As she retreats, Róża chides herself: She must be strong; she can’t allow herself to be defeated by her fears or her punishing imagination. She leans against a sheltering tree, forcing herself to breathe in the vanilla scent of its bark—its beauty—as methodically she sharpens her trowel blade on a rock and prepares to head deeper into the woods. She must stay alive for Shira, so that she can reclaim her as she promised she would, hold her close once again. With gathered resolve, she digs around several tree trunks and finds mushrooms enough to boil into a soup.

A week later, Róża spots two women huddled where she planned to dig roots. As she takes a step back, her foot lands on a branch, causing a loud crack. The women turn and stare. Róża begins to run.

“Wait! Please.”

Hearing Yiddish, Róża stops.

As the women approach, Róża’s heart pounds in her chest. She reaches into her pocket and clutches the sharpest object she has: root clippers. But soon she sees that their expressions mirror hers; they are filled with terror and exhaustion and desperate hope.

They look related—sisters, Róża thinks—with dark hair and dark eyes, though one’s face is soft, with rounded cheeks and wide eyes, and the other is sharper, more severe.

“We saw you foraging here yesterday,” the softer-faced one says.

Róża doesn’t answer. Her hand is still clenched around the clippers.

“You’re alone?” This same one reaches into her coat pocket and presents an offering: a handful of just-dug roots. “Here.”

“Miri!” the sharper one chides.

Róża stuffs the roots into her mouth and swallows, to stay alive even if the other will now want to kill her.

But they aren’t going to kill her. They are in hiding, like her. Sisters, as Róża thought, from Warsaw before the war. The woman who gave Róża the roots—Miri—sees Róża’s worn-out boots and pulls out strips of a torn work shirt for wrapping her cold feet. And even more miraculous, she shows Róża a ripped fragment of a newspaper conveying hope: news of the Red Army’s advance in the siege of Leningrad. How much time since the paper’s printing, she doesn’t know.

Róża cannot contain her relief at being with other human beings. Women. Jews. She grills them for more recent war news. They don’t have any, but the sharper sister, Chana, declares her intention to join the resistance and fight, first chance she gets.

“I’m going to make them pay for what they did to our parents, our little brother—” She bats at her red-rimmed eyes.

Miri, looking disturbed, takes Chana’s hand.

“At least we can thank God that you and I are together.”