Zosia wakes next with long-ago music in her head: a sleep song, a hen’s call, her mother’s gentle voice.

Mama? she asks.

But it is not her mother who touches her cheek, who takes her hand, who nurses her back to wellness.

She was with her parents in her dreams.

Sister Alicja told her that when she was sick, she called out names.

Her mother’s? Her father’s?

Maryla taught her made-up new names for them, but she only ever knew them as Mama, as Tata.

Did she yell out her own given name? This thought, too, brings a rising shame, as her hiding name has taken hold deeply within her. For so long she’s thought of herself not as Shira but as Zosia. She took her communion with it.

Zosia worries about what she’s blurted out, and she worries about what she’s left behind and forgotten. As much as possible, she keeps her mouth shut, her violin her only mouthpiece, her spoken words coming out in half-swallowed, halted bursts.

Chapter 39

Róża reaches Celestyn’s outskirts after weeks of walking through thicketed pastures, thistles biting at her ankles, her empty canteen bobbing against her chest. Dried mud cakes to her skin; her scalp crawls once again with lice. Spotting a puddle, she bends to it, bringing a handful of brown water to her lips. It tastes of ash.

Everywhere, there is smoke. Throughout the city, buildings have been bombed away, and some are still burning. But nowhere are there signs of German soldiers, German cars.

She darts down an abandoned street, head lowered, taking note of where the sewers are—she’ll drop into one if she has to. Even if she can’t retrieve Shira right away, she is determined to find the convent. And if, as it appears, the German army has in fact retreated, maybe it will be safe enough—maybe she needn’t wait much longer—to see her girl.

Róża takes cover in an alleyway behind a row of outsize refuse cans until nightfall. She wants to rummage through the cans—for food, for newspapers—but she doesn’t dare. She remains hunched and solitary in the dusky shadows. Once it is completely dark, Róża traverses the long city blocks, one bloody, blistered foot in front of the other. She skirts mounds of crumbled brick, shattered stucco roof tiles. She does not pass another soul.

Is the city under curfew? What if someone is watching from a window this very moment?

Even if the Germans are gone, she may be the target of certain Poles.