Footsteps creaked across the attic floor. Miriam trembled from head to toe. She couldn’t stop her tears. The heavy boots halted beside the barricade. She looked up into the face of a Nazi soldier.

“Out!” he said. “All of you! Out!”

CHAPTER 48

Ans sat on the narrow bunk in the Woerden jail, smelling the stench of vomit on herself, tasting bitter bile. She was alone in the cell only long enough to calm herself, gather her wits, and pray. Then footsteps came down the corridor. A key rattled in the lock. She stood, her stomach still roiling. Maybe her prayers were being answered and they were letting her go.

The cell door opened and she faced a guard who didn’t look any friendlier or kinder than the man who’d arrested her. He held her bag, the lining ripped open. He beckoned her forward, prodding her down the hall and up the stairs the way she’d come. One of the special paddy wagons the Gestapo used to transport prisoners waited outside, the engine running, dashing Ans’s hopes for a quick, merciful release. The guard pushed her into it.

Night had fallen while she’d been in the cell, the city dark under the blackout, but she recognized the imposing building they halted in front of a few minutes later. Kasteel van Woerden was a Nazi military barracks and Gestapo prison. Ans’s legs wobbled as she climbed from the car. Why hadn’t she listened to Erik and stayed safe? All his warnings about the terrible things the Gestapo did to Resistance workers flashed through her mind, making her feel sick again. She stumbled up the steps into the lion’s den. Then she thought of Miriam and Avi and Elisheva and knew she would do it all over again.

Ans stood before a desk in an office bristling with Gestapo officers, the walls plastered with swastikas and a portrait of Hitler. A clerk questioned her while he filled out forms and stamped papers: name, age, address, occupation. She was Bernandina Kamp, age twenty-two. She worked as a maid on a farm outside of Woerden. The clerk had her ID card and knew all the answers but asked her anyway. “The charges?” he asked Ans’s guard.

“Breaking curfew.”

A Gestapo officer at a nearby desk looked up and seemed to study Ans when he heard the reply. He pushed back his chair and came to stand behind the clerk. He was in his forties, with light-brown hair and a face that reminded Ans of a fox. “Let me question her when you’re finished,” he said to the clerk in German.