As the day approaches, Zosia and the other girls excitedly try on lacy white dresses and shiny white shoes, stored in the chapel closet, pulled out each spring. Kasia offers to braid Zosia’s hair—“It will look pretty for your service!”—but Zosia refuses. Kasia is trying to cheer her, Zosia knows, as when she invited her to join in on the prank of putting potato skins upon the mouths of the portraits. But Zosia worries. Supplies have grown scarcer and Sister Alicja has had to stretch out the bleachings of her hair. She doesn’t want Kasia to spot brown at the roots. And if she offers to weave a daisy crown?

Zosia takes to wearing a white kerchief over her head daily, tied with the tiniest knot at the back. She studies hard for her communion. “Communion” is not a word she understands, though she thinks it might mean connection, and she feels she should want connection with Jesus, who the nuns say is the greatest teacher of all. Safe within the parables, prayers, and hymns—nowhere a spark for others’ hatred of her; nowhere the danger of losing all she might come to love—she finds her devotion to Him.

When her name—Zosia Nowakówna—is called, no other name stirs within her, even as the air’s grassy scent evokes hay, nights entwined with her mother. She solemnly walks forward and kneels, opening her mouth to receive the sacrament, dry and papery. Afterward, she sings and prays. The littlest children think she is trying to be a nun.

Chapter 38

Róża was emboldened when she left the camp, but now, in the woods without company or protection, knowing that Germans could be nearby, she struggles to keep her doubts in check. What if I am caught? What will become of Shira then? Several times she comes close to backtracking, but she propels onward: she must see that Shira is all right.

For days, it pours. Her boots soak again; her feet chill, then chafe. The wetness seeps to her bones. She sleeps in burrows of sticky mud and damp pine needles. When she walks, she varies her steps, aiming always for the cover of leaves rather than the earthen ground that sucks at her soles and imprints deep tracks. She prays that Natan’s compass has her properly directed due south.

Her last substantial meal was the soup she made at the new campsite. Since then, she’s rationed the five potatoes she stuffed into her pockets before leaving—too few, yet more than she was entitled to take for herself.

She has one potato left.

Zosia is folding cloth napkins at the long refectory table—though there is hardly any food, only thistle soup and groats and dusty bread—when Sister Nadzieja rushes in. She is dressed to travel and she is holding Zosia’s coat and hat.

“Come, Zosia.You must get into the carriage right away.”