Celebrate Lit / January 13, 2025

What I Left for You

About the Book What I Left for You

Book: What I Left for You (Echoes of the Past Book Three)

Author: Liz Tolsma

Genre: Christian Fiction / Romance / Historical Fiction

Release date: December 1, 2024

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.

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My Thoughts on What I Left for You

What I Left for You is a wonderful mystery and suspense novel that is also a dual timeline novel about different generations of a family. I loved getting to know the modern and the old. I felt that I was living with them and a part of the family. To be 100% honest with you, this book made me cry. But it also made me laugh. I cried sad tears and happy tears and felt soo many emotions.

Modern day we have the recently unengaged McKenna. It’s not a sad thing though. Because he’s a jerk and she’s very much better off without him. But the sad thing is about her job. She’s on a leave of absence shortly after the book starts because of a death of a child. She’s a social worker and though it wasn’t her fault it’s procedure. And yes, that made me cry. A sweet innocent two year old dying. Even if it’s just in a book. My mama heart just could not.

There are gaps in McKenna’s family history and she wants to find out what they are. She starts researching and that leads to her taking a trip with her best friend to find answers.

WWII

Our second storyline is her ancester Helena. Helena is Lemko and lives in Poland during WWII. She’s a professor. She’s educated. And those are both things that are not normal for the time period but definitely not normal for her people, the Lemko’s.

I love reading about WWII. It’s a habit or a compulsion trying to learn as much as I can about the time period. This is an area that I haven’t read a lot about. Poland isn’t somewhere I’ve focused on or visited. I’m sure we all know about the persecution of the Jews but they weren’t the sole focus of persecution by the Germans. They were out to get all the minorities and that included the Lemko’s.

Helena’s story is heart breaking and will make you cry. It may not be exactly a true story but it’s based on. The people really did live like this. They really faced these challenges and lived this life.

This was an amazing story. I will definitely be reading it again.

I have voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book which I received from Celebrate Lit. All views expressed are only my honest opinion. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way. All opinions expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the FTC regulations.

About the Author of What I Left for You

Liz Tolsma is the author of several WWII novels, romantic suspense novels, prairie romance novellas, and an Amish romance. She is a popular speaker and an editor and resides next to a Wisconsin farm field with her husband and their youngest daughter. Her son is a US Marine, and her oldest daughter is a college student. Liz enjoys reading, walking, working in her large perennial garden, kayaking, and camping.

More from Liz

I stared at my computer screen in front of me. For years, I had been searching for my great-grandmother, Anna. I got no good information.

Census records in the US weren’t helpful. Some listed her birthplace as Czechoslovakia, while others had it as Austria. I had heard before that she might have been born in Czechoslovakia but never Austria.

There were no records that I had come across that listed the city or town where she was born.

Until that one day, while searching for my great-grandmother, I ran across a passport application recorded in Warsaw, Poland, for an Anna with the same last name, though spelt differently. Her birthday was listed as 1903, which matched the birth year I knew for my great-grandmother’s niece.

As I read through the application, my heart was pounding. Anna was born in the United States but went to Dubne, Poland, with her family in 1906. It was now 1923, and she wanted to return to the US, and she would be living with…

I started to cry when I saw who her sponsor was.

My great-grandfather.

The name and address were correct. There could be no doubt about it. It had taken me years, but I finally made the jump to Europe and discovered that my great-grandmother was not born in Czechoslovakia but in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now Poland.

Of course, the good little researcher that I am, I had to find out all I could about Dubne, the town they were from. That’s when I first came across the term Lemko.

What on earth was that?

Lemkos are a Slavic people that settled in the Carpathian Mountains of Southern Poland, Northern Slovakia, and Western Ukraine. They are also known as Lemko Rusyns, Rusyns (especially those born in Slovakia, like my great-grandfather), and Carptho-Rusyns. The mountains kept the world at bay, and they developed their own language, customs, and form of Christianity. For the most part, they were very poor, many of them eking out a living from the rocky ground.

They lived in “black houses,” called that because the poorest people couldn’t afford to have a chimney built. The smoke from the cooking and heating fires stayed inside the house and covered the walls with black tar. If you look at the cemetery records from Dubne, you would be old if you lived into your fifties. Conditions were brutal.

The most the average Lemko could afford was one sheep or one pig. Since this was their most prized possession, they couldn’t take the chance of a wild animal or a neighbor taking it away, so it lived in the house with them.

With all of them.

Up to eleven people would live in a two-room house. When I mentioned that in What I Left for You, my editor questioned if I had made a mistake.

No, I didn’t.

I have no idea how they fit all those people in there, but they did. As I was tracking one branch of our family tree, I kept coming up with people living in house 43.

Over and over and over.

They stuffed that house full. Grandparents, parents, and children all lived together. They may not have had much, but that forged the Lemkos into strong and resilient people.

I’m proud to be Lemko-Rusyn, and I’m thrilled to share this story with you.

I infused Helena, the historical heroine, with as much of the Lemko spunk and spirit as I could. Last October, my daughter and I had the privilege to travel to Poland and Slovakia and see the Lemko homeland for ourselves. It helped me to write a better, richer story because I now understand where they came from and who they were. Enjoy Helena’s story and her journey during WWII and beyond. I hope you come to understand and appreciate the Lemko people as much as I have.