Excerpt from They Went Left by Monica Hesse, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Papa had already reported to the stadium once: The Germans made all men. They were taken, but they were returned, ashen and not wanting to speak of what they'd seen. They returned.

I would tell this Red Cross worker that our identification cards were how we survived: Without one, you couldn't buy food or walk in the street. So we had to go, and we wore our best clothes. The instructions told us to do this, which we took comfort in, because maybe they really were going to take our pictures for identification.

But then we got there, and there were no cameras. Just soldiers. And all they were doing was sorting us. By health. By age. Strong-looking into one group; weak or old or families with young children in another. One line to work in factories. Another line to camps.

It took hours. It took days. Thousands of us were on the field. All of us had to be sorted. All of us had to be queried about whether we had special skills or connections. The SS surrounded the perimeter. Behind my family, an old man I recognized from the pharmacy was praying, and two soldiers came over to jeer. One knocked the pharmacist's hat off; the other kneed him to the ground. My father ran over to help him up—I knew he would; he was always kind to old people—even while my mother and I begged him not to, and I thought, What's the use.

My mother and I took turns curling our arms around Abek and telling him fairy tales: The Frog Princess. The Bear in the Forest Hut. The Whirlwind, his favorite.

Abek was tall for his age, which made him look older. When we realized how the soldiers were sorting us, we told ourselves that would matter. Abek, Mama said. You are twelve, not nine, all right? You're twelve, and you've been working in your father's factory for a year already.

We made up these reassurances for all of us. We looked at Baba Rose, my sweet, patient grandmother, and we told ourselves she looked much younger than sixty-seven. We told ourselves nobody in Sosnowiec could sew half as well. Customers who bought suits and skirts from my family's business did so because of the embroidery done at Baba Rose's hand, and surely this counted as a special skill.

We told ourselves my mother's cough, the one that had made her weak and gasping over the past months, the one Abek was starting to get, too, was barely noticeable. We said nobody would even see Aunt Maja's limp.

Pinch your cheeks, Aunt Maja told me. When they come to you, pinch your cheeks to make them full of life.

Beautiful Aunt Maja's face was so pretty and her laugh was so gay, none of her suitors ever cared that she was born with a mangled hip that made her lurch instead of glide. She was much younger than Mama, just nine years older than me. She used to tell me to pinch my cheeks so I would be as pretty as she was. Now it was so we would both be safe.

Darkness fell; it started to rain. We opened our mouths to catch the drops; we hadn't eaten or drank in days. The water on our now-sunburned skin felt nice for a minute, and then we were cold. Next to me, Abek tucked his hand in mine.

And Prince Dobrotek crept into the horse's ear, I said, telling The Whirlwind again. I was always good at telling stories. And when he crawled out the other side, can you remember what he was wearing?

A golden suit of armor, Abek said. And then he rode the horse to the moving mountain.

Pinch your cheeks! Aunt Maja called to me. Zofia, pinch your cheeks and smile.

I kept Abek's hand in mine and dragged him with me to the soldiers.

Fifteen, I told them. I can sew and run a loom. My brother is twelve.

Do you see why there isn't enough room on this woman's intake form for me to explain all this? It would take her hours to write it down. She would run out of ink. There are too many other Jews, millions of missing, whose information she also needs to collect.

Excerpted from They Went Left by Monica Hesse. Copyright © 2020 by Monica Hesse. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.