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recoiling, leather catching skin, my sister’s torn cheek, her small, thin cry. I stood there mute.
    We were herded into another room and I was pushed into a chair. My wrists were pinned down and someone jabbed me with a needle, piercing the pale fleshy underside of my arm, over and over until, beneath the blood, I could make out a number in blue ink: A10573. Nothing belonged to me anymore, not my piano, my home, my name or my hair. I was a number now.
    Someone wiped a bloodied rag across my arm and pointed to the door. I rose from the chair, careful not to drop my C sharp. I looked down at the black key resting in my palm and at my long, slender fingers and the freckles on my arms.
    I’m still Hanna Mendel
, I said to myself.
I’m five foot seven. I have a birthmark on my left shoulder. I’m scared of spiders. I’m hopeless at sport. I like Clara Schumann, and one day I’m going to be famous
.

Chapter 4
    We walked past endless rows of identical grey buildings until we reached our barrack. A woman was waiting for us outside. She wore a scarf over her shaved head and she carried a whip. She looked mean. She introduced herself as our block leader and ordered us into the wooden shed. The windowless room looked like a barn and smelled like a kennel. The walls were bare and the floor was grimy. A row of narrow bunks spread across two walls: wooden planks in three tiers, so close together that if you sat up you’d scrape your head on the tier above. There were no mattresses on the planks, just thin grey blankets.
    “Welcome to your new home.” The block leader kicked the door closed. I looked at the splintering bunks and the crumbling walls. There was nothing of my home here, and with every minute that passed there was less of me. I flopped onto a bunk.
    “Rule number one – no sitting.” The block leader cracked her whip and I leaped off the bunk. There were no Nazi guards stalking the barrack, no SS watching from the door. I glanced at the block leader, her bony arms folded across her chest, her eyes stony. She was wearing a yellow star – she was one of us.
    “Rule number two,” she continued in her thick Polish accent. “If there’s anything hidden under your blankets: an apple core, a spoon, soap …” She pulled a blanket from a bunk, sending a family of bugs scuttling. “There will be consequences.”
    My mother pulled at my sleeve. “Hanna, where’s the kitchen?”
    The block leader glared at my mother. “Rule number three.” She stepped towards us and rammed a finger against my mother’s lips. “No talking.” She pressed her forefinger and thumb either side of my mother’s trembling mouth and clamped her lips shut. “Understand?”
    My mother nodded, her eyes wide with fright. The block leader smiled, pulled her fingers from
Anyu
’s mouth and wiped her hand across my mother’s skirt.
    “Next time you interrupt, I’ll knock your teeth out.” She paused for effect. “Rule number four. You’ll be fed three times a day. Coffee at 5 am, soup for lunch and bread for dinner. If you’re lucky, you’ll get margarine.”
    The block leader pointed to a battered cardboard box on the floor.
    “Take a cup. Look after it. You lose the cup, you go hungry.”
    I pulled a rusted cup from the box, and copying the woman next to me, threaded the worn belt from my dress through the cup’s handle, so that my cup hung at my waist.
    The block leader ordered us outside and told us to form a single line. We marched in silence, past numbered buildings and nameless roads until we reached a block marked
Latrines
. A woman lunged for the door, clutching her stomach, but the block leader barred her way. “No one enters without a guard,” she scowled, shoving the door open to reveal a deep pit dug into the earth. She pointed to the woman. “You! Wait till last. The rest of you … time to shit.”
    We walked from the latrines to a dusty square where we were made to wait for hours in the burning sun so the guards