By: Monica Hesse
Synopsis
From the book dust jacket:
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 and mind have barely begun to heal, 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, 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 fiance. 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 Thoughts
This is a moving and beautifully written story. It is both sad and hopeful. Seeing things through Zofia’s eyes had a profound effect on me, and I’m really not even sure how to put into words what I’m feeling. The trauma Zofia experienced and witnessed has left her memory unreliable. This comes through in a heartbreaking way in her narration of the story as she recognizes that her brain is “broken.” I could feel her confusion. This is the part of the WWII story that is not often told – how hard it must’ve been to move forward after surviving such horrors. As the story progressed, I began to suspect part of the end regarding her brother, but the explanation for it was a complete surprise. My heart broke for her having to make the decision she did, and the resulting break from reality that she had in order to deal with that decision. I did not figure out Josef’s story until she started working through it as her memory was fully returning. The stories of some of the secondary characters were also so very sad. Especially Inge, whose daughter will never know what happened to her, and Miriam, who was looking for her sister. Chaim and Breine’s story was one of hope. I can imagine that a lot of survivors felt the way these two did: “Today I am choosing to love the person in front of me.” It ultimately ended on a hopeful note with two people choosing to be family and move forward together. I can tell that this book is going to be with me for quite a while to come, and I am ok with that because it has increased my understanding of the difficult decisions people had to make just to survive in the midst of an unspeakably horrible time.
This was the first book of Hesse’s that I’ve read, but it will definitely not be the last. Let’s talk about it.