They Went Left - Monica Hesse Page 0,109

weeks and months after the war, when an entire continent had to find a way to recover from the suffering it had experienced and the atrocities it had committed.

Several years before, on a somber vacation, I’d taken a long, meandering train ride from Germany through the Czech Republic and into Poland. The trip began in Munich, where I visited the site of the Dachau concentration camp, and it ended in Kraków, where I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most infamous Nazi death camp of the Holocaust, where more than one million people were murdered.

Late one night I realized, sickened, that my comfortable passenger train was following a route that a different train could have followed in 1941 or 1942, packed with terrified people heading to their deaths. My train made a brief stop in a city called Sosnowiec, and the name stuck in my brain. I came home and read a little about it, and when I began writing this book, I set about trying to re-create, as best as I could, what might have happened to a young woman who had been taken from that town at the beginning of the war, and who now had to return to it.

Germany invaded Sosnowiec in 1939, and life changed immediately for the Jewish people who lived there. They were banned from work and from attending schools and made to live in a ghetto. They were used for forced labor for the Nazi regime. First, forced labor in the streets—snow shoveling, road cleaning—and then, forced labor in factories because Sosnowiec, being an industrial city, had many factories that the Germans took over for their own production.

Finally, Jews were used as forced labor in concentration camps. In August of 1942, thousands of Jewish families were ordered to report to the soccer stadium, where they were told they’d receive new identification but they were instead sorted into lines and then deported to camps.

I read somewhere that one of the reasons writing fiction about the Holocaust is so complicated is because the atrocities were so vast and so horrific that writing about true things can end up sounding like fiction. Our minds simply don’t want to process that these things happened; we assume the author must be exaggerating for effect. I’ll say only that the details I included about the camps were true. Including the “singing forest” of Buchenwald, where tortured prisoners were left to scream and die. Including the chaotic arrival scenes, where prisoners described having their infant children ripped from their arms and slaughtered by hand. In the middle of the war, a small group of young women with sewing skills were taken from Birkenau, forced into slave labor at a textile factory called Neustadt, and then later forced to march, in the winter, to the concentration camp Gross-Rosen to evade the approaching Allies. I patterned Zofia’s imprisonment off that journey.

Before the war, the Jewish population of Sosnowiec was twenty-nine thousand people. After the war, only seven hundred returned.

And what they returned to was, in many cases, a persecution that was less systematic than it had been under Nazi occupation, but no less hateful. Anti-Semitism was still rampant; the war didn’t end people’s prejudice.

Several incidents from Zofia’s return to Sosnowiec were inspired from Polish survivor accounts: Sala Garncarz wrote of trying to board a train to her family’s home of Sosnowiec, only to have the conductor tell her that Jews weren’t welcome on his train or in his country. When she finally reached her family’s apartment, it had been taken over by strangers who showed no sympathy. Michael Bornstein recounted the story of being woken from bed as a young child by the sound of drunken men banging on the door because they’d heard a Jewish family had returned. The family was saved only because Bornstein’s cousin had spent the war hidden in a Catholic convent: She could recite enough prayers to convince the men that the family was Christian.

Postwar Europe was still a terrifying place to be Jewish. In 1946—a year after the war ended—in the town of Kielce, Poland, forty-two Jews were murdered by an angry mob of police and civilians. Massacres like these weren’t isolated, and they all had the same intent: to make it clear that Jews were not welcome to return. And so, after enduring years in death camps and concentration camps, survivors now found that their nightmares still hadn’t ended. Poland no longer felt safe, and many set about starting over in new homelands. In the months and years