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all night for them to come back for her, but they never did. In the morning, she snuck out of the factory and made her way home. For the rest of her life, she would suffer from guilt that she alone had survived.
    Even before the papers had arrived, when acquiring Catholic identities looked like it was going to be their only hope, Laura had started reading the catechism to Selma. Before they had been moved to the ghetto, Laura’s Christian landlady, the wife of a university professor who had been taken by the Russians, had given her a Polish Catholic catechism and a New Testament and tried to convince her to leave Lvov as soon as possible. She even suggested the family move to a resort town, a place where people were always coming and going anyway, where the locals were accustomed to strangers. She assured Laura that becoming a Catholic would be relatively effortless. She would have to go to church, but only occasionally, and merely watch what the others were doing. She might even see its many advantages over Judaism.
    “My children are not happy with me for wanting to help you,” her landlady had told her. “What can I do? I can’t take a chance that they would report me to the Germans. But, you see, that is what it is like now, Laura. I cannot protect you, but I can give you advice on how to protect yourself. So take this Bible and the catechism”—she made the sign of the cross on Laura’s forehead—“and may Jesus Christ be your savior.”
    She had not taken the woman’s advice, but she had taken the books and, thinking ahead, had been quietly preparing her five-year-old daughter for Catholicism. Laura’s greatest fear now, on the eve of their attempted escape, was no longer death—what was death to a stone?—but that Selma would inadvertently betray them all if she raised the slightest suspicion that she was a Jew.
    “Tell me the five church commandments,” Laura would whisper to Selma at bedtime in their ghetto room.
    “I don’t know, Mama.”
    “You do know. The first commandment begins, ‘On Sundays and holy days of obligation …’”
    “Please, Mama.”
    “‘On Sundays and holy days of obligation,’ you must what?”
    Her daughter sighed. “Attend Mass and re—and re—”
    “Refrain.”
    “—refrain from unnecessary work.”
    “Good girl. Now the next one: ‘At least once a year’—what?”
    “I’m hungry, Mama.”
    “Zula,” her mother said, using her pet name.
    “At least once a year, the sacrament of penance.”
    “Now the third commandment, the one about the Easter season.”
    “At least once a year during the Easter season, I must take the Holy Communion.”
    Laura kissed her hard on the forehead. “You’re such a good girl! What about the fourth commandment?”
    In the last couple of days before the two of them were to set out into the world as Bronislawa and Zofia Tymejko, Laura’s drilling intensified—and that wasn’t all.
    “I’m giving you a special name today,” she told her. “To be safe, so that nothing bad happens to me and you, I will call you Zofia. Zofia Tymejko. That is your new name. My new name is Bronislawa Tymejko.”
    “That’s not a very nice name.”
    “Which one?”
    “Yours is not as nice as Laura.”
    “That’s all right, Zula, because you call me Mama. You must always call me Mama, do you understand? But if someone asks you my name, what do you say?”
    “I say your name is Bronislawa.”
    “Very good. Bronislawa what?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Tymejko. Tymejko.”
    “Tymejko.”
    “So what is my name now?”
    “Bronislawa Tymejko.”
    “Very good. Who is Laura Schwarzwald?”
    “That’s you too.”
    “No!”
    Selma flinched.
    “That is no longer my name! That person doesn’t exist anymore. You mustn’t ever say that again. When someone asks you who your mother is, or what her name is, what do you say?”
    “Bronislawa Tymejko.”
    “Bravo! It’s like a game we’re playing, but if we break the rules and you