“Does she have the hands of a farm maid? Tell her to show me her hands.” The Gestapo officer ordered Ans to hold out her hands. She pretended to be baffled and held them up as if in surrender. The officer yanked them down and pushed them in front of the judge so he could examine them. For the first time in her life, Ans was grateful for red-chapped washerwoman’s hands.

“They’re the hands of a maid,” the judge said. “Was she carrying contraband?”

“No, but she admitted that she’d been to Bodegraven, so she might have delivered it before her bicycle was commandeered.” Ans objected to the word commandeered. Her bike had been stolen, plain and simple. But she didn’t dare react.

“Ask her how to milk a cow,” the judge said. Again, the Gestapo officer translated the request into Dutch, and again Ans tried to appear baffled, as if there were no mystery to milking a cow. She described the process, including a warning to watch out for the cow’s rear hooves.

“You have to squeeze and pull . . . Here, I’ll show you.” She grabbed her accuser’s hand, using his fingers as teats to demonstrate the gentle squeeze-pull motion that drew out the milk.

“Such a clever girl,” he muttered in German, his fox eyes narrowed. “A little too clever for a dairymaid, I think.”

“I only learned how to milk after I came to this country,” she told the judge. “I wanted to be a housemaid, but the only work I could find was on a farm.” The Gestapo officer didn’t translate what she’d said.

“She appears genuine, then?” the judge asked in German. The officer shrugged as if reluctant to give up. Ans stared at the floor, unwilling to let them see her relief. She jumped when the judge slammed down his gavel.

“Bernandina Kamp, I find you guilty of breaking curfew and sentence you to a term in the prison camp in Vught.”

“What did he say?” Ans asked her accuser. He didn’t reply.

They made Ans change back into her own clothes and drove her to the prison in Vught that night, stuffed in the back of a canvas-covered truck with two dozen other female prisoners. She recognized her former cellmate accused of black marketeering, but Trix, the talkative one, wasn’t there. It was still dark, with just a sliver of light in the east, when the truck halted on a narrow, rutted road in the woods. The guards ordered the women to get out, and for a horrifying moment, Ans wondered if they were going to be executed in this lonely, deserted place. She’d heard rumors of such things happening. But the soldiers told the women to start walking, prodded forward by bayonets. Anyone who stumbled in the darkness was struck by a rifle butt until she stood again.