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Day three. Day four. Day five. The train continues east. Always east.

The cars remain locked. They wait. Another day. Another night.

Finally, the door slides open. Andrée’s eyes blink in the blinding light. But there is fresh air finally, despite the shouting and the barking of dogs and the guards with their whips.

“Out! Move!”

Andrée finds her legs can barely support her weight. Her lips are cracked with thirst. Hunger burns in her stomach. She’s weak. But somehow she survived the journey. How many of them made it? How many died? She doesn’t know and finds she doesn’t want to know.

She looks around the platform, fenced in by barbed wire. Guard towers overlook the station and uniformed women with whips patrol. And beyond are gates, buildings, barracks, smokestacks.

Andrée reads the sign above the gates: Ravensbrück.

They’ve arrived in the notorious concentration camp for women. Andrée closes her eyes. This nightmare is real.

“Stay close,” Jeanette whispers beside her. “Whatever happens, we stay together. Yes?”

“Yes,” Andrée whispers back. “Together.”

They’re herded toward the gates. Whipped if they move too slowly. Beaten if they stumble. And then they’re inside the camp.

They have arrived in hell. But Andrée is alive.

Against all odds, she’s alive. She survived rue le Peletier. She survived Fresnes. She survived the journey from Paris. She will survive this too. For Josie. For her parents. For everyone who’s counting on her to live. To bear witness.

She will survive.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Reeling from their journey, the women are marched through the chaos of the camp to the French area where other women greet them, gawking at the clothing some of them wear. While dirty and unkempt, some of the newcomers are dressed in the clothes they were snatched in only days or weeks ago: well-cut dresses, skirts, blouses, and shoes. One woman has a Chanel scarf draped around her elegant neck.

Andrée and the other new arrivals are stunned by the appearance of the thousands of women crammed into such a small space. It is obvious the women of Ravensbrück have been beaten and starved, that disease is rampant. With night falling, the new arrivals are herded down a narrow alleyway into a small clearing. There they spend their first night.

Side by side, they each claim a small space to lie down for the first time in days and sleep. Andrée and Jeanette whisper long into the night, trying to guess what fate awaits them.

The next morning the women are forced into groups and taken into what they are told is the quarantine block. Andrée and Jeanette try to make eye contact with any of the dozens of women for whom this block is already home. The women stretch out on their small cots, claiming their space. Their unspoken message: no room here. Eventually Andrée catches the eye of one woman who nods begrudgingly. Come here. I’ll make room for you.

Only when all the newcomers have been given a bunk to share—each bedbug-ridden straw mattress holding two bodies, sometimes three—do the conversations begin. The newcomers are peppered with requests for news of beloved France. The whispers of joy at learning the Allies are on French soil and advancing on Paris carry from one bunk to another.

“Our turn,” Andrée says gently. “Can we ask what to expect here?”

Silence. Finally . . .

“I’m sorry you spent your first night where you did,” one of the women, two bunks down, says.

“It was fine. We got to lie down for the first time in days. I slept,” Jeanette says.

The reticence of the old-timers doesn’t go unnoticed by Andrée. “There’s something you’re not telling us.”

“They deserve to know. They’ll find out eventually,” one woman says.

“Tell us,” Jeanette says.

“You spent your first night in this hellhole in the execution yard. Where they have taken so many of our sisters to be shot, for asking for food, for water, for nothing at all. The ground you slept on runs red with the blood of women who came before you.”

Silence. This is what survival here will look like. Swallowing what cannot be swallowed. Standing on ground soaked in the blood of the dead. And living on in defiance.

Each day, hundreds more women arrive at the camp. Women from all over occupied Europe, rounded up in their home countries or transferred from other camps. The French women are crowded into increasingly overcrowded barracks. Andrée asks everyone she encounters about Tina, but no one has heard of her.