THIRTY-SIX

In February 1945, snow covered the naked bodies piled outside the camp’s newly built crematorium. Putrid black smoke roiled up from the chimneys.

Isabelle stood, shivering, in her place at the morning Appell—roll call. It was the kind of cold that ached in the lungs and froze eyelashes and burned fingertips and toes.

She waited for the roll call to end, but no whistle blared.

Snow was still falling. In the prisoners’ ranks, some women started to cough. Another one pitched face-first into the mushy, muddy snow and couldn’t be raised. A bitter wind blew across the camp.

Finally, an SS officer on horseback rode past the women, eyeing them one by one. He seemed to notice everything—the shorn hair, the flea bites, the blue tips of frostbitten fingers, and the patches that identified them as Jews, or homosexuals, or political prisoners. In the distance, bombs fell, exploded like distant thunder.

When the officer pointed out a woman, she was immediately pulled from the line.

He pointed at Isabelle, and she was yanked nearly off her feet, dragged out of line.

The SS squads surrounded the women who’d been chosen, forced them to form two lines. A whistle blared. “Schnell! Eins! Zwei! Drei!”

Isabelle marched forward, her feet aching with cold, her lungs burning. Micheline fell into step beside her.

They had made it a mile or so outside of the gates when a lorry rumbled past them, its back heaped high with naked corpses.

Micheline stumbled. Isabelle reached out, holding her friend upright.

And still they marched.

At last they came to a snowy field blanketed in fog.

The Germans separated the women again. Isabelle was yanked away from Micheline and pushed into a group of other Nacht und Nebel political prisoners.

The Germans shoved them together and shouted at them and pointed until Isabelle understood.

The woman beside her screamed when she saw what they’d been chosen for. Road crew.

“Don’t,” Isabelle said just as a truncheon hit the woman hard enough to send her sprawling.

Isabelle stood as numb as a plow mule as the Nazis slipped rough leather harness straps over her shoulders and tightened them at her waist. She was harnessed to eleven other young women, elbow-to-elbow. Behind them, attached to the harness, was a steel wheel the size of an automobile.

Isabelle tried to take a step, couldn’t.

A whip cracked across her back, setting her flesh on fire. She clutched the harness straps and tried again, taking a step forward. They were exhausted. They had no strength and their feet were freezing on the snowy ground, but they had to move or they’d be whipped. Isabelle angled forward, straining to move, to get the stone wheel turning. The straps bit into her chest. One of the women stumbled, fell; the others kept pulling. The leather harness creaked and the wheel turned.

They pulled and pulled and pulled, creating a road from the snow-covered ground behind them. Other women used shovels and wheelbarrows to clear the way.

All the while, the guards sat in pods, gathered around open fires, talking and laughing among themselves.

Step.

Step.

Step.

Isabelle couldn’t think of anything else. Not the cold, not her hunger or thirst, not the flea and lice bites that covered her body. And not real life. That was the worst of all. The thing that would get her to miss a step, to draw attention to herself, to be hit or whipped or worse.

Step.

Just think about moving.

Her leg gave out. She crumpled to the snow. The woman beside her reached out. Isabelle grabbed the shaking, blue-white hand, gripped it in her numb fingers, and crawled back to stand. Gritting her teeth, she took another pain-filled step. And then another.

*   *   *

The siren went off at 3:30 A.M., as it did every morning for roll call. Like her nine bunkmates, Isabelle slept in every bit of clothing she had—ill-fitting shoes and underwear; the baggy, striped dress with her prisoner identification number sewn on the sleeve. But none of it provided warmth. She tried to encourage the women around her to hold strong, but she herself was weakening. It had been a terrible winter; all of them were dying, some quickly, of typhus and cruelty, and some slowly of starvation and cold, but all were dying.

Isabelle had had a fever for weeks, but not high enough to send her to the hospital block, and last week she’d been beaten so badly she’d lost consciousness at work—and then she’d been beaten for falling down. Her body, which couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds, was crawling with lice and covered in open sores.

Ravensbrück had been dangerous from the beginning, but now, in March 1945, it was even more so. Hundreds of women had been killed or gassed or beaten in the last month. The only women who’d been left alive were the Verfügbaren—the disposables, who were sick or frail or elderly—and the women of Nacht und Nebel, “Night and Fog.” Political prisoners, like Isabelle and Micheline. Women of the Resistance. The rumor was that the Nazis were afraid to gas them now that the tide of war had turned.

“You’re going to make it.”

Isabelle realized she’d been weaving in place, beginning to fall.

Micheline Babineau gave her a tired, encouraging smile. “Don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying,” Isabelle said. They both knew that the women who cried at night were the women who died in the morning. Sadness and loss were drawn in with each breath but never expelled. You couldn’t give in. Not for a second.

Isabelle knew this. In the camp, she fought back the only way she knew how—by caring for her fellow prisoners and helping them to stay strong. All they had in this hell was each other. In the evenings, they crouched in their dark bunks, whispering among themselves, singing softly, trying to keep alive some memory of who they’d been. Over the nine months Isabelle had been here, she had found—and lost—too many friends to count.

But Isabelle was tired now, and sick.

Pneumonia, she was pretty sure. And typhus, maybe. She coughed quietly and did her job and tried to draw no attention. The last thing she wanted was to end up in the “tent”—a small brick building with tarp walls, into which the Nazis put any woman with an incurable disease. It was where women went to die.

“Stay alive,” Isabelle said softly.

Micheline nodded encouragingly.

They had to stay alive. Now more than ever. Last week, new prisoners had come with news: the Russians were advancing across Germany, smashing and defeating the Nazi army. Auschwitz had been liberated. The Allies were said to be winning one victory after another in the west.

A race for survival was on and everyone knew it. The war was ending. Isabelle had to stay alive long enough to see an Allied victory and a free France.

A whistle blared at the front of the line.

A hush fell over the crowd of prisoners—women, mostly, and a few children. In front of them, a trio of SS officers paced with their dogs.

The camp Kommandant appeared in front of them. He stopped and clasped his hands behind his back. He called out something in German and the SS officers advanced. Isabelle heard the words “Nacht und Nebel.”

An SS officer pointed at her, and another one pushed through the crowd, knocking women to the ground, stepping on or over them. He grabbed Isabelle’s skinny arm and pulled hard. She stumbled along beside him, praying her shoes wouldn’t fall off—it was a whipping offense to lose a shoe, and if she did, she’d spend the rest of this winter with a bare, frostbitten foot.

Not far away, she saw Micheline being dragged off by another officer.

All Isabelle could think was that she needed to keep her shoes on.

An SS officer called out a word Isabelle recognized.