At last Ans saw guard towers ahead, silhouetted against the slowly brightening sky. Spiky rows of barbed wire stretched between them. Dogs barked and snarled in the distance. The prison camp looked enormous, sprawled across a flat, sandy area and surrounded by woods. “At least they didn’t send us to Germany,” the woman beside Ans whispered.

They were marched through two sets of gates and into a windowless reception hall. “Undress! Undress!” someone shouted. Ans removed her clothes, dropping them to the floor to stand naked and shivering with the other women while prison guards and laughing soldiers watched. “Do not think of escaping,” the women were told. “The fences have electricity. The guards in the towers have machine guns. And beyond the fence is a minefield.” They let Ans keep her underwear and sweater and issued her a striped prison gown.

Guards called out their names and assigned each woman to a barracks and a work detail. “Bernandina Kamp, since you are a scrub maid, you will clean the latrine floor every day, then proceed to the camp laundry to wash the guards’ clothing.” It was a special punishment from the Gestapo officer. He’d had the final laugh.

CHAPTER 53

It was Tuesday morning again. The lists of names would be read today. Despairing souls would assemble in the camp square in the cold, drizzling rain, then shuffle to the railcars. The train would depart as it did every week. Miriam had been assured that she was exempt. Yet she’d awakened this morning with the same sickening dread she’d felt every week since arriving at Westerbork, wondering which people from her barracks or from the camp kitchen where she worked would be missing after today.

She stood in the barracks doorway after the names were read, forcing herself to watch the painful ordeal in the camp square, silently reciting the psalm that had become her unending refrain: “Have mercy on me, my God, have mercy on me, for in you I take refuge. I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings until the disaster has passed.” Then she closed her eyes against the sight of children clinging to their parents and elderly couples holding each other’s hands as the roll call was taken. She prayed for God to have mercy on the souls who would leave here today.

Miriam had returned to the punishment block to search for her friends Klara and Tina from Meijers House, but no one seemed to know or remember them. She’d asked several of her fellow musicians from the orchestra if they’d ever met Avraham Leopold —or Andries Bakker, his false identity. No one had. Nor did they remember her father or Mrs. Spielman. Miriam understood the reluctance most people felt to befriend their fellow prisoners. It made the endless, seemingly random goodbyes too painful.