“I remember you from my first day in Bolzano. I’d have lost my boots if not for you.”

“I wasn’t very nice. S . . . sorry.”

“You were wary. Of course you were.”

“They took my parents before me. I hid in our flat, but I had to go out to buy food, and that’s wh . . . when . . .”

“I know. I know.”

“I just wish I knew where they took my mamma and papà,” Stella wept.

And what could Nina say? How to answer such a question when the truth was more than she herself could bear?

Instead she made Stella a promise. “I’m alone, too. I’ll be your friend.”

Stella nodded, and her thin arms tightened around Nina. “There were dead people in my boxcar. One of them was standing next to me almost the entire way. She cried and cried, and I remember wishing that she would stop. Just stop making so much noise. And then she did stop, and I looked at her, and she was dead. Her eyes were open but she was dead.”

“Hush,” Nina told her, and held the child even closer, and she rubbed her back. Just as she’d once soothed Carlo when he’d been frightened or upset.

The men in the striped uniforms left.

The sun rose.

The doors of the shed burst open once more.

Soldiers came in, hard-eyed men armed with rifles and clubs and vicious dogs, and they quickly moved to encircle the desperate crowd. Among them were three officers. The soldiers began to nudge people forward, using their rifles as prods.

One by one they came forward to stand before the officers and be judged.

A nod, a barely discernible gesture, and the person was sent to join one of three groups. Young men, young women, and everyone else. The third group was by far the largest, and among it were children, elderly people, the infirm, and the sick. Nina knew that she did not want to be put in that last group.

But Stella—if she didn’t act quickly the girl would be sent to join them. She was nearly as tall as Nina, but her schoolgirl plaits made her look terribly young.

“You need to look older,” she hissed in her ear. “Be older. If they ask, tell them you’re sixteen. What’s your birth date?”

“May sixteenth.”

“Yes, but what year?”

“Nineteen thirty.”

“From now on, it’s 1928. We’ve only changed the year. Can you remember? You were born in 1928.”

“Yes,” the girl whispered.

As they spoke, Nina unraveled Stella’s plaits, combing through the lank strands with her fingers, her hands steady in spite of her fear. She twisted it back off the girl’s face and used a ribbon from her plaits to secure it.