Faceless(49)
Author: Kathryn Lasky

Eva Braun was the companion of Adolf Hitler for several years. She met Hitler in Munich when she was seventeen years old. For less than forty hours, she was his wife. They committed suicide together on April 30, 1945.

Joseph Goebbels was minister of propaganda for Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. He and his wife, Magda, committed suicide on May 1, 1945.

Hermann Göring is known for being one of the primary architects of the Third Reich Nazi police state in Germany. He established the Gestapo secret police and concentration camps. In addition, he organized the plundering of art collected by prominent Jewish families—the Rothschilds, the Wildensteins, and the Rosenbergs. He was arrested and found guilty in the subsequent Nuremberg war trials and sentenced to death. He committed suicide shortly before his execution.

Emmy Göring was the wife of Hermann.

Claus von Stauffenberg was a German army officer best known for Operation Valkyrie, his failed attempt, on July 20, 1944, to assassinate Adolf Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair. He was arrested a short time after this. He received a death sentence and was shot at midnight by a firing squad in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock in Berlin.

Winifred Wagner, born in England, was the daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner, the composer of many operas, including the Ring Cycle. She had married Wagner’s son, Siegfried, who was the director of the Bayreuth Festival. After his death she became the director of the festival. She was passionately devoted to Hitler and the Nazi regime. She died in 1980.

Martin Bormann was head of the German Nazi Party Chancellery and Adolf Hitler’s private secretary. He became party minister of the National Socialist German Workers’ party after Hitler’s suicide on April 30, 1945, and later fled and is thought to have committed suicide in May 1945.

Elisabeth Kalhammer was Hitler’s housekeeper at the Berghof. She began when she was nineteen years old. She kept her job a secret for seventy years following Hitler’s death.

Traudl Junge was Hitler’s last personal secretary. Hitler called upon her to type out his will shortly before he committed suicide.

Inspiration for Faceless Condition

Several years ago, I read a novel about a boy who had witnessed a murder but could not remember the murderer’s face. It turned out that he had a cognitive disorder called prosopagnosia, in which people simply cannot register other people’s faces. It wasn’t the face itself that triggered this response. It was something in that person’s brain. A kind of dyslexia that made them unable to recall faces. So, I started thinking, what if it were the reverse? What if there was a small group of people whose faces in and of themselves were simply not memorable. What if the entire world had this cognitive disorder for those particular people? Wouldn’t a person with such a face make a great spy? Hence the Rasas, as in Tabula Rasa, came to be.

About the Author

Photo by Jean Fogelberg

KATHRYN LASKY is a New York Times bestselling author of many children’s and young adult books, which include her Tangled in Time series; her picture book She Caught the Light; her bestselling series Guardians of Ga’Hoole, which was made into the Warner Bros. movie Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole; and her picture book Sugaring Time, recipient of a Newbery Honor. She has twice won the National Jewish Book Award, for her novel The Night Journey and her picture book Marven of the Great North Woods. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband.

www.kathrynlasky.com

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FACELESS. Copyright © 2021 by Kathryn Lasky. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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Cover design by Joel Tippie

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lasky, Kathryn, author.

Title: Faceless / Kathryn Lasky.

Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2021] | Audience: Ages 8–12. | Audience: Grades 4–6. | Summary: Growing up in 1943 war-torn England, thirteen-year-old Alice and her older sister Louise are members of a centuries-old spy clan, but when Louise decides to spy for the enemy, their bond is changed forever.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020052741 | ISBN 9780062693310 (hardcover)

Subjects: CYAC: Spies—Fiction. | World War, 1939-1945—Fiction. | Sisters—Fiction. | Secret societies—Fiction.

Classification: LCC PZ7.L3274 Fac 2021 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052741

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Digital Edition OCTOBER 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-269333-4

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-269331-0

2122232425GV10987654321

FIRST EDITION

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