When she is on the move through the woods, Róża trains her eyes on the rippled patterns that wind gusts carve into fallen snow and on the prisms of colored light that dapple the white forest floor. She propels herself forward, rubbing her thumb against the smooth wooden handle of her trowel—the single most important tool she has, the thing keeping her alive—as she digs out shelter, digs out roots. When she makes a fire, she sees flickers of indigo, rare amid the yellow-orange flames. But when she closes her eyes, Róża sees only darkness.

She sets animal traps the way Henryk told her, yet each time she checks them, weak but hopeful, they gape empty. Misery overtakes her, as she is a failure at hunting, and she knows that what vegetation lurks under snow here is not enough to subsist on. She shivers constantly. It’s safer, and better for foraging, to move camps, but maintaining a fire conserves matches—and she has just twenty-two left. If she dies here, from hunger or cold, she will leave Shira utterly alone.

In a dugout framed by thin crossing boughs, Róża loses track of time and place. She has no sense of whether she’s slept, how long it’s been since she’s last eaten. She no longer knows how many sunsets have passed, how many knots to tie on her string.

Delirium delivers a dust storm, sand whipping at her skin, stripping the flesh from her bones. Burial by a cacophony of sound—the pounding of drums, the whirling strum of guitars, the wail of bagpipes—too loud to bear. She pounds her head against the dirt floor, hoping to make it stop.

She closes her eyes to dream-images of Shira—curled up and listening to lullabies, one hand holding her tiny imaginary bird, the other her blanket—and her dreams conjure the stitches she hid amid the blanket’s piping. Róża cannot dream of Shira without her blanket, and the dreams turn into nightmares as the sewn letters—proof of her daughter’s Jewishness, her name—transmute into thick vines that squeeze and strangle her child. How could I have been so foolish?

Róża wakes, clammy. She curls tight in her burrow, in disbelief that she is here alone, living like an animal, and that her family members, all of them, are gone from her. She cannot manage to get warm again; not now, after the sweats. The ground feels like a sheet of ice beneath her. The air is damp, and her skin could itch her into madness. If she had current news, maybe she’d learn that this horror was ending and she could get on her way, get back to Shira. But alone in the woods, she cannot know what is happening in the war.