“I know, not so strong, but hardworking, dogged. Yes?”

“Róża, you have to listen to me.”

“Why didn’t he tell me to pack a bag? I could have sent him with clean clothes.”

“They forced us to dig trenches.”

“He told me, it was very hard work. Such deep trenches.”

“They had all of us line up in front of them.”

“Why they need such deep trenches, who knows, but—”

“Róża, they shot more than half of us. After we’d dug all day. I don’t know why I’m here. It’s not right that I am here, when Natan—” Oskar buried his face in his hands.

Róża stepped back, stunned.

She ran, legs quaking beneath her, home, where they lived together with her parents. Her father ushered Shira away; her mother held her as she railed and sobbed and eventually tucked her into bed. Róża blinked at the pale papered walls, the bedspread with yellow sunflowers, the wood-carved elephants, trunks entwined upon the bureau. This room—the room she shared with Natan—was unrecognizable to her. The world ceased to make sense.

Two days later the soldiers swept through their building and took her parents. In the shadowy darkness of the closet, clutched tight to Shira, inhaling the floury scent at the collar of her mother’s camel-hair coat, she could feel Shira’s eyes fixed on her, bringing to mind her own mother’s face. Róża signaled to Shira to be silent and held back her own sobs as she heard the pounding of boots on the stairs, her parents’ shrieks echoing in the wall. Her fingers encircled the metal frosting tip, buried deep in the pocket of her mother’s coat.

Afterward, alive because an altercation down the hall had distracted the soldiers from an all-out search, Róża comprehended one single fact: They could not stay here.

She waited only for soldiers to vacate the street and for the cover of night. She satcheled photographs, coins and jewels, Natan’s watch and compass and fur hat. She took Shira—yellow bird conjured from the same senselessness, cupped in her hands—and ran.

Róża watches Shira now, curled in her shadowy hiding spot, one cheek pressed against the music paper, tracing the illustration on her book’s cloth cover—a lion posed regally on a high rock—outlining it with her pointing finger. Before the worst began happening in Gracja, Róża downplayed the denigrations: the yellow stars, the marks on the doors of Jewish businesses, including her mother and Aunt Syl’s bakery. Róża only ever wanted Shira to feel pride in herself. Perhaps this is why she doesn’t tell her outright the reason they have to hide, why they are hunted. She’s not sure Shira would even understand if she tried to tell her.

The fall air nips. Dull light presses through the cracks.