It was hard to turn, not without elbowing the others around her, but by slow increments she managed to press her face to the side of the car, where narrow gaps between the planks let in the barest wisps of fresh air. The wood was rough and unfinished, and smelled of the warm earthiness of a barn. Of its animals.

She would not think of what became of those animals when their journeys in such cars came to an end.

“I can’t see much,” she said, and it was true. Only fleeting impressions of trees and rocky slopes and little more. “From the sun I think we’re going north.”

She lost her place by the door when she needed to empty her bladder and had to make her way to the end of the car, only to discover that the toilet was simply an open barrel a little less than a meter high. The women nearby averted their eyes as she used it, and some even smiled encouragingly once she was finished.

They had not lost their humanity. They knew how important it was to restore a fraction of the dignity that had been stolen from them.

She managed to shuffle a little distance away from the stinking barrel, but the elderly woman had taken her spot at the side of the car and she couldn’t begrudge her the relief of a solid surface to rest against, nor the chance for a few breaths of fresh air.

“Do you know where they’re sending us?”

Nina didn’t recognize the speaker, who was young and very pretty. Perhaps she had been kept in another bunkhouse with the older women? She hadn’t been part of Nina’s work kommandos.

Nina shook her head, wondering if she ought to introduce herself. Would it be helpful to cling to such pleasantries? Or would it be salt in an ever-deepening wound?

“No,” she said, leaving the question of names for another time. “I think they’re sending us to a labor camp. At least that’s what I’ve heard.”

“Me too. There were men in my neighborhood in Vicenza, soldiers who were captured last year. Their families got postcards saying they were in labor camps.”

“There you go,” Nina said, but she wasn’t able to put much conviction behind her words.

“They weren’t Jews, though.”

“No,” Nina agreed. “But the Germans need workers. And we’re both young and strong.”

“We are. Only . . .” And the woman looked down, and Nina noticed—how could she have missed it before?—that she was pregnant. So pregnant there was no way of hiding it. Despair pinched at her lovely face, and Nina, try as she might, could not think of a single word of comfort.