The Lost Wife

At a rehearsal dinner in New York City in the year 2000, an elderly man, the groom's grandfather, is seated beside the bride's grandmother. He feels an immediate recognition when he sees her ice-blue eyes and long neck. When he notices something dark beneath her sleeve and asks to see her arm, she reveals six tattooed concentration camp numbers beside a small brown birthmark. Trembling, he identifies himself: Josef, her husband from over 60 years ago. The novel then circles back across the 20th century to tell the story of how they were separated and what each endured.

Lenka Josefina Maizel grows up in 1920s Prague, the eldest daughter of a glass dealer. Her family lives in a lavish apartment overlooking the Vltava River, surrounded by colored crystal, gilded mirrors, and warmth. Her father adores craftsmanship; her mother, Eliška, is a former art student. A young nanny named Lucie joins the household when Lenka is about five and nurtures Lenka's talent for drawing. After years of difficulty conceiving, Lenka's mother gives birth to a red-haired daughter, Marta, whom Lenka gradually embraces, using her as a subject for increasingly ambitious portraits.

At 17, Lenka enters Prague's Academy of Art. She befriends a Jewish classmate, Věruška Kohn, and at a Shabbat dinner, the traditional Jewish Sabbath meal, at the Kohns' apartment, Lenka meets Věruška's older brother Josef, a medical student. The attraction is immediate and mutual, though Lenka keeps her feelings secret from Věruška. Over the following year, they begin meeting privately at a café, and during two weeks at the Kohn family's country house in Karlovy Vary, they share their first kiss and a deepening intimacy.

Meanwhile, anti-Semitism accelerates across Czechoslovakia. Lenka's father's warehouse is destroyed by arson, the word Žid (Jew) scrawled on the remaining wall. The family lets go of their maid and seamstress as the business deteriorates. President Beneš resigns in October 1938, and anti-Jewish hostility becomes commonplace.

In early 1939, with the German invasion imminent, Josef proposes. His family has secured exit visas through a cousin in America, but the U.S. State Department limits sponsorship: The Kohn family and Lenka can leave, but not Lenka's parents and Marta. Lenka insists she will not go without her entire family. They marry in a rushed ceremony at the Old Town Synagogue, Lenka wearing her mother's altered wedding dress. The next morning, Josef reveals the full truth: There will be no passage for her family, and her father already knew. Lenka is devastated and refuses to leave.

Lenka convinces Josef to go ahead as a "scout" to settle in America and arrange passage later. His family rearranges their travel to spend the summer working at a clinic in Suffolk, England, before departing from Liverpool. At the train station, Josef places their wedding photograph in his breast pocket and gives Lenka a cameo that belonged to his mother. She watches the train pull away.

Two weeks later, the German army occupies Prague. Josef writes from England while Lenka discovers she is pregnant. On September 1, 1939, the Kohn family departs Liverpool on the SS Athenia, which is torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland. Josef's father pushes Josef and a fellow passenger named Isaac Kirsch, a teenage violinist, into a lifeboat, refusing to board himself. A rescue ship's propeller tears into the lifeboat carrying Josef's mother and Věruška. Josef survives, but his parents and sister are among the dead. Czech newspapers incorrectly list Josef among the casualties. Lenka reads the news and believes her husband is dead. Consumed by grief, she miscarries and retreats into severe depression until Lucie brings her pastels and a sketchpad, reminding her she still has her sight and her hands.

In December 1942, the Maizel family is transported to Terezín, an 18th-century fortress repurposed as a Jewish ghetto. Before departing, Lenka entrusts Lucie with her mother's jewelry, her wedding ring, and Josef's cameo. The family is separated into overcrowded, freezing barracks.

Lenka is assigned to a painting workshop and later transferred to the Zeichenstube, the ghetto's technical department, under Bedřich Fritta, a renowned satirist. She smuggles art supplies to her mother, who teaches art to the ghetto's children alongside Friedl Brandeis, an Austrian artist. Her friend Rita becomes pregnant and gives birth to a premature baby named Adi, who dies within hours. Lenka draws mother and child in charcoal, squeezing blood from her own torn cuticles to color the image. When Rita is transported east, she returns the drawing to Lenka. Lenka entrusts it to an engineer who buries it in a metal canister beneath the Hamburg barracks.

Fritta, his colleague Leo Haas, and other artists secretly document the ghetto's true conditions, smuggling drawings to contacts outside the camp; some reach a Swiss newspaper. In June 1944, the Nazis stage an elaborate deception for a visiting Red Cross delegation, transforming the ghetto into a model community with fresh paint, a café, and cultural performances. Within days of the delegation's departure, every improvement is stripped away. The artists are arrested and beaten during interrogation; Otto Ungar, a painter in the technical department, has his painting hand smashed with a rifle butt. Their families are taken to the Kleine Festung, the Small Fortress on the outskirts of the ghetto from which no one returns. Lenka, interrogated by the Gestapo, refuses to identify any of the artists' work.

In November 1944, Lenka secretly adds her family's names to a transport list, refusing to let them be separated. At Auschwitz, the family is split at the selection. Her father disappears into the chaos. Her mother is sent with the elderly and children. Lenka and Marta are assigned to sort the belongings of those sent to the gas chambers, searching seams for hidden valuables. In an act of defiance, Marta begins throwing discovered jewelry into the latrine. When an SS officer catches her and she refuses his order to retrieve a brooch, he shoots her.

In January 1945, the SS forces prisoners on a death march through the snow. Lenka survives because a nameless woman behind her, who believes Lenka resembles her dead daughter, repeatedly picks her up when she falls. After passing through Ravensbrück and a smaller camp, Lenka wakes one morning to find the SS gone. American soldiers arrive.

In a displaced persons camp outside Berlin, Lenka meets Carl Gottlieb, an American Jewish soldier. Before leaving for America, she returns to Prague and visits Lucie, who returns the jewelry she kept safe throughout the war. Lenka then travels alone to the empty ghetto of Terezín and unearths the drawing of Rita and Adi from the basement of the Hamburg barracks.

Lenka marries Carl and builds a quiet life in America, never speaking of her wartime past. The painting stays hidden in her closet for decades. Carl dies after a long illness; on his final night, they sway together to Glenn Miller while Lenka tells him she loves him. Their daughter Elisa has a daughter, Eleanor, who inherits the red hair and swanlike neck of Lenka's mother. Eleanor grows up to become engaged to Jason Baum.

Josef's narration, interspersed throughout the novel, reveals his parallel life. He marries Amalia, a war orphan from Vienna, in 1947, and becomes an obstetrician, keeping a red leather ledger of every child he delivers in tribute to the 1.5 million children who perished in the Holocaust. For six years he searches for Lenka through the Red Cross but is told she was gassed at Auschwitz. His daughter Rebekkah later discovers that Josef was incorrectly listed among the Athenia's dead, meaning Lenka would have believed him gone and his letters never reached her.

In the weeks before the wedding, Lenka decides the painting should no longer be hidden and writes Eleanor a letter explaining its history, rolling it as a wedding gift meant to symbolize defiance and love. At the rehearsal dinner, Josef recognizes the birthmark on Lenka's arm and speaks her name. She studies his face, mentally coloring his white hair black. She whispers his name in return, and he covers her hand with his.