Writing a historical novel implies describing a part of the world that no longer exists, a part that has disappeared little by little and given way to something else. Someday the impetuous winds of time will buffet us until we, too, are history. The images engraved on our pupils, the sum of emotions and experiences that we all represent, will disappear forever. That futility of life makes us simultaneously giants and pygmies, believing the only way to prolong our existence is to perch atop the shoulders of the next generation and whisper a few phrases into their ears. At its core, that is what literature is: a whisper from people who are no longer. But why is it so crucial that books keep murmuring to us?
In his masterful Le Livre des Justes, French Jewish Resistance worker and author Lucien Lazare narrates how the rescue of a baby on the shores of a river changed the course of history. Pharaoh had ordered the extermination of all male Hebrew infants. One poor mother who could not bear to see her son die decided to stick her baby in a basket and float him down the dangerous waters of the Nile. The outcome seemed inevitable, but that very day, the daughter of Pharaoh—the author of one of the most large-scale genocides against children in recorded history—went down to the river to bathe. She saved the baby boy in the basket. That anonymous feat allowed the future legislator and liberator Moses to stay alive.
What is known about the majority of those called “Righteous Among the Nations”—non-Jewish men and women who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save their Jewish neighbors, friends, colleagues, and even strangers—has dissipated with the inevitable passing of time. These were largely anonymous heroes whose only goal was to do good and to act according to their consciences. Today, some four thousand French men and women are recognized by the international community as Righteous Among the Nations. Thanks to these Righteous, three-fourths of the Jews in occupied France did not die. The majority of these were children.
The Forgotten Names is the story of a heroic act without precedent in Nazi-occupied Europe. A network of institutions and people of different ideologies and beliefs came together to carry out one of the largest rescue operations organized during World War II. Cardinal Gerlier, Charles Lederman, Monsignor Saliège, Dr. Joseph Weill, the Protestant pastor Marc Boegner, Father Pierre Chaillet, and the social workers Élisabeth Hirsch, Hélène Lévy, and Maribel Semprún, among others, saved 108 children from the Vénissieux internment camp on the outskirts of Lyon. This novel recounts their experience as well as that of the French historian Valérie Portheret. At the age of twenty-three, Valérie began her riveting research into the rescue of the children of Vénissieux. After discovering a box with the children’s files, her research became a twenty-five-year journey to find those lost children and give them back their true identities.
I learned about Valérie Portheret’s story in an article in Le Monde while researching for my novel La casa de los niños. Valérie had been so gripped by the rescue operation that she spent over two decades of her life traveling Europe, Israel, and the Americas to find the children. The story gripped me as well. I was immediately compelled to keep alive the chain of memory. When that chain breaks, we are all left nameless.
In the summer of 2022 I walked the streets of Lyon and visited the Centre d’Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation, the Resistance and Deportation History Center. The center is housed in the former military medical school of Lyon-Bron, which was also the former headquarters of the Gestapo and where the infamous SS official Klaus Barbie tortured hundreds of people. The fear and desperation of all those fighting for freedom in those dark hours was palpable.
The Montée des Carmélites is a hill where the former Carmelite convent still stands. In that imposing building the children rescued from Vénissieux were hidden. I paused right where the French gendarmes crouched in waiting to charge the building and seize 108 innocents. That was a time when horror was lord and master of this worn-down city. Then I passed by the plaque that commemorates Vénissieux. The plaque, placed in 2012, is the only remaining vestige of the French internment camp. Time seems to have had its corrosive way with the footprints of all that pain. Yet with rapt concentration, something can still be heard: the stifled cries of the mothers being separated from their children forever, the screams of the children reaching out into the darkest night of the soul for their families. May this book serve as a tribute to them all.
Madrid, September 15, 2022