“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.