They Went Left

The scarred and devastated landscape speaks to the violence of the far-reaching European theater of World War II. The bombing has left a trail of immense destruction, which Zofia sees on her journey back to Sosnowiec with Dima and then on her journey to Germany to find Abek; Dima and Zofia drive past many destroyed structures, such as the “waist-high remnants of a brick structure, the vaguest hint of a doorway” (14). In Germany, “the green farmland is interrupted by angry black gashes cutting open the earth” (70) from the recent Allied bombing. Lives are utterly disrupted even after the war through the widespread destruction of farmland, homes, and infrastructure.

Among the debris, Zofia notices many incongruent possessions left on the roadside. Zofia imagines the desperate and exhausted families who must have left these things: “music boxes and silk shawls […] broken wagon wheels, upturned yokes, milk cans with rusted-out bottoms” (16-17). The displacement of people is symbolized in these discarded possessions. Zofia is haunted by imagined images of the people who left their things. She reflects that they may have been intercepted and killed by German soldiers or incidentally killed through the armed conflict.

The landscape also reflects the loss of life in the “large plot of upturned earth” (17) that Dima and Zofia pass, which the reader understands to be a mass grave.