Róża scans the loft. If she’d kept even one ruby or a small bag of yeast, she’d have something to barter with at the next hiding place. In the corner, she sees Shira’s blanket amid a collection of tiny hay nests, each lined with a puff of rabbit fur. She checks her pockets for the photographs, Natan’s watch and compass. Her fingers brush against her mother’s frosting tip.

When Henryk comes in that night, Róża again expects him to tell her they must leave the barn. She braces herself, fearing the journey to the next village, the possibility of refusal from the merchant’s wife. But he does not evict them. Instead, it is the usual nightly visit.

Days later, a neighbor corners Krystyna as she is pinning clothes on the line and inquires about the boy Dariusz.

“What about him?” Krystyna asks.

“I saw him hanging around here. Was he a friend of your boys?”

“He was Piotr’s classmate—” Krystyna’s voice is gravel.

“Well,” the neighbor keens, “he’s been taken.”

“Taken?”

She leans in closer to Krystyna, eyes glinting. “Borys turned him in. Suspected he had a contagion. You know how the Germans deal with that—”

Róża sees Krystyna’s face blanch. “A contagion?” Krystyna asks limply.

“Yes. It’s good he’s gone from our boys.”

Róża shifts and lowers herself beneath hay. For the next several hours she doesn’t dare peer out at the road for fear of seeing sugar cookies piled high on plates, of hearing castrati jokes, of witnessing Piotr being dragged away.

Chapter 9

Autumn 1941

Róża wakes, cold and stiff. Since the weather turned, she has positioned herself to block Shira from the draft that presses in and embroiders the wall cracks with early morning frost. But now Shira has her pinned, and the slightest attempt to extend a leg sets her calf muscles seizing. She can’t even snake an arm up to scratch her scalp—infested with lice despite constant hair braiding—lest she awaken Shira and begin even earlier the challenge of keeping her quiet through yet another day. When will it end? The silent counting contests and statue games get them only so far before Shira is tapping out her music, what seem like full-blown symphonies she can hardly keep contained.

Pressed against the floorboards, the hay tamped down, the back of Róża’s head aches. At the point when she can’t take the position any longer, she shifts a hip a little at a time, feeling Natan’s no-longer-ticking watch press against her thigh. Shira doesn’t wake. Gratefully, Róża drops back to sleep.