As the train carried them west, the weather grew steadily more damp, if not objectively colder, and the plains were replaced by hills and then foothills. Surely they would be in Germany before long.

The train halted at dusk on the third day, its doors opening onto a forested valley. On the opposite side of the train was a fast-flowing river; before them was a small camp, its scattered buildings surrounded by high fences.

The women scrambled down from the boxcars, their clogs and ill-fitting shoes slipping on the snowy ground, and the guards led them through the gates and across a stretch of open ground to a long and low wooden building, its few windows crisscrossed with iron bars. It smelled of diesel fumes and machine oil, as if it had once been used as a drive shed, and its concrete floors were cracked and buckling. The walls were in even worse condition, with wide cracks between their roughhewn wooden planks. Just looking at them made Nina shiver in anticipation of the arctic nights ahead, for it was a barracks, filled end to end with tiered wooden bunks.

But the bunks were made of new wood that still smelled of the lumberyard, and they were lined with straw mats that had yet to grow foul, and at the foot of every bunk was a blanket, an actual wool blanket. Nina went over to the nearest of the bunks, and she touched one of the blankets, and it was clean, or something close to it, and that alone was enough to bring sudden, stinging tears to her eyes.

The male guards from the train had vanished, presumably along with the train itself, and now a pair of female guards brought in pails of rough black bread that had been torn into chunks and adorned with dabs of watery jam. They ordered the prisoners to form a queue, and one by one the women received their supper, and one by one they wolfed it down in mere seconds.

There was just enough time for everyone to visit the latrines, newly dug and as fresh as a field of daisies compared to the stinking pits at Birkenau, before the call came for appell.

At the direction of the guards, the women arranged themselves in formation on a stretch of flat ground between the barracks and other camp buildings. The last of the sun was fading, and everyone quieted and waited to be counted.

A woman came to stand before them. Her face was pink and round, her figure just well fed enough to pull at the seams of her crisply tailored uniform. She looked almost pleasant. Someone who might, in another life, have masqueraded as a decent person.