They wanted her to cross the beam and go into the truck, but she couldn’t see beyond the lights. Couldn’t see where her feet were meant to go, and she dared not imagine what would happen if she fell.

But the other women were crowding forward, unaccountably eager to leave the boxcar, so she stepped into the abyss and lurched across the makeshift bridge. By some miracle she did not fall.

Trucks took them to a huge, echoing shed. One after the other, the vehicles disgorged their passengers and departed, and when the last group of people had been harried inside, the shed doors were slammed shut and bolted.

And still no one came with water.

The concrete beneath her feet was cold and filthy, but Nina could stand no more. She crumpled to the floor, drew up her knees, huddled in on herself, and willed away her dread of what was to come.

This was tolerable. This was something she could survive.

If only someone would give them water.

The first pale glimmerings of dawn crept in through the high, barred windows, painting the people around her with faint stripes of gold. The minutes passed, measured in heartbeats.

She was dozing, dreaming of the fountain at the house on the empty plain, when the doors opened again. Six men entered, each carrying a large bucket, and they were dressed in striped uniforms that looked like something out of a comedy short.

Then one of the men came closer and the sight of him drove any memories of laughter from her mind. He was desperately thin, closer to a corpse than a living man, and he moved as if every step and gesture was infinitely painful.

“Toilette,” he said softly. “Toilet.”

At last someone who spoke Italian. Others gathered around the man, whispering their questions, rightly wary of the guards who still flanked the shed’s open doors. The scant answers they received rippled through the crowd like a tidal wave.

They were in Poland. At a place called Birkenau. Food and water would come later. Later.

“After what?” someone asked.

A selection. People would be chosen for work. To be chosen you had to be strong. Fit. Young.

Her parents had not been young, or fit, or strong.

“What happens to those who cannot work?”

It was the girl who had greeted Nina on her first day in Bolzano, her carapace of toughness peeled back to reveal a solitary and bewildered child.

“They are eliminated,” the man now said, his eyes averted.

Eliminated. Erased. Extinguished.

“Sent elsewhere?” the girl asked, her voice halting.

The man shook his head. And he drew his finger across his throat.

Nina caught the girl before she could fall. Calmed her as best she could. Swallowed down her own pain and fear with a silent promise: Later you will mourn. Later you will rage. Tonight you must remember how to live.

“I’m Nina. What is your name?”

“Ste . . . Ste . . . Stella Donati.”