At the bakery they would be preparing for the High Holidays, overrun with orders for honey cakes and apple cakes and babkas. Mrs. Blum would be asking, as she did every week, if the sponge cake was moist. Róża thinks of her friends and extended family, Aunt Syl and Uncle Jakob, Natan’s young nieces and cousins.

Are any of them still alive to usher in a New Year?

Is there a synagogue still standing?

She turns her head toward the wall and listens for the birds who return to perch, slantwise, on the branches outside the barn.

Chapter 12

Winter 1942

Their breaths come out in frosted puffs. Even beneath piles of hay, the tips of Shira’s ears sting with cold and her fingers and toes grow numb. When she begins to tremble, her skin clammy, Róża lies on top of her to keep her warm. Henryk sneaks in a wool blanket, a child’s hat, and some gloves.

Shira nestles her covered head low against her pillow, a sack filled with peas. Through a crack in the wall, she looks at the ice-encased tree branches, longing for the cold to stop, for the sound of the birds to come back.

Her mother hums a bit of The Snow Maiden—an opera she’s explained is about how winter must die for spring to come. But spring seems so far off.

“Mama, what about Brahms’s Scherzo? You said you’d teach me.”

Róża misses a beat as she remembers how Natan rehearsed Brahms’s Scherzo with Władysław, a most talented pianist and friend. They worked it over measure by measure as other friends meandered in and out of the music room, dunking slices of her mother’s mandelbrot into glasses of tea. Róża shuts her eyes and presses her cheek to her shoulder, striking the same deep-angled pose Natan struck, the whole left side of his face nuzzled against his violin as he played. In this way she recalls the stormy cascade at the beginning of the piece, the lyrical movement in the middle. She hums it for Shira once again.

Shira remains subdued even as Róża describes the bouncy bow strokes, the quick-tied notes. Is she lethargic from hunger? A broken spirit? Gauntness sucks at her once-round cheeks. Their food pail is at its most meager: a few turnips, a watery potato soup. According to the nicks in the rafter, today marks their one hundred and sixty-eighth day. Shira’s quiet listlessness brings forth in Róża a collision of gratitude and despair.

“Shira”—Róża’s voice strains to be cheery—“why don’t we look together at the atlas?”