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sister came home to an empty apartment, the building’s concierge told them, “The Nazis came for a cleaning.” Daniel’s family was now also gone. Laura’s family and her siblings were among the last of the clan in the ghetto, now a pitiful city populated mostly by ghosts, both living and dead.
    The Schwarzwalds knew it wouldn’t be much longer before the Nazis closed in on them. The SS were clearing one ghetto block at a time—from the window Laura could see them herding Jews, friends and acquaintances among them—and soon it would be their turn. Laura found a platform under the roof of an adjacent house where they could hide at night, packed in like herrings with fifteen others, including an epileptic girl of thirteen who started to howl at the sound of German boots in the empty apartments below and had to be silenced with a pillow. Laura would toss Selma across a ventilation shaft to someone who caught her on the other side, then leap from a top-floor window of their building to the window of the next with a bag of food and a change of clothes for her daughter.
    Meanwhile, her husband hid on the roof at work, pressed all night against the drainpipe.
    The competition for Christian identification papers that roughly matched the Jews’ ages was intense and the price always climbing, but somehow Daniel succeeded first in purchasing authentic Christian birth certificates for his wife’s two younger sisters, Fryda and Putzi, who would now become Zofia Wolenska and Ksenia Osoba. Then he was able to purchase a marriage certificate for Laura and a birth certificate for Selma from a family named Tymejko.
    The papers for her and her daughter were going to be delivered in two days. By now, Laura could barely summon an ounce of hope. She had become like a stone. She felt as if suffering no longer touched her. A human, apparently, could adapt to anything. In late August, while Daniel was at work, the paperman actually came, and the documents were hers—but only after, by sheer luck, she had gotten rid of an unexpected visitor who claimed that he had been promised them as well.
    When her husband begged her to leave with Selma, she agreed. He would try his best to follow.
    The family’s good fortune had run out, though; on the eve of their escape, Daniel found himself in the right place, but at the wrong time.
    On September 1, 1942, the Germans ordered all remaining Jews to consolidate their living quarters in one section of the ghetto, and Daniel went to the Jewish Community House to see one of the Jewish Council members, his friend Dr. Katz, to ask him about finding a new place to live. The game of musical chairs was coming to an end.
    Unknown to Daniel, a Jew had killed a drunken German soldier the day before, and the Nazis wasted little time retaliating with their customary brutality. While Daniel conferred with Dr. Katz on the second floor, the Nazis surrounded the council building with MG-42 machine guns, a weapon so effective—it could shoot a fifty-round belt in a matter of a few seconds—that it would still be in use seventy years later. SS men stormed the Jewish Council building and forced dozens of Jews outside, where they were instantly mowed down. The SS men then stomped up the stairs and cornered the members of the Jewish Council and the other Jews with them.
    Word of the Aktion spread quickly inside the ghetto. Laura left Selma with her sister Fryda and headed immediately to the Jewish Community House. Laura wouldn’t tell anyone for many, many years what she saw that afternoon, although by then a grisly photograph of it had begun to appear in photographic histories of the Holocaust. There were no signs of life around the building, but six perfectly spaced corpses hung from the second-floor balcony, dangling like a row of marionettes in a toy store.
    When Laura saw the dead council members, some of whom she knew, twisting slowly in their nooses, she clutched her stomach and turned away. When she turned back,