THE CAMP, THEY soon discovered, was a small armaments factory, set up only weeks before to produce submachine guns. Nina had hoped that she and Stella would be allowed to work together, but instead she was sent to the kitchens and Stella to the foundry. Alarming images of molten metal and blazing furnaces came to mind, but there was nothing she could do without marking herself as a troublemaker; no protest she could raise that would make the slightest difference. She watched her friend march away, across the muddied appell ground to a shambling row of brick-built workshops, and turned to follow her own group to the kitchens, which were just next door to their barracks.

She and the other women were forbidden from doing any of the cooking, which was the sole province of local laborers, all of them men, all of them too old for military service. Instead she was set to washing dishes, so many that Sisyphus would have declined to take her place at the sinks, and her only tools for the task were a threadbare rag, a pail of sand, and a jar of caustic lye soap.

By midday her hands were raw from the paste of sand and soap that she used for the dirtiest of the pots and pans. By evening her fingertips were cracking and bleeding and her forearms itched unbearably from the hours of immersion in greasy water.

Stella returned from the foundry even more miserable, her hands and arms marked by countless small burns, like bee stings but a hundred times more painful.

“I was filling molds with metal,” she explained. “The men pour the molten metal into these smaller containers that look a bit like pitchers, only without any handles, and we have to pick them up with tongs and fill the molds for the gun parts.”

“With your bare hands?” Nina asked, swallowing her own complaints about soap and sand and greasy water.

“The tongs aren’t hot. And they gave us leather aprons so our uniforms wouldn’t catch on fire. These are from all the sparks.” Stella held out her arms, looking them over, tracing her fingers over the myriad burns.

“Can’t they find men to do that work?”

Stella shrugged. “There are plenty of men in the foundry, but they’re busy with the furnaces. And it’s not so bad, you know. We’re inside. We’re not up to our knees in a muddy field. It could be worse.”

She was right, of course. So why could Nina not stop herself from hoping their lives could become just a fraction more bearable?