Another more obvious liberty, as noted, was imprisoning a girl in a men’s camp. Non-Jews were not subjected to a selection process as Jews were; however, in these smaller, earlier transports prior to the Final Solution, most men were spared. A few exceptions—including men unable to perform hard labor and a rare handful of women or children sent with the men or arrested in surrounding towns—were shot at the death wall in the courtyard between Blocks 10 and 11. By contrast, later, massive transports of Jewish men, women, and children were heavily scrutinized and the unfit sent to gas chambers. I made Maria’s transport larger and busier than it likely would have been historically, making it easier for Maria to stray from her family.

When women first arrived at Auschwitz in spring 1942, they were given their own numbering system and kept in separate blocks in the main camp before moving to the women’s sector in Birkenau when the camp was expanded. I learned much about what those first women experienced from Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz by survivor Rena Kornreich Gelissen with Heather Dune Macadam. Maria arrives in 1941, during a time when women and girls would have been executed.

I felt that it was only right for a Jewish woman to be the lone female prisoner in the camp before Maria’s registration, a small, symbolic way to recognize and commemorate that the first female inmates were Jewish. This led me to Hania. Regarding Hania’s registration, I created an SS guard whose prominent, fictional German family name gives him significant power, so he secures permission to register her (after she offers to prostitute herself to him in exchange for her life). Many women used their bodies for survival, often with prisoners in positions of authority rather than with SS guards. I wanted Hania involved with a guard to heighten the stakes, because this would have defied race defilement laws, and to demonstrate how much she was willing to risk to survive for her sons. She and Maria are housed with men and given prisoner numbers in the same groupings as the men’s. The first female transport received the uniforms of executed Soviet POWs, not the blue-and-gray-striped garbs commonly recognized as camp uniforms. I put my characters in stripes for symbolic purposes. Since the series of numbers for women had not been created yet, Hania’s number comes from a transport of twenty-seven prisoners registered on April 18, 1941, sent by the Gestapo from various cities. Warsaw is not mentioned, but I took creative liberty. Maria’s number is consecutive with Father Kolbe’s. I reasoned that Fritzsch wouldn’t go to the trouble of granting separate quarters or establishing different number sequences for two women who, frankly, should have been dead, and whom he doesn’t expect to survive long.