“Things were okay for us until October 1944, when there was a mutiny in the camp. My friend was involved and he was hanged. Then, with the Red Army just a few miles away, they marched us out. That march was the worst thing. Worse than anything I had experienced before. People dropped in the snow and were shot where they fell. Eventually we were herded onto trains and went to Bergen-Belsen, which was much worse than Auschwitz and more terrible than I describe. For a start, there was no food. Nothing. I starved for two months. If I hadn’t been so well fed in Block Twenty-four, I would certainly have died at Belsen. When the British liberated the camp in April 1945, I weighed just seventy-five pounds. But I was alive. That was the main thing. Nothing else matters besides that, does it?”

“Nothing at all,” I said.

She shrugged. “It happened. I had sex four hundred and sixteen times at Auschwitz. I counted every one of them so that I knew exactly what my survival cost me. I’m proud of my survival. And I’m telling you because of that, and because I want people to know what was done to Jews and communists and Gypsies and homosexuals in the name of National Socialism. I’m also telling you because I like you, Bernie, and because if you should happen to want to go to bed with me, then it’s best you know all the facts. After the war I married an Ami. He ran away when he found out what kind of woman I was. Eric thinks that it bothers me, but it doesn’t really. It doesn’t bother me at all. And why should it matter how many men I slept with? I never killed anyone. To me that would seem like a much worse thing to bear. Like Eric. He shot some French partisans in retaliation for the killing of some men in a German army ambulance. Well, I wouldn’t want his conscience. I think to have murder on your conscience would be something much worse than the memory of what I have to live with. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

I touched her face with my fingertips. There were no scars on her cheek, but I couldn’t help think of the scars she had inside. At least four hundred of them, probably. What she had been through made my own experience seem ordinary, though I knew it wasn’t. I had seen some service during the Great War, so I was probably better prepared for it than she had been. Some men might be repelled by what she had told me—like her Ami. I wasn’t. Perhaps it would have been better for me if I had been. But what she said made me think we had something in common.