after the war, a web of displaced-persons camps sprung up around Germany. Some of the people who went to them had no other choice: Their own homes had been demolished or had new families living in them. Their own families were gone. Their homelands had become foreign places to live. In search of safety, they came to these camps, located in convents, office complexes, and sometimes in the very concentration camps they had just been liberated from.
Foehrenwald was a real place, on the repurposed grounds of the I.G. Farben pharmaceutical factory, famous for making Zyklon B. It was one of the most prominent camps, holding thousands of people at the peak of its existence, and incorporating trade and language schools. The Kloster Indersdorf was also a real camp, for children, run out of a convent and populated by children who needed to be retaught to eat and sleep peacefully. An estimated 1.5 million children died in the Holocaust.
I used Foehrenwald and the Kloster Indersdorf as rough templates for They Went Left, but changed some details and also incorporated details from other camps. There were several, for example, that functioned mostly as training farms for young Jews who planned to emigrate to Israel and were learning to work the land. One of the most famous was Kibbutz Buchenwald: A group of prisoners took the patch of land that was meant to be their destruction and instead turned it into their salvation. Many of them did ultimately take ships, some sanctioned and some secret—Aliyah Bet—beginning in the fall of 1945.
The first book I read about displaced-persons camps was The Rage to Live: The International D.P. Children’s Center Kloster Indersdorf by Anna Andlauer, a moving testimony of postwar life for children. For other accounts of postwar life, I recommend The Hidden Children: The Secret Survivors of the Holocaust by Jane Marks; We Are Here: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany by Avinoam Patt; Life Between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany by Zeev Mankowitz; Kibbutz Buchenwald: Survivors and Pioneers by Judith Tydor Baumel; and the documentary The Long Way Home, directed by Mark Jonathan Harris.
I am again indebted to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, and especially to its priceless collection of oral histories. To name a very small few: Bella Tovey, Sonia Chomicki, and Zelda Piekarska Brodecki all gave richly textured descriptions of what it was like to grow up in Sosnowiec during the occupation. Hana Mueller Bruml described the liberation of Gross-Rosen. Regina Spiegel spoke of learning to become a seamstress at Foehrenwald. Writings by Henry Cohen, who served as Foehrenwald’s director in 1946, described life in the camp: the fact that there was a library, for example, and a Jewish police force, and that residents were allotted three ounces of canned meat a day. He also wrote of black markets, camp tensions, and other facets of the time and place that I didn’t have a chance to illuminate.
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.