Sunday, December 8, 2024

Liz Tolsma: What I Left For You

By Kelly Bridgewater

A Family's Ties Were Broken in Poland of 1939   1939 Helena Kostyszak is an oddity—an educated female ethnic minority lecturing at a university in Krakow at the outbreak of WWII. When the Germans close the university and force Jews into the ghetto, she spirits out a friend's infant daughter and flees to her small village in the southern hills. Helena does everything in her power to protect her family, but it may not be enough. It will take all of her strength and God's intervention for both of them to survive the war and the ethnic cleansing to come.   2023 Recently unengaged social worker McKenna Muir is dealt an awful blow when a two-year-old she's been working with is murdered. It's all too much to take, so her friend suggests she dive into her family's past like she's always wanted. Putting distance between herself and her problems might help her heal, so she and her friend head on Sabbatical to Poland. But what McKenna discovers about her family shocks everyone, including one long-lost family member. 

 


My Thoughts:

What I Left for You by Liz Tolsma brings light to a small culture that has been erased by the Nazi's during World War II. She does a wonderful job at creating a story to show the lengths a mother would go to find her child again. Even put her own health at risk. Tolsma shows the horrors of a concentration camp with truth and grit. She does not shy away from the horrors inflicted on the bodies of these innocent people. The plot is not that much different than a lot of the World War II novels that I have read. Yes, Tolsma based it on true stories, and there are tons of them, but it is hard to be different when the plight was felt by so many of these people. The setting was definitely different with the small, uneducated people being forced to move and forget their heritage. Overall, What I left for You by Liz Tolsma was a World War II novel that tugged at the heart, but ends in a happily-ever-after meeting.

I received a complimentary copy of What I Left for You by Liz Tolsma from Barbour Publishing, but the opinions stared are all my own.

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Purchase What I Left For You

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