They Went Left

The impact of the violence enacted on prisoners of concentration camps is alluded to in the broken and fragile state of the women recovering in the hospital: “We have nothing, we feel nothing. […] [O]ur minds are soft. Confused” (4). At the refugee camp, Breine also alludes to the scattered minds and memories of survivors in her explanation to Zofia: “The war ended, and some of us are here, but not all there” (100). The confusion of released prisoners stems from the years of trauma they experienced through starvation, torture, beating, freezing, and losing friends and family in devastating ways. Zofia struggles to recall what is real and what is imagined; her mind has protected itself by compartmentalizing stressful experiences to protect her sanity, and now she can’t clearly remember some parts of what happened to her in the previous four years. At other times, she remembers horrific events and can’t stop fixating on them, which leaves her feeling mentally exhausted and confused: “This is what happens to my brain now. It trips. It goes in loops. It won’t let me think some things and won’t let me stop thinking of others” (17).

Zofia struggles to discuss certain events, as they bring on a post-traumatic stress response that causes Zofia to feel like she is currently reliving these moments; this occurs when Gosia asks who else was on her transport to Birkenau: “‘On the transport, there was only—’ But before I can continue, I’m slipping back into the horrors of that day: yelling in my ears, the smell of decay in my nostrils, feelings so thirsty and so weak and barely able to breathe” (41). This distress manifests in Zofia’s shaking body and her inability to continue speaking. Some memories are too painful to recount, and others are so painful that Zofia represses them altogether.

The fragmented and inaccessible parts of Zofia’s memory foreshadow the fact that Abek is dead; Zofia’s search for Abek propels the plot forward as Zofia travels to refugee camps and orphanages in Germany looking for him, but she will eventually remember that she smothered her dying brother on the cattle train on the way to Birkenau. Tension builds toward this twist as Zofia wonders: “What’s the line between the amount of information that brings hope and the amount that brings despair?” This alludes to the fact that Zofia is choosing hope over the despair of remembering. She further wonders, “Do you choose comfort or fantasy? Or do you choose real pain?” (188). Zofia is eventually forced to confront the untruth of the comfortable fantasy that Abek has returned to her, as well as remembering other distressing details about her family’s fate, such as her father’s murder in the soccer stadium: “First, one soldier viciously jammed his hand against my father’s throat, knocking out his wind, and then they shot him” (267). This memory also allows Zofia to solve the mystery of Josef, who used the same throat punch on Rudolf; Zofia is able to name her feeling of disquiet—Josef was a Nazi soldier.

Memory is also explored when Zofia returns to her family’s apartment in Sosnowiec; it is disorientating being back in a place where she lived in easy comfort with her beloved family after their deaths and after years of suffering from deprivation and violence. Zofia struggles to comprehend this familiar space after so much change: “With each empty room I can feel my brain wanting to break into pieces” (26). It is a familiar space, but Zofia is irrevocably changed, and the crush of memories of how her life used to be is overwhelming and devastating in light of how her family members were brutally and indifferently killed. Zofia’s choice to leave Europe to travel to a new life in Canada is foreshadowed by her distress and discomfort at revisiting her family’s apartment.