I took my place and scanned the faces around me. When I’d first come to Auschwitz, most prisoners had been non-Jewish Poles. Now the listless women surrounding me were mainly Jews from all over Europe, sent here as part of a demented plan to eradicate an entire race. As I studied them, I wondered which camp I would have been sent to a few weeks earlier if Hania hadn’t found my number on a transfer list. She’d bribed the prisoners responsible to remove it. Thanks to her position in the SS offices, she kept a close eye on the lists and ensured that our numbers and Izaak’s weren’t included in relocations.

When the women were situated, the Beast contained herself after one final shriek. “Scheisse-Juden!”

The command against my ears was harsher and more vicious than the wind chafing my skin. This selection was a Jewish one. Beside me, Hania didn’t react, but I reached for her, slow and cautious, until our hands met. She stroked her thumb across the back of my hand, then started to move away, but I didn’t let her go. I couldn’t.

Hania jerked free and pinned me in place with a sharp glance, and I could almost hear her telling me I should know better. Of course I knew better. But that didn’t make it easier to watch her follow the other Jewish women, who obeyed in petrified silence as they created a separate formation.

Undress, kneel, get up, lie down, don’t move, again and again. Even from a distance, Hania looked more fragile than I recalled as she moved through exercises, though it had been only three days since the roll call that had somehow transformed into a selection. As the sky began to lighten, I counted the vertebrae along her spine as she lay facedown in the snow, motionless, then examined her protruding hip bones and shoulder blades when she got up. Most prisoners were just as skeletal and flat-chested, standing beneath a sky as gray as their skin, but others, recent transfers, retained a slight roundedness, perhaps even a faint flush of health. Time hadn’t had a chance to rob them of either yet.

An unbearable whisper encroached upon my thoughts; when I held it back, it resisted, demanding to be heard. Suddenly I was immune to the cold, immune to everything but a heavy terror that pressed down upon me. The whisper asked whether or not lipstick would be enough for Hania this time.

While SS men conducted the selection with Mandel, a few female guards watched my group. I was on the outskirts of my row, so I studied the guards near me, considering my options, choosing my play. The one closest to me was young, maybe Hania’s age, bright-eyed and attractive. Diamond earrings glittered against her earlobes, thick fur lined her boots, and I imagined that the nails beneath her leather gloves were neat and manicured.