Winner of Paris Book Festival Award

GLENVIEW, Illinois, Oct. 7, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- "Paris Orphan: Escape from Evil," a novel based in part on the exploits of female spies in the Special Operations Executive–Britain's WWII secret service–has been awarded an honorable mention in the 2015 Paris Book Festival.

The historical fiction book, which had received an honorable mention in the 2014 New England Book Festival, is a sequel to "Love and Death in Paris" that also won an honorable mention in the Paris competition.

"Paris Orphan: Escape from Evil" has been added to the collection of Holocaust and genocide information in the Brill Resource Center at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, Skokie, Illinois.

The narrative is based on factual resources:

• SOE agents stationed in France.
• Jews arrested by Paris police in July 1942 and imprisoned in the Drancy detention center, an antechamber for Auschwitz.
• Jewish girls hidden at a Catholic girls boarding school in Paris.
• An American war correspondent in France.

Jewish orphan 12-year-old Hannah Abramov is sheltered with other orphans at a boarding school in the Picpus neighborhood after Paris police imprison her parents. When her orphan friend is arrested, she fears the gendarmes will come after her too.

American newspaperman Jack Lamont escapes arrest by hiding as the school gardener after French police find him with his lover, a university student who fought against the Nazi occupation of France. Her friends devise a daring plan for him to leave France.

Jack and Hannah flee Paris to seek safety in neutral Spain. They are befriended by British SOE female spies parachuted into France–a Jewish wireless operator and an agent who replaced a captured SOE leader in the Aquitaine region.

Their survival depends on the covert agents; a hot-tempered French underground leader; a Swiss Red Cross home that cares for displaced children; Basque smugglers who take refugees across mountains to Spain; and the mistress of the Gestapo commander in the south of France.

Both award-winning novels by author Charles Loebbaka are available in paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon.com websites, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, and United States.

Loebbaka, a retired journalist, also is the author of three mysteries in the LOST trilogy: "Darlin, the lost twin"; "Sparrow, the lost baby;" and "Lola, the lost memory." He served as Northwestern University media relations director for 27 years.

Contact: Charles Loebbaka, 847-724-0775, charlesloebbaka@comcast.net

SOURCE Charles Loebbaka