Call Them By Their Names
Set in France during World War II, CALL THEM BY THEIR NAMES is the story of desperate children rescued by an extraordinary and unlikely couple. Sabine and Miron Zlatin, Jewish refugees on the run from the Nazis themselves, reluctantly postpone their own escape to Switzerland in order to save fifteen trapped children. They don’t mean to be heroes and they certainly don’t mean to be parents, but in establishing a home for these irresistible youngsters the Zlatins become devoted not only to the children’s survival, but to their fullest human development.
In a remote mountain hamlet in eastern France, Sabine and Miron restore their charges to health and joy. More children arrive, and then more still. For over a year, struggling every moment to hide them and feed them and pass them to safer havens, the Zlatins and their courageous supporters manage to create real life, real childhood for these orphans of disaster. Their dedication saves more than a hundred children from certain death.
By the spring of 1944 an Allied invasion of France is clearly imminent, and the Nazis respond with ever more virulent repression. Sabine and Miron exhaust themselves trying to move their household beyond the fascists’ reach. On the morning of April 6, while Sabine is away arranging the safe transit of the last of the children, German troops raid the Home. Forty-four children and six adults, including Miron himself, are hauled away to annihilation.
CALL THEM BY THEIR NAMES is in a real sense a love story – the love of two solitary people for the children of strangers, and the love those wounded children learn once more to feel and live. It’s also a story of heroism, defiance, and transcendence in the face of unspeakable brutality.
This is a work of fiction, but it is based scrupulously on historical documents, and on interviews I conducted both with Madame Zlatin before her death in 1996 and with people who knew her during the war. The portraits of the children are drawn from what biographical material and photos remain of them, and are as true to the individual children’s souls as I could make them.
It was Sabine Zlatin’s ardent wish that the children somehow be made to live again in imagination, so that people of today can understand the full meaning of their loss. That is the mission of CALL THEM BY THEIR NAMES.
CALL THEM BY THEIR NAMES won the 2023 Hackney Literary Award for the Novel.