“We will. We’ll go to Paris and I’ll teach you how to speak French, and we’ll use every one of the phrases from my parents’ guidebook. ‘Can you recommend a good dentist? Does this hotel have a laundry service? What time is the next train to Biarritz?’”

“That sounds wonderful.”

“I won’t use any of the words I’ve learned here, though. I’ll never say them again. I won’t even think them. No oberaufseherin or appell. No schnell or steh auf or blöde sau. And no strings of numbers instead of my name. None of those words. Never again, not ever, after this war is done.”

Chapter 29

The gray days blurred together, and winter settled deep upon the valley, and Nina could no longer remember what it was like to feel the sun on her face. November—gone. December—gone. A new year begun, and still the war raged on.

Her days were long and lonely, for the women in the kitchens were forbidden to talk to one another, and when the men gave her an order she was allowed only to nod or say “ja.” She worked in silence, her mind occupied by memories of happy days and comfortable nights and the smiling ghosts of those she had lost, and if there were moments when she could bear the loneliness no more, and she wept silently over her work, there was no one to notice or care.

It was some weeks before she realized that one of the local workers, despite every order to the contrary, was trying to help her and the other women. He was careful about it, and only intervened when the guards were distracted or absent, but he was watchful and persistent and was never far away when Nina needed to lift the heaviest of the pots from the sink to the draining boards. He even saved her from a beating when she splashed water on the floor, claiming that he had jostled her first.

She never spoke with the man, was too cowed by the guards to even whisper her thanks, and had he ever walked past her in the yard she wouldn’t have recognized his face, for she was careful never to look him in the eye.

She knew his first name was Georg, for that’s what the other men called him. She knew he suffered from pains in his hands, just as she did, for she noticed how he rubbed at his arthritic knuckles and sometimes stopped to massage them with a salve he scooped from a little tin.

He knew she was a Jew, for her uniform still bore its yellow symbol, and she had to wonder if it mattered to him. If he, like so many others, had been taught to hate her for it. Or if he had decided to embrace kindness instead.