Hot books are, in Frankfurt parlance, the most traded books, fought over by major publishers. Although many negotiations have been carried out since the weeks prior to the fair, and others are completed later, personal contact is irreplaceable in a sector that lives on stories... and how they are told.
One of this year's surprise books – which has already begun to be sold abroad, due to the enthusiasm of Polish publishers – is The Names of Ludka, by the Catalan Gisela Pou (Castellar del Vallès, 1959), inspired by the true story of some Polish orphans –or, simply, without known parents– who, in 1946, were welcomed in Barcelona.
The novel –which Planeta will publish in January and Columna in March, in Catalan– covers the case of a group of Jewish children who were taken from their parents –some of them murdered in the Holocaust– by Nazi families, with the aim of turning them into perfect Aryan kids, from their physical features. Others were to be used in eugenic experiments. At the end of the war, they were sent to hospices, including one in Barcelona, waiting for a family member to claim them. Thus, they were children with first Jewish parents and then Nazis. After ten years, they were returned to Poland or ended up in other countries, such as Italy, Austria or the United States. Some also stayed in Catalonia.
Initially they stayed in a children's residence at number 49 Anglí Street and later in the Vallcarca residence, in the same Bonanova neighbourhood.
The protagonist of Pou's fiction is Ludka, a 9-year-old girl formerly called Hedda by her adoptive parents, an S.S. and her wife, although she is unable to remember her real name, the one she was given at birth. He befriends Emma, the daughter of Isabel Andreu, one of the employees of the residence, a member of the resistance to Franco, and who hides the secret that her husband has not been killed by the nationals, but remains alive, and hidden. , in France.
Ludka is cared for in Barcelona, like the rest of the group, by Wanda Morbitzer, a real character who was a counselor at the Polish consulate, and who turned out to be the closest thing to a mother (she even sang songs for them) that those boys had. Ludka will be part of the choir of the Polish school of Barcelona. When she turns 19, she travels to Poland in search of her family, and comes into contact with her father's sister, the only survivor of the massacres.
This is how he discovers his real name: Ewa Jedinak. Later, she goes to live in the USA. She spends time and, more than fifty years later, in 2008, the Barcelona City Council and the Polish consulate invite all the foster children, now elderly, for a tribute to Wanda Morbitzer-Tozer. The reunion of the two friends will unleash intense memories and feelings.
