She tells him how her parents hid her in their closet; how she reached for the frosting tip in the pocket of her mother’s coat while she blocked out the awful thumping sounds, her parents stumbling down the stairs.

But she cannot manage to tell him that she’d lost Natan, shot in a trench he’d been forced to dig, and that Shira was with her there in the closet, hunched amid wool blazers and camel-hair overcoats—yet is not with her still.

The words Róża swallows while awake script her dreams while she sleeps.

She is crocheting tiny bird scarves for the coming winter. Her fingers work the yarn quickly, three neat stitches across and one stitch down, over and over again. But it’s not yarn at all, it is copper-wrapped gut spooling from the pocket of a splayed-open violin case, and each tug tightens the wire’s grip on the small bird tangled within it. Three across, one down; three across, one down. Róża stitches on, until she hears a frantic flapping, a strangled chirp.

“Nie!”

“You had another nightmare.” Aron leans over her, troubled.

Róża tries to shake it off. Her hands throb. Splotches bloom red on her skin, as if pecked. Did she harm herself in sleep? Róża turns toward the earthen wall. She tucks her hands gingerly beneath the backs of her thighs so Aron won’t see.

For weeks, they sleep entwined, Róża’s head pressed against Aron’s shoulder, his arm wrapped around her hip. Until the night, when time both stops and pulses, when Róża sets herself free to feel and to remember—then all that has been exiled rises up and it is her first night with Natan, his soft lips on hers and her body opening to the sweet, sharp wholeness that brought her unknown pleasure, unimaginable hope. And it is night after night with Henryk—his eyes, then his heavy frame atop hers, Róża praying that Shira would remain asleep. And it is the night when Shira was taken. Gone. The feel of her padded hands and the smoothness of her belly, the smell of her hair, her wide-open curious stare. As Aron moves gently inside her, Róża buries her face in his chest. He wraps his arms tight around her.

As Róża pairs with Aron, Chana pairs with Hershel. Hershel cooks alongside Chana on her shifts and Chana accompanies Hershel on his walk each day to the patrol station.

Róża is surprised to see Chana holding a gun one morning.

“Yes, I am learning to shoot. Hershel is teaching me. Stop looking at me like that.”

Róża is repairing torn jackets late one afternoon when Hershel rushes by, shouting, “German soldiers! They are coming!”

In a matter of seconds everyone is running, some to the bunks, others to the steepest area of the forest. Questions fly from every direction.

“How close?”

“How many?”