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(From Amazon)
Germany, 1945. The soldiers who liberated the Gross-Rosen concentration camp said the war was over, but nothing feels over to 18-year-old Zofia Lederman. Her body has barely begun to heal; her mind feels broken. And her life is completely shattered: Three years ago, she and her younger brother, Abek, were the only members of their family to be sent to the right, away from the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Everyone else - her parents, her grandmother, radiant Aunt Maja - they went left.
Zofia's last words to her brother were a promise: "Abek to Zofia, A to Z. When I find you again, we will fill our alphabet." Now her journey to fulfill that vow takes her through Poland and Germany and into a displaced persons camp where everyone she meets is trying to piece together a future from a painful past: Miriam, desperately searching for the twin she was separated from after they survived medical experimentation. Breine, a former heiress, who now longs only for a simple wedding with her new fiancé. And Josef, who guards his past behind a wall of secrets and is beautiful and strange and magnetic all at once.
But the deeper Zofia digs, the more impossible her search seems. How can she find one boy in a sea of the missing? In the rubble of a broken continent, Zofia must delve into a mystery whose answers could break her - or help her rebuild her world.
(My Review)
With the plethora of WWII books that seems to be about currently, They Went Left takes a different approach. This book follows Zofia at the end of the war, as the camp she is in is liberated. Her main concern is finding her sole surviving family - her brother. I thought this book was so interesting on so many levels. While it was historical fiction, it was a story of survival. These survivors, after having lived through the horror of the concentration camps, found themselves on a desperate quest to find their families after the war. The author explored how the trauma of war effected many of the characters in many different ways, leading them to make unimaginable decisions.
