Title: They Went Left

Author: Monica Hesse

Publisher: Little Brown

Release Date: April 7th, 2020

Genre: Young Adult, Historical Fiction.

My Rating: 5/5

Germany, 1945. The soldiers who liberated the Gross-Rosen concentration camp said the war was over, but nothing feels over to eighteen-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.

I have read a few historical fictions before but have not come across a single book that had talked about the aftermath of war. In her book They Went Left, Monica Hesse has walked us through the atrocities of the Nazi in the German invaded Poland, the after-effects of war and the mental trauma it has inflicted upon the victims.

After being liberated from the Nazi concentration camp, our protagonist Zofia Lederman headed back to her hometown Sosnowice in the hope to reunite with her younger brother Abek Lederman, the only person who was left of her family. But when he didn’t show up as planned, finding him has become the sole purpose of her life.

The whole story was in Zofia’s point of view who suffers a severe memory loss and post-traumatic disorder which made her an unreliable narrator. Anyone who suffered such savagery would be the same as of Zofia and by presenting the MC as an unreliable narrator the author had given a touch of reality to this fiction.

I liked Breine’s practicality and positive approach towards life and I really admired her for that. After all the horror they had been through, moving on is indeed an act of bravery which I don’t think I would be able to do if I were in her place. Like Zofia, Miriam’s character also touched me in a way like no other fictional character has ever had. Being an elder sister I could feel the pain they both went through in search of their siblings.

The characters in this book may be fictional but not the incidents. The torture the Jews had gone through in the Dachau, Birkenau, Buchenwald concentration camps was terrifying and what Monica Hessa has shown in her book They Went Left was just a glimpse of the barbarity of the Nazi.

They Went Left has reverberated the mental suffering of the Holocaust survivors, their quest for a family and their hope for a new beginning. If historical fiction is your favourite genre then this book is a must read for you. Overall, it is a great read and I couldn’t recommend it enough.

*A special thanks to The FFBC team for including me in the blog tour and for the eARC of They Went Left! All opinions are my own.*

Monica Hesse is the New York Times bestselling author of Girl in the Blue Coat, American Fire, and The War Outside, as well as a columnist at The Washington Post writing about gender and its impact on society. She lives outside Washington, D.C with her husband and their dog.