A blast of cold water came streaming from the ceiling. Nina looked up, squinting, and for the first time noticed the shower heads set into the ceiling. The water grew warm, then scalding, and in an instant was frigid again.

She didn’t care. She didn’t think of washing herself, begrimed as she was. All that mattered was the water. She tilted back her head and opened her mouth wide and was grateful for every drop she swallowed. Nothing would ever again taste as good as that water.

Long before she was able to drink her fill, though, the water ceased and they were hustled onward once more.

Now they were given uniforms. Hers was a striped tentlike dress, even dirtier and rougher than the one she’d had in Bolzano. By sheer chance she was handed a proper pair of shoes. The soles were nearly worn through and they were a size too large, but most of the women had been given zoccoli to wear. Any sort of shoe, no matter how worn-out, was better than those rough wooden clogs.

Then food, the first meal she’d had since leaving Italy, and it was dreadful: a few mouthfuls of thin and bitter soup and a slice of hard black bread that only scraped against the void of her hunger.

Just as she was reaching the last of her strength they were led to a hut. It was many times more wretched than the cellblock in Bolzano had been. It was colder and dirtier and packed with twice as many women, and the stench inside was insufferable even to her benumbed nostrils.

She and Stella hadn’t even found places among the bunks when a bell began to clang.

“Appell! Appell!”

“That’s the blockowa,” someone muttered. “Get yourselves moving, or we’ll all catch it from that bitch.”

“What’s a blockowa?” Nina asked, exhaustion clinging to her like a shroud.

“She runs the block here—hurry!”

So they rushed outside to a muddy yard and arranged themselves in neat rows, hundreds of women, all of them shorn and pale and trembling from the cold, and anyone who was so much as a millimeter out of line was pushed into place by the blockowa, who didn’t hesitate to use slaps and pinches to punish anyone who moved too slowly for her liking.

When everyone was arranged just so, a young woman in a smartly tailored uniform came to stand before them. She was slight and rather small, with delicate features, smooth and shining dark hair, and staring eyes that missed nothing.