The Bureau of Unknown Fates

About this book

In the tradition of The Lost and The Postcard, a powerful novel of loss and restitution in and after wartime, like a detective novel in reverse. When young French woman marries and moves to her German husband's small hometown, Bad Arolsen, she finds a world where no one discusses what the locals did during the war. She has no idea that her life will be changed forever when she accepts a job at the secretive International Tracing Service--founded by the Allies at the end of WWII to help trace the fates of millions of wartime dead and displaced. Meticulous and conscientious, Irene quickly becomes obsessed with her work--at the cost of her personal life. Years later, she is entrusted with returning thousands of confiscated objects, recovered from the liberated camps. Irène pieces together the identity of each object's rightful owner, in order to give the descendants of the victims something to remember their lost relatives by. A faded cloth doll, a medallion, an embroidered handkerchief . . . every object contains its secrets. During her research, Irène meets people who will inspire and guide her from Lublin to Warsaw, from Berlin to Paris, to discover a past that concerns her personally. In so doing, she glimpses humanity--at its worst, but also, its best--and looking for the dead, she finds the living. Weaving together the trajectories of these individual lives with the collective memory of Europe, this devastatingly beautiful novel is suffused with wisdom and compassion.