And, a story I have thought of again and again while writing this book: Alice Cahana spoke of her sister Edith. She spoke of how the two of them, as teenagers, survived selection together at Auschwitz-Birkenau when the rest of their family was sent to the gas chambers. She spoke of how she and Edith managed to stay together through the entire war, when they were transferred to Gross-Rosen and finally Bergen-Belsen. They celebrated liberation together. And then, Edith, weak and sick, was taken away in an ambulance to recover. Alice watched the ambulance drive away with her sister, and she never saw her again. She never saw her again, but never stopped looking.
The USHMM has an online database that allows researchers to look up Holocaust victims by various criteria: by name, by age, by the camp they were placed in, or by the city they were born in. All my characters’ first names came from these records, from the lists of real people who were born in Sosnowiec, or who were imprisoned in Dachau and Auschwitz, or who were, like Zofia, eighteen years old in 1945, trying to start life anew with ravaged hearts on a ravaged continent, in a ravaged period of time in which the entire world seemed to have gone crazy.
Besides those accounts, I’ve read probably a hundred Holocaust memoirs in my lifetime, and I know I carried pieces of each of them into this. I know, for example, that the idea for a prized bottle of Coca-Cola came from Thomas Buergenthal recounting his first sip of the strange foreign drink after surviving Auschwitz as a young boy. I know that Gerda Weissman described the surrealness of a neighbor asking to borrow ribbon so she could sew a swastika onto a flag. I offer a blanket debt of gratitude to any survivors who found ways to tell their stories, and for the journalists and historians who facilitated that storytelling.
I filled this book with sadness because there was plenty of sadness. I ended this book with hope because, improbably, there was plenty of that, too, in the camps for displaced persons: romances, babies, new starts, new life. Some of my favorite photos to look at while researching They Went Left were the photos of weddings that happened in displaced-persons camps. I looked at image after image of optimistic brides and grooms, dressed in whatever clothes they could make or borrow, surrounded by the new friends they had made into a family, getting ready to face the future together.
I don’t know which is more unfathomable to me: the base evil and cruelty of the Holocaust, or the undying hope that survivors managed to take out of it. I don’t know which is more unfathomable, but I do know which we should aspire to.