It took all morning for the truckload of new prisoners to be processed, their names and ages recorded. Miriam’s ID card still identified her as Christina Bos, but her accent betrayed her as a German Jew. The knowledge that they’d recaptured one of their own seemed to please her jailers. “All Jews who were discovered in hiding will be housed in the punishment block —a prison within this prison,” they were told. “You will be treated as convicts for breaking the law and failing to report for relocation as you were ordered to do. You will be among the first to be deported to the labor camps.”

Miriam was assigned to the punishment barracks with Klara and Tina. They had barely spoken to her all day, and she wondered if they blamed her for being discovered. If it hadn’t been for Rietje’s screams, the Nazis might not have searched the attic. And yet, with no way out, all three of them would have surely starved to death. Would that have been a worse fate than what they now faced?

Miriam carried her suitcase with the violin tucked inside into the crowded barracks and searched for an empty bunk. They were stacked three high and crammed into the barracks so tightly, there was barely space to walk between the rows. The barracks supervisor located a bunk for Miriam in the densely packed middle, up near the rafters where wet laundry draped above her head. She would have no privacy, no way to be alone. “What happens to us now?” she asked the supervisor.

“The deportation train leaves every Tuesday,” she replied. “The authorities will give me a list of names from this barracks, and if yours is on it, you leave.” Today was Sunday. The train departed in two days.

“Do you know where the train ends up?” Miriam asked.

The woman looked all around for a moment as if worried someone would overhear. “They say we’re all going to resettlement camps somewhere in Poland. But nobody ever writes back to tell us they’ve arrived. They promise they will, but then they board the train when their names are called and we never hear from them again.” Her words made Miriam shudder. She’d heard nothing from Papa or any of her relatives in Cologne.

“Has anyone ever tried to escape?” she asked. She was thinking of Avi and how he’d escaped from Westerbork once before. If they had captured him and brought him here, perhaps he might have escaped a second time.

“A few have tried it. But every time someone attempts to escape, ten other people from that barracks are deported in retaliation.” Avi would never endanger his fellow prisoners that way.

Prisoners in the other barracks labored in a workshop where they made shoes or in a scrapyard where aircraft wrecks were disassembled for parts. Prisoners in the punishment block wouldn’t be in camp long enough to work.