At my local post office, at 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, in Harlem, there is almost always a long line for Window 8. Earlier this month, when I went to pick up a package, a group of people were clustered around a woman in a turban who was holding a clipboard and a pen. She was saying, “Now, you have to remember to fill it out with black ink.” I asked a postal worker what was going on. She said, “They’re here to try to get passports, papers, you know, for the children.”

In the spring of 1940, a temporary travel pass was issued to Irène Némirovsky, a Russian Jew who lived in France, to travel from Paris to the village Issy-l’Évêque, in order to see her daughters, Denise, aged eight, and Élisabeth, who was called Babet, aged three, who had been evacuated. By then, at the age of thirty-seven, Némirovsky was a celebrated writer. Her books included eight novels, two of which, “Daniel Golder” and “Le Bal,” had been made into films.

That June, after the Germans had occupied Paris, Némirovsky and her husband, Michel Epstein, a banker, were able to continue to work in Paris and pay visits to their children, while disregarding mounting advice from friends and family to leave France. By September, 1941, no one categorized as a Jew according to the new racial laws could travel within France without permission. The family took up residence in Issy-L’Évêque. Over the next months, Némirovsky continued to work on two novellas, “Storm in June” and “Dolce.” The first recounts the occupation of Paris, and the second tells of the overlapping lives of French denizens in a small village, very much like Issy-L’Évêque, which is taken over by German soldiers.

According to her notes, Némirovsky originally intended to write a long novel in in five parts. She listed what she needed to finish the manuscript, including “an extremely detailed map of France or Michelin Guide,” and “June birds, their names and songs.” She wrote, in her notebook, about the novel’s general theme: “All in all, it’s only the initial shock that counts. People get used to everything, everything that happens in the occupied zone: massacres, persecution, organized pillaging, are like arrows shot into the mire!” On July 13, 1942, Némirovsky was arrested and sent to a concentration camp in Pithviers. The next day, Bastille Day, Epstein wrote a frantic letter to her publisher in Paris:

I tried to reach you by telephone yesterday without success. . . . The police took my wife away yesterday. It appears she is going to the concentration camp in Pithviers (Loiret). Reason: general order against stateless Jews between the ages of sixteen and forty-five. My wife is Catholic and our children are French. Can anything be done to help her?

The Epsteins had converted to Catholicism, and the children had been born in France. In the nineteen-thirties, they had tried several times to become naturalized French citizens—these requests had not been granted, and then it was too late. From Pithviers, Némirovsky was deported to Auschwitz, where she died a month later, of typhus. In August, Epstein was also arrested and sent directly to Auschwitz, where he died in the gas chamber.

After their parents were arrested, the children were detained, but Denise, the elder, reminded the arresting officer of his own daughter, and he let them go. The girls were hidden for the duration of the war by Julie Dumont, a French woman whom Némirovsky had employed as a nanny and who had become a friend of the family. In 1945, when the trains of survivors began to arrive at the Gare de Lyon, the children went to the station every day to wait and watch for their parents, wearing placards around their necks on which they had written the family name.

After the war, Denise and Babet were taken care of by a consortium of family friends. They attended French schools. Némirovsky’s work was almost forgotten, and her books, which bear the outmoded, slightly arch prose style of the thirties, were mainly out of print. Denise Epstein worked as an archivist, eventually settling in Toulouse; Babet, now Élisabeth Gille, became a noted editor and translator. In 1992, at the age of fifty-five, Gille published her first book, a novel called “Le Mirador”: in English, mirador can be translated, loosely, as “lookout.”

The title was prescient: the history of the Némirovsky-Epstein family and the publications surrounding them are complicated—as if viewed simultaneously through both ends of a telescope. “Le Mirador,” written in the form of an autobiography of Gille’s mother, reads as if the author had fastened her gaze as closely as she could bear on someone at once loved and feared for her capacity to wound, who betrayed her. In the novel, Gille imagines her mother’s every footfall: her childhood as the beloved daughter of one of the richest Jewish bankers in Russia; her grotesque relationship with her feckless and vulgar society mother; the family’s snowy exile in Finland; their new life in Paris in a series of gilded apartments; and her marriage to Gille’s father. In her sitting room in Issy-l’Évêque, the fictionalized Irène, wearing a yellow star, recalls a quote from Osip Mandelstam: “This werewolf century flings itself on my shoulders.”

How is it possible to fully imagine the life of another human being? To understand the choices that she made, in hindsight? The novel is a strange and beautiful book, about a mother who disappeared, when her daughter was five years old, into personal and historical tragedy. In one of those “odd coincidences,” Gille writes, “of which the period was so fond,” the boat that carries the family from exile in Finland on their way to France is also carrying theatrical sets: the teen-age Irène is hit by a chair that pushes her into a cardboard urn painted with Greek nymphs. (In another, her worst bouts of asthma are caused by linden pollen—the trees that give Berlin’s most famous thoroughfare its name). She is struck down by history. Chapters of “Le Mirador” are punctuated by italicized paragraphs that record Gille’s own searing recollections: two officers in the doorway as her mother kisses her goodbye; the wet, salty taste of a wool scarf tied over her mouth to keep her quiet in hiding. In a final italicized passage, on a visit to Pithviers, in 1962, the narrator picks up a stone from the track bed, imagining that her mother might have stepped on it as she got into the train.

Over the next four years, after the publication of “Le Mirador,” Élisabeth Gille wrote two more books, “Shadows of a Childhood,” a novelization of her own experience as a Jewish child hidden during the war years, and “The Crab in the Back Seat,” the story of her struggle with cancer. She died in 1996. “Shadows of a Childhood” lacks the detached, meticulously rendered world of “The Mirador,” in which perhaps Gille’s greatest accomplishment is to have written a nuanced portrait of her mother rendered with infinite and almost inconceivable generosity, despite Némirovsky’s now documented inability to understand, as others perished, that her status as a writer and a member of what a French reviewer called “le haute-bourgeoisie juif” would not protect her or her family; that, instead, it put them in grave danger.