The forgotten names: a novel
(Book)

Nashville, Tennessee : Harper Muse, 2024.

Book

1 volume ; 23 cm

English

9781400248513, 1400248515, 9781400248414, 9781400248513

Translation of: Las vidas perdidas.

Includes bibliographical references.

In August 1942, French parents were faced with a horrible choice: watch their children die, or abandon them forever. Fifty years later, it becomes one woman's mission to match the abandoned names with the people they belong to. Five years after the highly publicized trial of Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyon," law student Valérie Portheret began her doctoral research into the 108 children who disappeared from Vénissieux fifty years earlier, children who somehow managed to escape deportation and certain death in the German concentration camps. She soon discovers that their rescue was no unexplainable miracle. It was the result of a coordinated effort by clergy, civilians, the French Resistance, and members of other humanitarian organizations who risked their lives as part of a committee dedicated to saving those most vulnerable innocents. Theirs was a heroic act without precedent in Nazi-occupied Europe, made possible due to a loophole in the Nazi agenda to deport all Jewish immigrants from the country: a legally recognized exemption for unaccompanied minors. Therefore, to save their children, the Jewish mothers of Vénissieux were asked to make the ultimate sacrifice of abandoning them forever.

904b308e-99dc-d04a-42ef-bb66a76f1739