The Lost Children of Paris: The Inspiration Behind The Secret Twins of Paris
When I started writing The Secret Twins of Paris, I did not begin with a plot twist or a clever structure. I began with an image I could not shake: two little girls standing on a crowded station platform in wartime Paris, in matching coats, clutching each other’s hands while the adults around them tried to navigate a war so unkind it asked them to put their children on a train and hope it would keep them alive.
Like many of my books, this one grew out of fragments of real history. During the Second World War, thousands of children were sent away by train, sometimes with name tags pinned to their coats, sometimes with almost nothing at all, in the desperate hope that they might be safer elsewhere. Some travelled with organised groups. Some were smuggled out quietly. Some were never seen again by the families who loved them.
The Children who Survive
I kept returning to the question: what happens to the children who survive, but do not know where they belong?
From that question, the twins in The Secret Twins of Paris were born. In the wartime timeline, we meet them as small girls placed on a train out of occupied Paris. The adults around them are making impossible decisions in the hope of saving their lives. In the modern timeline, decades later, we meet a daughter who begins to suspect that her family history is not what she has always been told. A safety deposit box, a pair of worn ballet shoes, and a photograph of her mother’s twin she knew nothing about sent her back into the past to search for the truth.
I am always drawn to stories of quiet courage. I am less interested in glamorous heroes and more interested in the people who never imagined they were brave, but who discover who they are when history backs them into a corner. In this book, that courage shows up in many forms: a ballerina who agrees to help the Resistance, a guardian who takes children onto a train not knowing what will happen at the other end, a modern daughter who risks family conflict to uncover long-buried secrets.
The twins were inspired, in part, by my fascination with found family. Throughout my Paris Sisters series, I explore the idea that family is not only about blood, but also about the people who step up to become a family. War separated people. Some were reunited. Others were not. I wanted to write about the adults who had to make those hard decisions, and the way their choices echoed down the generations.
The Paris Sisters Series
The Secret Twins of Paris is part of my Paris Sisters series, in which each book follows a different woman whose life is touched by the war. The sisters’ stories unfold in different corners of France, but they are all connected by one family and the threads of love and loyalty that run between them.
In the first book, we meet Isabelle, who works to save the art in the Louvre and finds herself pulled into dangerous work protecting what cannot easily be replaced. In the second, we follow Madeleine, who smuggles endangered books from other countries back into France. Another story belongs to Antoinette, a passionate violinist who made the greatest sacrifice for her Jewish husband and son. And in another, we step back in time to explore Gigi, a ballerina whose choices during the occupation shape the fate of the twins she must put on the train heading south. Each woman sees the war from her own angle, and together they form a kind of tapestry of resistance, survival, and hope.
The Secret Twins of Paris
Writing across the series has allowed me to return to the same events from different viewpoints. A moment that appears briefly in one book may turn out to be life-changing when seen through another woman’s eyes. The Secret Twins of Paris grows out of that structure. It picks up the threads of the children’s story hinted at in earlier books and asks what happened next, not only for the twins themselves but for everyone whose lives were altered by the choices made on that station platform.
While The Secret Twins of Paris explores painful subjects such as separation, identity, and the legacy of war, I also wanted it to offer hope. The modern storyline gives the characters a chance to begin healing some of the fractures left by a brutal war.
Ultimately, this book is my love letter to the lost children of history and to the families, both given and chosen, who tried to protect them.
If you pick up The Secret Twins of Paris, my hope is that you will not only be caught up in the mystery of what happened to the twins but also come away with a renewed sense of how powerful quiet acts of courage can be, even in the darkest of times.
(c) Suzanne Kelman
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About The Secret Twins of Paris:
Paris, 2011: Lily Tremaine’s hands shake as she opens the envelope addressed in her mother’s hand. The faded letter inside reveals the long-buried family secret that her mother had a twin she was separated from during the Second World War. A tear slides down Lily’s cheek, knowing the loss of a sister caused her mother so much heartbreak. And now, after all these years, her mother needs Lily to find her…
As Lily begins to piece together the fragments of her mother’s story, she meets Julien, a photographer whose research contains the clues she needs to unlock the past. As they pore over faded black and white photographs together, a warm feeling begins to stir in Lily’s chest. But she knows she can’t bury her own recent heartbreak just yet, not until she has fulfilled her mother’s wish.
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