THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS extremely important information and significant spoilers. I implore you to read it, but not until you have read the book. You have been warned!

First, allow me to clarify that the Auschwitz portrayed in this novel is not an entirely factual representation of the camp. To study Auschwitz, I relied heavily on Danuta Czech’s Auschwitz Chronicle and Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum’s Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, but I took various creative liberties for story purposes, some detailed below. My hope is that this book will encourage you to dive deeper into history. Auschwitz is where real people—more than a million of them—lived, suffered, and died, the overwhelming majority being European Jews. My own two feet have walked its grounds, and I have no words to describe the experience—the sorrow, cruelty, and injustice, yet the bravery and resilience of the victims. Sadly, some claim the Holocaust never happened, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary and eyewitnesses who still live. Bear in mind, the Second World War ended less than eighty years before the time of this book’s publication. That is not very long ago. Please look to survivors, their testimonies, and listen and learn from them. Please turn to experts who have dedicated their lives to educating the world on these horrors—the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and many others. Please do not forget.

This book began with Saint Maksymilian Kolbe, one of my favorite saints. Father Kolbe was a Conventual Franciscan friar and Polish Catholic priest who sheltered Jews in his monastery and published anti-Nazi materials. He was arrested and sent to Auschwitz in 1941; beginning in 1939, Auschwitz was a labor camp for male political prisoners before the Final Solution—the Nazi’s plan for the genocide of the Jews—was implemented in 1942, transforming it into an extermination camp for Jews. According to eyewitness testimony, Father Kolbe was a positive, supportive influence on his fellow inmates and ultimately offered his life for one of ten men chosen by the camp deputy, Karl Fritzsch, to starve to death in reprisal for another inmate’s escape. I learned so much about him through Patricia Treece’s biography, A Man for Others. This novel came to me as the idea of a young female prisoner visiting Father Kolbe in Block 11, Cell 18, where he spent two weeks without food or water before being murdered by lethal injection. This girl had an intense need to be with him, so much so that she was willing to risk this visit, to try to comfort him as, I sensed, he had comforted her. Because women were not imprisoned in Auschwitz until March 1942, when the first transport of Jewish women arrived, I asked myself if I could come up with a way to make this impossible scenario possible.