All eyes turned to me, the one in a headscarf. Next to me, Father Kolbe tensed. It was kind of him, but not even his concern was enough to keep my heart from springing into my throat. Now more than ever, I wished the earth would swallow me.

A frantic SS man consulted a handful of papers. “There must have been a mistake, Herr Kommandant.”

“I don’t have time for mistakes!” Höss shouted, interrupting the man’s splutters. “I need men—workers, hard workers—and a girl isn’t fit for labor. Take care of this, Fritzsch.” Red-faced, he walked away, barking something about the sheer stupidity that ran rampant among those assigned to his camp.

When the kommandant was gone, I stared at the gravel, unable to look into Fritzsch’s eyes as they scraped over me and peeled everything away until I disintegrated into visceral terror. He’d sent me through registration just to send me to the execution wall. I was sure of it. All the female prisoners had been sent there except the Jewish woman I’d met, and she must have been spared because she served some purpose. Fear coiled around me, squeezing until I was certain it would kill me before the bullet had a chance. I tightened my fist around the tiny pawn.

The sound of approaching footsteps reached my ears, and I didn’t have to look up to know it was him. First I saw his feet, then his open palm. He must have realized I was holding something.

I didn’t have a choice. I dropped the pawn Tata had made for me into Fritzsch’s hand.

Although I expected him to walk away, he didn’t. Once I lifted my head, Fritzsch looked at me with that same eagerness I’d seen when we met on the arrival platform, as if he were a child and I was his new favorite toy.

“There’s no mistake. Daughter of intelligentsia, are you, Polack?” His cynical assumption was correct; my parents had been university graduates. I had lived under Nazi occupation long enough to know they despised intellectual Poles, planned to reduce us to a race of uneducated workers. “Unfit for labor,” he went on, assessing me. “Unfit for survival. Unfit for anything except this . . . for a time.” He gripped the pawn’s slender neck between his thumb and index finger, twisted it back and forth, back and forth, slow and calculated. His fingers whitened as he squeezed harder, harder.

A sudden snap made me flinch, then the decapitated pawn lay at my feet. My father’s last gift.