Instead she worked. She stopped her ears and averted her eyes and thought only of each single square of parquet before her. She worked and worked, and when they were told to empty their buckets and queue up again for the journey home, she reminded herself the way back to camp was downhill. It would be an easy walk, and there would be something to eat after appell, and when she was at last in bed she wouldn’t fall asleep straightaway. Instead she would think of her baby.

She would remember how delicious it felt to hold Lucia in her arms. How her whispery lashes curved upon her cheeks as she slept. How her rosebud mouth trembled when she was hungry. She would remember that her baby was safe and loved, and that alone would be enough to carry Nina through another cold night and another wretched day.

She and the other Jewish women—not zeros; never zeros—worked for a few more days at the hotel, and then they were sent to a nearby apple orchard. At first she was elated, for the walk there was far shorter and the smell of the apples in the late autumn sunshine was ever so pleasant. As one of the strongest in her group, she was given the work of collecting the baskets of fruit once they were full. The baskets were heavy and awkward to carry, though, and after only a few hours she was faint with hunger and fatigue.

She was ravenous, but she knew better than to sample even the most flyblown piece of fruit. One woman took a bite of half-rotten windfall, one single bite, and she was beaten almost to death for it. The sound of her piteous cries, together with the sickly-sweet smell of the overripe apples they labored to harvest, were enough to turn Nina’s stomach—and yet she wolfed down her supper of gritty polenta and moldy vegetable scraps that evening without a moment’s hesitation.

THE WHISPERS STARTED a few days later. In the queues for the latrines, in the fleeting moments as they assembled for appell, in the coldly blanketing night when the guards had retreated to their comfortable quarters, the women spoke of one thing only: the threat of another transport.

“The guards were talking about it. They say it’ll happen any day now,” Nina overheard in the queue for supper.

“What do you mean by ‘transport’?” she asked.

“What do you think?” came the answer. “People are transported away from here. They line up and they march away and they never come back.”

“Where?”

“North, across the Brenner Pass. And from there no one knows. No one’s ever returned.”

Her last day in camp began no differently from the rest.