“Shut up,” Sonia shouted, stunning all of them. Roberta had never seen her friend so angry. “Just be quiet, all of you, and leave me alone.”
They dug in silence. Roberta glanced back over her shoulder and saw Mrs. Peabody smoking a cigarette near the door to the teachers’ hall, talking quietly with Mrs. Wentworth. They laughed at something, and Mrs. Wentworth shook her head. From the girls’ place in the shadows, the two teachers looked bathed in sunlight, as if Roberta were watching them through a magical doorway.
She looked down at the space she was digging, the mottled, ugly clots of dirt. Baby bones. She always thought of baby bones here. Finger bones, leg bones, a soft little skull . . .
Don’t think about it. Don’t.
The blade of her shovel slipped, and for a second there was something white and fleshy speared on the metal, something pale and soft and rotten. Roberta flinched and dropped the shovel, preparing to scream, before she realized what she’d severed was a mushroom, huge and wet in the cold, damp earth.
She was trying to calm down when there was a huff of breath next to her, like a sigh. She turned to see Sonia fall to her knees in the dirt. She still clutched her shovel, her hands sliding down the handle as she lowered to the ground. Roberta bent and grabbed her friend by the shoulders.
“I can do it,” Sonia said, her head bowing so her forehead nearly touched the ground, her eyes rolling back in her head.
“Mrs. Peabody!” Mary Van Woorten shouted.
“Sonia,” Roberta whispered, clutching the girl harder.
Sonia’s shoulders heaved, and she quietly threw up drops of spit into the dirt. Then she sagged, her eyes closing. Roberta held her tight. Her friend weighed almost nothing at all.
“Have you been sleeping?” Miss Hedmeyer, the school nurse, said. “Eating?”
“Yes, madame.” Sonia’s voice was pale, tired.
Miss Hedmeyer jabbed her fingers up under Sonia’s jaw, feeling her lymph nodes. “No swelling,” she said. “No fever. What else?”
“I have a headache, madame.”
Roberta bit the side of her thumb as she watched Miss Hedmeyer take a bottle of aspirin out of a cupboard and shake out a few large chalky pills. “I’ve seen this before,” Miss Hedmeyer said. She had light blond hair that contrasted with a startling spray of freckles across her nose. When she wasn’t treating the ailments of the Idlewild girls, she taught their meager science curriculum, which mostly consisted of the periodic table of elements and the process of photosynthesis, sometimes mixed with explanations of snow and rain. It was not assumed that the housewives of the future needed to know much about science. “It happens to some girls when they’re asked to do physical activity during their time of month. Am I correct?”
Sonia blinked and said nothing, and even Roberta could see her abject humiliation.
“Get some rest,” Miss Hedmeyer said. She tapped Sonia on the arm of her thick uniform sweater. “You need to be tougher,” she advised. “Girls like you. There’s not a thing wrong with you. We feed you good food here.”
Sonia’s voice was nearly a whisper. “Yes, madame.”
“And less French, please. This is America.” The nurse turned to Roberta. “I’ll talk to Mrs. Peabody and get you the next hour free to make sure she doesn’t faint again. Since you’re on the field hockey team, she’ll likely agree.”
Roberta kept her eyes downcast. “Thank you, Miss Hedmeyer.”
She took Sonia’s hand as they left the room. She thought vaguely of putting the girl’s arm around her shoulder and half carrying her to their room, but Sonia stayed upright, even climbing the dorm stairs, though she kept her cold, clammy hand in Roberta’s, her gaze down on her feet.
In their room, Roberta helped her take off her mud-soaked stockings and shoes. They worked in silence, Roberta hanging the stockings over the doorknob to dry—dried mud was easier to get out in the sink than the wet kind—as Sonia pulled back her covers and lay in bed, still wearing her skirt and sweater. Sonia folded her hands over her chest.
Roberta kicked her own shoes off and sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at her friend’s pale face. “Tell me,” she said.
Sonia stared at the wooden slats that made up Roberta’s bunk above hers. “It is a sad story,” she said.
“We all have sad stories,” Roberta countered, thinking of Uncle Van. Without thinking, she added, “Please.”
The word seemed to surprise Sonia, who glanced at Roberta, then away again. Dutifully, she spoke. “My mother distributed pamphlets during the war,” she said. “For the Resistance. She helped smuggle the pamphlets from the printers to the places they needed to go. I helped her.”
Roberta bit the side of her thumb again. In France? she wondered. What sorts of pamphlets? Resistance against Hitler? Already she was lost. She knew so little—no one talked to girls their age about the war. Some girls had brothers and cousins who went away, and either got killed or came back again, like Uncle Van. No one had ever taught any of them about a Resistance. But she wanted Sonia to keep talking, so she nodded, silent.
“We knew it was dangerous,” Sonia said. “Papa was already gone to Dachau—he was a writer. He was outspoken. They took him early, but they left us, because Mama’s father had once worked for the government. But they arrested us in early 1944. I was nine.”
Roberta breathed as quietly as she could, listening.
“We were sent to prison first,” Sonia said. “It wasn’t so bad. Mama tried to get us kept there because of her father. But her father was dead by then, and they put us on the train. We went to Ravensbrück.”
“What is Ravensbrück?” Roberta finally said, unable to help herself.
“It was a prison camp.”
“Like Auschwitz?” That was a name she knew—there had been a newsreel at the cinema once, before the movie started, that showed the gates in black and white, the train tracks. Something about liberation. That had been in the last days before Uncle Van came home.
“Yes, but only for women,” Sonia said. “And children.”
Roberta blinked, shocked.
Sonia didn’t seem to notice. “We were put in a barracks,” she said, “Mama and me. We were made to work. There was a work detail that dug all day. There was never an end to the digging—we weren’t even making anything, just moving dirt back and forth. Still, they made us do it. In the heat, in the cold, without food or water. Whoever fell during work detail was left there to rot. Women fell every day.”
Roberta felt her heart rise up and start beating in her neck, squeezing it in dread. I’m not ready to hear this. I’m not.
“We stood every day in the Appelplatz,” Sonia said. “That was the main square in the camp. They lined us up and made us stand, for hours and hours. It was supposed to be a roll call, but of course it wasn’t. We froze or we sweated under the sun. Whoever fell was left. Mama was all right at first, but as the days went by, she got quiet. Quiet, quiet. I thought it was a good thing, because when you were quiet, you got by and no one noticed you. Then one day, as they made us stand in the Appelplatz, she started to scream.” Sonia twisted the edge of her bedsheet softly between her fingers, dropping her gaze to it. “She screamed and screamed. She said they were murderers—they would all go to hell. She said the war would be over one day and it would all come out. She said there would be justice, that there would be no silence in the end. She said that the murderers would someday see, that they would someday face their Maker. They took her away and I never saw her again. I heard one of the women say that they executed her, they shot her in the back of the head, but I didn’t know if it was true. If she’d just stayed quiet . . .” She dropped the sheet. “If she’d just stayed quiet. But she did not. And then it was just me.”
“Could you get away?” Roberta whispered.
Sonia turned her head and looked at her. “When we arrived, they told us that if we wanted, we could see the last woman who tried to climb the fence. Because she was still there.” She turned back to looking at the wooden slats again. “She was.”