The Paris Architect

The Paris Architect is a 2013 novel by Charles Belfoure and the author's debut in fiction writing. It follows the story of a French architect Lucien Bernard who is paid to create temporary hiding places for Jews in Nazi-occupied Paris.

Specialising in historic preservation, before writing The Paris Architect, Charles Belfoure had written several non-fiction books on architecture, including works on the history of American banks and rowhouse architecture in Baltimore. He decided to pop into fiction spontaneously, thinking it might be an exciting experience and a way of having a break from everyday work. A direct inspiration came to Belfoure after discovering the fact that during the reign of Elizabeth I in England special spaces were designed in houses as temporary hiding places for repressed Catholic priests.

Like most gentiles in Nazi-occupied Paris, architect Lucien Bernard has little empathy for the Jews.

So when a wealthy industrialist offers him a large sum of money to devise secret hiding places for Jews being hunted by the Nazis, Lucien struggles with the choice of risking his life for a cause he doesn’t really believe in. He desperately needs the money to make a living though he knows that if caught, he will be killed.

Ultimately he can’t resist the challenge and begins designing expertly concealed hiding spaces --- behind a painting, within a column or inside a drainpipe --- detecting possibilities invisible to the average eye. But when one of his clever hiding spaces fails horribly and the immense suffering of Jews becomes incredibly personal, he can no longer deny reality.  But when one of his hiding spaces fails horribly, and the problem of where to hide a Jew becomes terribly personal, Lucien can no longer ignore what's at stake. 

The Paris Architect asks us to consider what we owe each other, and just how far we'll go to make things right.