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Andrée thinks of Josie. Today, on this day of liberation, where is she? Somewhere in Paris, perhaps on the Champs-Élysées, knowing Josie, wriggling her way to the front of the crowd, craning her neck to see de Gaulle. Perhaps with Maman and Papa. Maybe they’re all celebrating in the street with strangers who are not strangers on a day like this.

She thinks of her mother, Tina, whom she hasn’t seen since they were in the courtyard at rue le Peletier. Tina, whom she has tried not to think about, because worry is a door she cannot afford to open, not here, not if she is to survive. Is Tina safe? Did they release her? She turns her mind from the thought of the poor women who died on the trains.

And Papa. Where is he? At home? Or was he on the men’s train?

She thinks of Louis, who drew the maps of Normandy and returned to Paris with them hidden in his clothes. He helped make this liberation possible in his own small, essential way.

“You did it, Papa,” she whispers, so quietly no one can hear. “You helped them get here. You helped free France.”

There is no answer, just the sounds of the camp, the distant guards and the wind whistling through the barbed wire.

But Andrée stays sitting on her bunk a little longer than usual. She lets herself feel this moment of joy beneath the horror of her present reality. There is hope beneath the despair.

Paris is free.

And across hundreds of miles of occupied Europe, in a liberated city, a thirteen-year-old girl is surely celebrating. Josie, who survived. Josie, who ran. Josie, who carried their secret safely through the war.

Andrée closes her eyes. And for a moment, just a moment, she is back on rue Blomet. She hears Josie playing “Clair de Lune,” finding her way through the difficult passages, getting them right.

I’ll come home, she thinks. I don’t know how. I don’t know when. But I’ll come home.

And Josie will play for me.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Autumn barely announces itself before winter pushes it aside. It is not enough that the women in Ravensbrück are beaten, starved, and dying of infectious diseases that continue to sweep through the camp, but the camp is filled to overflowing, with new prisoners arriving every day as the Germans evacuate camps further east, retreating before the Red Army’s advance.

The cold bites hard. Illness runs rife and rations are scarcer than ever. The guards are increasingly angry, their fear as the war turns against them spilling into violence against the women they hold captive.

Andrée had no idea of exactly where she was when she first arrived. She recognized the name and knew only that it was somewhere in northern Germany. The birch forests surrounding the camp could have been anywhere in this part of Europe. But with the arrival of winter Ravensbrück reveals its true identity. Bitterly cold winds from the Baltic scatter sandy soil across the camp, coating unwashed clothes and bodies, stinging eyes. With the tree branches bare, the full ugliness of their desolate surroundings declares itself.

When Andrée is stricken with fever, when her body finally succumbs to the hunger and the cold and the exhaustion, the women in her block look after her. They feed and care for her. They take turns hiding her from the guards during roll call, holding her upright when she can barely stand, whispering to her to hold on, to just hold on a little longer.

As her strength returns, one of the women, a Parisian named Marceline, perhaps fifty, with kind eyes and steady hands, takes her to work alongside the weakest prisoners. Work buys life. This is privileged indoor work, away from the freezing wind. They dismantle the garments that arrive daily from other camps. Sorting fur from fabric, unpicking stitches with fingers numb from cold.

Many days at work, her friends allow her to sleep under a pile of dismantled fabrics. Slowly, as her strength returns, she joins them properly in their task.

As she painstakingly unpicks the stitching from a coat or jacket, she imagines its owner. Who was she? Where is she now? Did she have a family? A husband? Children? Is she dead, or still alive somewhere in this hell?

Each coat tells a story. Some are elegant, clearly expensive, handmade for women of means. Others are simpler, well-worn, patched and mended over years. All of them now here, taken apart, stitch by stitch. For what? As the sense that the war might soon end grows stronger, the task seems increasingly futile.

But Andrée is grateful for this indoor work as she feels herself growing stronger. Her determination to survive returns. The French women in her block have created their own small community of resistance within the camp. They share food when food is given. They protect the sick among them. They refuse to betray each other, no matter what.

One day, as her fingers work at a particularly stubborn seam, she begins humming. “Clair de Lune.” The melody she learned a lifetime ago. The piece Josie plays so beautifully.

Only when she stops does she become aware of the other women in the room looking at her. She sees smiling faces, the first for so long.

“Sing it again,” one of them asks. “Please.”

Andrée hums quietly, so the guards won’t hear. And the women around her stop their work for just a moment to listen. To remember that beauty exists. That music exists. That somewhere beyond these walls there is still a world worth surviving for.

After that, she hums often. Different pieces. Chopin’s “Raindrop Prelude,” Mozart’s Sonata in C, the Minuet in G major from Bach’s Anna Magdalena Notebook. All in major keys—nothing sad. And her workmates and the women in her block request songs like they might have once requested them in a concert hall.

“The one from yesterday.”

“That beautiful happy one.”

“The one that makes me think of spring.”