Her gaze swept over the assembled formation, her nostrils flaring for an instant, and then she looked down at the clipboard in her hands and began to call out numbers at a ferocious clip. It took Nina a moment to realize that she was calling out their numbers, the ones they bore on their arms, and she was still staring at her own number, vainly trying to remember its translation, when the blockowa grabbed her arm and hoisted it in the air.

“Hier, aufseherin,” she shouted, and then she slapped Nina across the face. “Blöde Sau.”

One after the other they were counted, dozens upon dozens, and nearly everyone earned a blow or worse for failing to respond as promptly as their captors required. And then, when the last number on her list had been found and checked off, the dark-eyed woman in the smart uniform—the aufseherin?—nodded at the blockowa, and then . . . nothing.

They stood in place and waited, and the moon rose, and still they waited, and those few who were unwise enough to shuffle or scratch at a louse bite or rub their frozen hands against the fabric of their uniforms were rewarded with more slaps, more pinches, and even, once, the sharp crack of the blockowa’s club against defenseless shoulders. That was the punishment for a woman who had fallen to her knees.

The moon rose ever higher, but its light was dimmed by spiraling drifts of smoke from the looming chimneys.

“Ovens,” came a whisper.

The guards were only meters away. What if they heard?

“Where the bodies are burned,” the same voice added.

“Alive?” Stella asked, and her clear child’s voice carried across the yard.

The aufseherin looked up from her clipboard, her sharp eyes moving over them, judging and assessing, much as a crow might look at carrion when considering how best to pluck out its eyes.

When she spoke, it was in Italian overlaid with a heavy Austrian accent.

“No. Not alive when they burn.” A pause, another birdlike tilt of her head. “They gas them first. Those who fail selection. Lazy ones. Sick. The troublemakers. They all go to the gas.”

Nina’s world shrank to the aufseherin’s mouth and the poison she spoke and the calamitous truth embedded in her words. They all go to the gas.

Her parents were dead.

Since the day Nico and Father Bernardi had told her of their deportation she had known, but she hadn’t been brave enough to face it. And now she could shut her mind to it no longer.

She knew.

The guards would have separated them. Mamma would have been alone. Defenseless, unable even to stand. Would she even have survived the journey?

But Papà would have been alive when they had torn him from his beloved’s arms. When they had pushed him onto the train. When they had led him to the gas.