By the second day, they were all exhausted and hungry and so thirsty they remained quiet, saving their saliva. The heat and stench in the carriage was unbearable.
Be afraid.
Wasn’t that what Gaëtan had said to her? He said the warning had come from Vianne that night in the barn.
Isabelle hadn’t fully understood it then. She understood it now. She had thought herself indestructible.
But what would she have done differently?
“Nothing,” she whispered into the darkness.
She would do it all again.
And this wasn’t the end. She had to remember that. Each day she lived there was a chance for salvation. She couldn’t give up. She could never give up.
* * *
The train stopped. Isabelle sat up, bleary-eyed, her body aching and in pain from the beatings of her interrogation. She heard harsh voices, dogs barking. A whistle blared.
“Wake up, Micheline,” Isabelle said, gently jostling the woman beside her.
Micheline edged upright.
The seventy other people in the car—women and children—slowly roused themselves from the stupor of the journey. Those who were seated rose. The women came together instinctively, packed in closer.
Isabelle winced in pain as she stood on torn feet in shoes too small. She held Micheline’s cold hand.
The giant carriage doors rumbled open. Sunlight poured in, blinding them all. Isabelle saw SS officers dressed in black, with their snarling, barking dogs. They were shouting orders at the women and children, incomprehensible words with obvious meaning. Climb down, move on, get into line.
The women helped one another down. Isabelle held on to Micheline’s hand and stepped down onto the platform.
A truncheon hit her in the head so hard she stumbled sideways and dropped to her knees.
“Get up,” a woman said. “You must.”
Isabelle let herself be helped to her feet. Dizzy, she leaned into the woman. Micheline came up on her other side, put an arm around her waist to steady her.
To Isabelle’s left, a whip snaked through the air, hissing, and cracked into the fleshy pink of a woman’s cheek. The woman screamed and held the torn skin of her cheek together. Blood poured between her fingers, but she kept moving.
The women formed ragged lines and marched across uneven ground through an open gate that was surrounded by barbed wire. A watchtower loomed above them.
Inside the gates, Isabelle saw hundreds—thousands—of women who looked like ghosts moving through a surreal landscape of gray, their bodies emaciated, their eyes sunken and dead looking in gray faces, their hair shorn. They wore baggy, dirty striped dresses; some were barefooted. Only women and children. No men.
Behind the gates and beneath the watchtower, she saw barracks stretching out in lines.
A corpse of a woman lay in the mud in front of them. Isabelle stepped over the dead woman, too numb to think anything but keep moving. The last woman who’d stopped had been hit so hard she didn’t get up again.
Soldiers yanked the suitcases from their hands, snatched necklaces, pulled earrings and wedding rings off. When their valuables were all gone, they were led into a room, where they stood crowded together, sweating from the heat, dizzy from thirst. A woman grabbed Isabelle’s arms, pulled her aside. Before she could even think, she was being stripped naked—they all were. Rough hands scratched her skin with dirty fingernails. She was shaved everywhere—under her arms, her head, and her pubic hair—with a viciousness that left her bleeding.
“Schnell!”
Isabelle stood with the other shaved, freezing, naked women, her feet aching, her head still ringing from the blows. And then they were being moved again, herded forward toward another building.
She remembered suddenly the stories she’d heard at MI9 and on the BBC, news stories about Jewish people being gassed to death at the concentration camps.
She felt a feeble sense of panic as she shuffled forward with the herd, into a giant room full of showerheads.
Isabelle stood beneath one of the showerheads, naked and trembling. Over the noise of the guards and the prisoners and the dogs, she heard the rattling of an old ventilation system. Something was coming on, clattering through the pipes.