Photo Credit Sasha Makoviy.
One of the most interesting and well crafted novels I’ve read in awhile is Kristin Harmel’s The Book of Lost Names. The story of a young forger in WWII who provided papers to children being evacuated from Nazi occupied countries. Concerned about the children reuniting with their parents, she devises an ingenious code to record the true names of the children in an innocuous book. WWII ended in 1945.
The short length of a lifetime later, Sasha Makoviy codes her mother hope into her child’s back with marker to identify her child if she and Vira were separated, or Vira’s parents were killed while fleeing a despot invading Ukraine.
When will we learn?