They would be beaten. Not: I would beat them. The guard had devolved responsibility, just like Martha had said.

Jess moved back outside. General Collins had been to the town on whose doorstep this abomination lay and he’d brought back with him a group of German civilians. He now made them walk through the camp, which they did, staring directly in front, seeing as little as possible. Refusing to bear witness to what had happened right beneath their unseeing gazes.

“The Germans did not do this,” one of the civilians protested. “Our Führer would not let this happen.”

What was there to say to such ignorance, when the evidence, so much terrible evidence, was right there? General Collins told the civilians they must bury the dead with their own hands. Two thousand bodies. Two thousand forgotten people buried by those who’d ignored their plight, watched over by a company of American soldiers and Jess, trying to find prayers that might bless the unblessed.

How can we pray, Jess wondered, when it is our fault too? We’d heard there were camps. Why were we so slow, so unseeing, so obtuse as to not come straight to these places and free those who needed it most?

Before they left, they learned that the people they’d found were genuinely the living dead. Unable to work or to move. More than twenty thousand women who had still been able to crawl or stumble or trudge had been sent on a death march from the camp before the Americans arrived to free them. They were the vanished, the Nacht und Nebel—the Night and Fog—mostly resistance fighters the German army had wished to render invisible. And they’d all but succeeded.

The journey back to headquarters was long and silent.

“I’ll sit next to Sparrow,” Jess said when they reached the jeep.

Even though Sparrow hadn’t been sick again, he’d withdrawn far inside himself, face pale, smile gone, eyes dull. She took his hand in hers and held it, limp and spiritless.

For the rest of the drive, Jess wondered what she would say to Bel. How she would make her believe that her camera hadn’t created the pictures, that she hadn’t zoomed in too narrowly or composed the image in such a way that it seemed worse than it actually was. That the savagery was real.

I implore you to believe this, was how she would begin, begging Bel to let the women of the camp speak, to declare to the world that their lives had, after all, not been for naught.

Night had cast a shroud over them well before they reached Dan’s HQ. Then it was another long drive back to the press camp, a drive Jess wasn’t sure she was up to. She was hugely grateful when Dan said, “Stay here tonight. There are some female translators and WACs around. I’m sure you can bunk in with them.”

She nodded. “Thanks.”

They were the only words exchanged. Dan spoke briefly to a woman exiting the mess to secure a bed for Jess. The woman smiled so brightly that Jess wanted to hold up a hand to ward her off. She told Jess to follow her and soon she was found a tent and a bedroll. But she knew she needed to shower. She had to sluice off the smell that clung to her, had to wipe away all the physical remains of the day in a way she could never erase the images and stories from her mind.