I still didn’t understand quite what it all meant—or how it had kept him from coming back to me. “What do you do, exactly?”

He shook his head. “I can’t say. It’s terribly dangerous work, though, fighting the Germans in many different ways. That’s why I had to stay away from you, even after I came back. You see, most people who are a part of this don’t live very long.”

“No...” I said, stung by the notion that something might happen to him. I moved closer to Krys and he put his arm around me.

“I didn’t want to cause you pain. And I didn’t want to put you in harm’s way. I’m not worried for myself. But if I were caught, they would go after everyone I loved. I didn’t come back because I needed to protect you. I still care about you more than anything. But I cannot see you hurt. So you see now why we couldn’t be together.”

“And why we still can’t.” I straightened, pulling away from him.

He nodded grimly. “It’s the only way.”

“Do you think you can defeat the Germans?” I asked incredulously.

“I don’t.” His tone was blunt. “We are no match for their weaponry or their numbers.”

“Then why do it?” He was throwing away his future—and ours together—for an impossible chance. How could someone give their whole life to a fight that at the end of the day could not possibly make a difference?

“Because when people look back on the history of this time, at what happened, they should see that we tried to do something,” he said with determination. I tried to imagine this awful time as a moment in the past, after the world had restored order, but found that I could not. “We can’t sit here and wait for the outside world to do nothing while thousands die.” His eyes grew dark and stormy. “It’s so much worse than everyone thinks, Ella. Thousands upon thousands of people have been arrested and imprisoned in labor camps.”

“You’re talking about the Jews.” I saw Sadie’s face in my mind.

“Mostly, yes. But it isn’t just them. They’ve arrested priests and professors and Roma and homosexuals.” My heart cried out, thinking of Maciej. Surely things couldn’t be that bad in Paris as well. But once I had thought the same about Kraków, and after all of the horrible things I’d witnessed these past few months, I knew that nowhere was safe. Krys continued, “They aren’t really just being sent to labor camps, like the Germans say. They’re being shot in quarries and forests, or sent to death camps right here in Poland where they are being killed in large numbers with gas.” I inhaled sharply. I’d seen the cruelty with my own eyes when I witnessed the woman jumping from the bridge with her own children, heard about the camps from one of the Germans at Ana Lucia’s lunch. But that had not prepared me for the horrors Krys now shared.