Their resistance efforts—and the hot iron Lidia occasionally uses to smooth jagged bits of metal—prompt Róża to think of Chana. Chana told Róża how she once used her mother’s clothes iron to finish a crème brûlée (incidentally, her most delicious egg dish), unleashing the fury of her mother and Miri—who had a date with Ari Bauer that night and had planned to press and then wear her nicest pleated skirt. Chana insisted the sugar would burn off and the iron would be good as new, but it was wrecked, repurposed for caramelizing projects only.

As she remembers it, a tightness rises from the pit of Róża’s stomach and catches in her throat as the image of Miri, splayed on the forest floor, calls up the stubborn flare of refusal to accept Shira’s death.

So long as she hasn’t seen her girl’s body amid the rubble, can’t she cling to the possibility that Shira is still alive?

Late summer, Russian tanks roll into Celestyn, signaling the liberation of the city. Lidia peels back a corner of the shop’s black window covering to see the streets fill with people, shouting and hugging, kissing and crying. Bells from every church in the city begin tolling and toll on and on without ceasing.

Róża ventures out, apprehensively, her Semitic looks exposed in broad daylight. She can’t find her footing amid the chaos and ruin, the jostling of people who stare at her and step widely out of her path as she passes. Her whole body quakes as she walks, as she poses questions on her lips. She is determined to find out what she can about the orphans of Siostry Felicjanki.

Some call Róża “kike” and stiffen and bristle around Lidia, turning heel in scorn. Yet one kindly woman who refused to evacuate a flat near ul. Poniatowskiego tells Róża of carriages circling the convent gate hours before the bombings. Another reports a nun leading a line of small girls along the cobbles. Róża pulls the photo fold from her pocket, torn and water damaged. “Please. Do you remember seeing her among them?” She points, with a shaking hand, to the faded photograph of Shira.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know.”

Róża goes from ministry to ministry, inquiring about the possibility of a Jewish girl hidden within the Felicjan orphanage. She meets with pitying looks and discomfited head shakes, but no useful information. Eventually she returns to the ruined convent area, mounds of rubble streaked pink by the dusk sky.

More than anything, she hopes to find someone who will tell her that the convent was evacuated, that the orphans were moved to safety before the bombings. Instead she meets a woman who witnessed two nuns and their wards caught in the destruction.

“I saw it with my own eyes. Those poor little children. The nuns too. Bless their souls.”