Yet her daughter lived. Lucia was safe with Rosa. She was safe, and happy, and Nina would return to her. She had only to survive this one day, and the next, and the next day to come. It was that simple—and that terrifying.

It was growing dark again when the truck slowed, made a series of lurching turns, and then finally, mercifully, stopped. Unseen hands wrenched open its tailgate, followed by a flare of dazzling light. Harsh voices shouted unfamiliar words—but was she meant to stay where she was? Or come forward?

It seemed to be the latter, for the men around her jumped from the truck one by one, some of them so weak they struggled to keep their balance. She was supposed to get down, too, but terror numbed her limbs and froze her in place.

“Bitte,” she begged. Please.

One man, faceless in the dizzying glare of the light, seized her wrist and pulled her out of the truck. She landed heavily, pitching forward onto her knees, but he dragged her up and through a narrow gate, past high fences garlanded with barbed wire, and across a patchily graveled courtyard to a low brick building. Wrenching open the nearest of its doors, he pushed her inside.

They were in an office. It was bright and clean and the air smelled of beeswax and lemon. It held filing cabinets and desks and typewriters, and there were neat stacks of stationery and pots of sharpened pencils on its desks. It belonged to another world.

A high counter separated Nina and the guard from the rest of the space; behind it stood another man in uniform, his attention focused on an open ledger. He looked up as they entered, his face a stolid blank, and rattled off a string of words in German. When she failed to respond he repeated them, and then, his expression hardening, switched to Italian.

“Name. Place of birth. Age. Occupation.”

“Antonina Mazin,” she answered. They were imprisoning her because she was a Jew. Why not give them her true name?

“And?” the clerk snapped. “The rest of it?”

“I was born in Venice. I am twenty-four years old. I am . . .” And here she hesitated again. If she was here to work, they’d want her to be strong. Tough. Used to hard labor. “I am a farmworker.”

The clerk wrote it all down in his ledger, as serenely as if he’d recorded the delivery of a piece of furniture, and then he nodded, his attention still fixed on the page before him, and the guard dragged her along the corridor to another office, this one a stockroom of sorts.

“Nummer?” The clerk here was a woman no older than Nina.

The guard shook his head. “Keine. Jüdin.” No number. Jew.