva looked in the mirror sometimes and hardly recognized the sharp lines of her own narrowing face.

In early December, just before Hanukkah had begun, the French police had arrested Joseph with a pocketful of forged ration cards and turned him over to the Germans, but somehow—perhaps because Père Clément had gone to Vichy to plead with the German high command—he had been released. The Germans, Joseph said when he returned to Aurignon sporting a broken arm set in plaster, hadn’t realized he was involved with the Resistance; he’d been arrested because they thought he was selling false ration cards on the black market. He had managed to play into their mistake, which had earned him a two-week jail sentence and an admonition that should he be caught again, the punishment would be much more severe. “Imagine what would have happened if they’d realized I was a Jew,” he said one night over dinner with Eva and Mamusia, his smile not reaching his eyes.

But there was joy in the darkness, too. Geneviève and Joseph had gotten more serious after his close call with the Germans—though as far as Eva knew, he hadn’t yet told her his real name. Still, a name was just words, something Eva had learned all too well. They seemed genuinely to love each other, and on the nights Joseph was in Aurignon, Geneviève always left the secret library early with stars in her eyes to spend the night with him in the loft of the old barn, under piles of woolen blankets.

“Do you think he’ll ask me to marry him someday?” she asked Eva shyly one day. “I dream sometimes of walking toward him down a path that’s white with blossoming cherry trees, carrying a bouquet of lilies. The dream always ends before I reach him, but I wake up feeling that it’s possible. Maybe when the war ends, he will propose.”

“Maybe,” Eva agreed with a smile, but she wondered if Geneviève was deceiving herself. It felt as if the war would never be over, but what if the tide was turning? Germany had seemingly lost the Battle of the Atlantic, and was being beaten back from both east and west, according to the forbidden BBC radio broadcasts she, Mamusia, and Madame Barbier sometimes listened to at the boardinghouse. Was it possible that France could be saved after all? That Rémy might come back to her? Eva allowed herself to dream sometimes of a future that had him in it—and of a future in which her father returned from Auschwitz, too. But she knew that she was deluding herself imagining that Tatu? had survived this long—and she wondered if her thoughts of a life with Rémy were equally unrealistic.

On the last Saturday of the month, Eva and Geneviève were working in the afternoon on a batch of papers for the Maquis group in the forests near Aurignon, who were growing in strength and number faster than their little forgery bureau could keep up with. There were more children than ever before, too, nearly forty of them concealed in different homes around town, most hailing from Paris, all of them stuck here until the weather warmed up enough to make an Alps crossing. Eva hadn’t yet started on their papers because there was plenty of time before they’d need to leave.

“Do you ever think of the life you had before the war?” Geneviève asked quietly, breaking the silence between them. She was working on an identity card for a young, dark-haired man, and when she looked up at Eva, she looked haunted.

“Sometimes,” Eva said after a pause. “It’s painful, though, isn’t it? To think of what we once had.”

“And what could have been.” Geneviève touched the man’s picture gently. “This one looks so much like my brother.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“A twin.” Her smile was soft and sad. “Jean-Luc. We drove each other crazy, but he was my best friend, too. He was called up to the army and died in May 1940 at the front. He never had a chance.”

“I’m so sorry, Geneviève.”

“Everything crumbled after that. My mother was inconsolable. My father began to drink. We all drifted further and further apart, though we lived under the same roof. We were barely speaking by the time I came home one day and found my mother dead on the kitchen floor. Stress, the doctor said, or maybe a broken heart. My father was gone a month after that, a stroke.”

Eva put her hand over her mouth. “Geneviève, I didn’t know. I’m terribly sorry.”

She waved away the sympathy. “Sometimes, when I’m tempted to step away from the work we’re doing, to just go somewhere and live an ordinary, simple life, I think of them—Jean-Luc, my mother, my father—and I know I can’t stop. If the Germans hadn’t arrived, Eva, my brother would be home tending our farm alongside our father, and my mother would be in the kitchen baking bread and worrying about when I would give her grandchildren. Maybe I would even have children already, and I’d be putting them to sleep at night singing ‘Au Clair de la Lune,’ just like she sang to me every night when I was a little girl. The Germans have already taken so much from so many people. We have to save those we can—because we couldn’t save the people we loved.”

It was the most Geneviève had ever said about her reasons for being here, and Eva was moved. She had never known that the other woman had suffered losses similar to her own. “I couldn’t save my father, either,” she admitted. “He was taken by the Germans.”

“I know,” Geneviève said. When Eva looked at her, she added, “Gérard mentioned it. But you didn’t fail to save him, Eva. There’s nothing you could have done.”

Eva shrugged, though she was a bit bothered by Joseph sharing her tragedy with Geneviève so easily. “If I had tried harder to persuade him to go underground… If my eyes had been more open…”

“I feel the same about the past. We can’t blame ourselves, though. We can only take the responsibility of preventing the same things from happening to others.”

“Do you think we’re making any difference?” Eva asked after a long pause. “Sometimes, it’s still hard to feel as if we’re part of any meaningful resistance. There are days when I forget there’s a whole world outside these walls.”

A day later, though, everything changed. Eva was cleaning up the tiny library to head home for the evening—hiding the stamps and inks, concealing the blank and forged documents in a hollowed-out dictionary, sliding the Book of Lost Names into its unassuming spot on the shelf—when Père Clément appeared at the door, his face pale.

“Is Geneviève with you?” he asked.

“No, she’s already gone for the night. Is everything all right, Père Clément?”

“I’m afraid not, Eva. Come with me.”

In silence, she followed him through the empty church to his small office behind the altar. As he ushered her inside, she saw Erich waiting for her in a chair with a grave expression.