“Hiding?” the other woman at the table asked.

“Yes,” Colonel Maust replied. “There were a few Jews who managed to escape when the ghetto was liquidated, mostly to the neighborhoods along the river.”

“That close to where I live!” the woman gasped. I understood then that her horrified look had not been out of concern for those arrested, but rather her own well-being. “How dangerous!” One would have thought from her voice that she was talking about hardened criminals.

A mother with two children, I wanted to say. A danger to the very existence of our city. Of course, I did not. “What will happen to them?” I asked instead.

“The woman who jumped? I assume that she and her children will feed the fishes.” Colonel Maust laughed at his own cruel joke and the others joined in. I wanted to reach over and slap his fat face.

I swallowed back my anger. “The Jews who are arrested, I mean. The ghetto has been closed. So where will they go?”

Ana Lucia shot me daggers for continuing to raise the subject. But one of the Germans at the far end of the table answered. “The able-bodied may go to Płaszów for a time,” he said between mouthfuls of apple pie. He was a slim, sinewy man, with dark beady eyes and a face like a ferret’s. “It’s a labor camp just outside the city.”

“And the others?”

He paused for a beat. “They will be sent to Auschwitz.”

“What’s that?” I was familiar with the town of Oświęcim, about an hour west of the city. I had heard mention of a camp there called by the Germanic name of the town, whispered references to a place for Jews more awful than the rest. Only no one could confirm the rumors, people said, because no one ever returned from there. I looked the German in the eye, daring him to acknowledge the truth in front of everyone.

He did not hesitate. “Let’s just say they won’t be coming back to dirty your neighborhood again.”

“Even the women and children?” I asked.

He shrugged indifferently. “They are all Jews to us.”

He met my eyes without blinking, and looking into the darkness there, I saw everything that he had not said, of imprisonment and death that awaited the Jews. The woman on the bridge had sooner jumped than abandon herself and her children to such a fate.

Ana Lucia flashed daggers at me. “Enough questions.” She put her hand on Colonel Maust’s arm. “Darling, let’s not speak of such things in polite company and ruin our lunch. My stepdaughter was just leaving.”

“I must be going as well,” Colonel Maust said, folding his napkin.

“Must you?” Ana Lucia asked, seeming to deflate.

“Excuse me.” Not wanting to witness their farewell, I stood abruptly and pushed my chair back from the table so hard that the coffee cups rattled. I hurried from the room and up the stairs to the garret. There was a strange ringing in my ears as I processed what the German had said. The Jews were being taken to camps—all of them. What had I thought? I berated myself. I knew the ghetto had been emptied. Still, it had been easier to tell myself that the Jewish occupants had simply been “relocated” to live somewhere else—or to not think about it at all. Now the truth was laid before me impossible to ignore. The Jews were being imprisoned and used as slave labor, or worse.