Someone Named Eva by Joan M. Wolf

Someone Named Eva by Joan M. Wolf is set during 1942 in Lidice, Czechoslovakia. Eleven year old Milada and her family are proud Czechs who do not agree with Hitler and his Nazis and are hoping for a fast end to the war. Their hopes are dashed when Nazi soldiers break into their home in the middle of the night and arrest everyone - Milada, her mother, father, grandmother, older brother and baby sister. All of the men and teen-aged boys in the neighborhood are separated and taken away, while the women and children are transported to a nearby town and held. Because she has blond hair and light eyes, Milada is selected, along with several other children, to be relocated to a Lebensborn center in Poland, leaving all of the rest of her family behind. There, Milada is forced to change her name to Eva, speak only German, and learn to "become" an upstanding German girl. Several times during her two years at this "school" Eva nearly forgets who she is and where she's from - the very things her grandmother pleaded with her to never forget as she was being taken away. Eventually, all of the girls are adopted by German families hoping to further the Aryan race. Eva works hard to remember who she truly is, despite the years it's been since she's seen her family. She prays for the war to come to an end and hangs on to the hope that she'll eventually be reunited with her real family.

This was a really good book. I actually cried at the end! The author's note was really interesting - I didn't realize the Nazis took non-Jewish, non-German children who had the right facial features and coloring and "repatriated" them as German children. This was a side of World War II I have never read about.