" Halina tries to picture the American president seated triumphantly behind his desk some 6,000 kilometers west of them. V-E Day, Truman called it: Victory in Europe. But to Halina, the word victory feels hollow. False, even. here's hardly anything victorious about the ruined Warsaw they left, or about the fact that so much of the family is still missing, or about how all around them in what was once Lodz's massive ghetto, they can feel the ghosts of 200,000 Jews - most of whom, it's rumored, met their deaths in the gas vans and chambers of Chelmno and Auschwitz. "

― David Foenkinos