Ettie had heard rumors of underground groups that rescued foreign Jews, young people, and children and fought against the Germans, creating as much chaos as possible, destroying roads and train tracks with homemade bombs made of cheap ingredients, match heads, gunpowder, old nails and tacks, as they did their best to remove the most evil players among the Nazis stationed in their cities and towns. To prove that she, too, was ready to take radical action, Ettie challenged herself. There were days when she didn’t eat or drink, merely to toughen herself, and when she had time she often did push-ups of the sort her little brothers used to do, to keep her body in shape. One evening she took a sharp knife from the kitchen. In the shed where she slept, she cut an M into her arm in memory of her sister so that she would always remember what she was fighting for. In her faith she was never to cut herself, not in service of an idol or in the throes of grief, but Ettie’s faith was gone, and that command no longer mattered. She remembered Queen Esther’s cry to God. Why did you leave me? I call out to You in the day and You don’t answer.

Ettie was no longer the Orthodox girl who did as she was told. She was someone else entirely. To prove this to herself, she broke every rule she could. She worked on Friday nights, she ate pork, she let her hair loose and didn’t cover her head, she spoke with men she didn’t know while she served them their dinner, she didn’t burn candles or respect the Sabbath. God had forsaken her, and in turn she had forsaken His ways and His word. People barely glanced at her; she was thin and unkempt, with a haunted look in her eyes, no one worth looking at. This was the way she wanted it. Let her be invisible, a shadow who was overlooked. It was easier to pick up information if she went unnoticed, and plain girls always went unnoticed. She knew that thousands of young men and women, both French and Jewish, had escaped forced labor to disappear into the forests or safe houses in villages and towns in order to fight back against the Germans.

This was what Ettie wished for. A way to fight back.