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many were being routinely murdered there was assumed, but now she understood who the murderers were. Still, she had not known of Sisak, the nightmare sub-camp Carlo described, saying it was a few dozen miles down the Sava from his base, in what he called the Partisan Fourth Zone. That evil Sisak could have sparked an impulse in her she was too guarded otherwise to admit—the impulse to be with Carlo—seemed shameful to her now.
    But what he had described, how it cried out to be exposed! Thousands of children being held, as young as the age of three. He said they were being put to death in gas vans that made endless circuits on a huge former racetrack, a rubber hose channeling exhaust fumes back into the closed trucks crammed with little ones. He said that Ustashe guards had turned the gassing into a raucous game, with two or three of the tightly sealed vans roaring around the oval at the same time, as if it were a Grand Prix event. The winner was the truck all of whose young captives died first.
    Sisak was not on any Red Cross list Marguerite knew of. Nor was any concentration camp anywhere in the German Reich, or in occupied Europe, known to be devoted only to children. If she were to make a report to Geneva, how could she not take along evidence of that? So she went with him.
    Across those weeks, beginning in early April, moving from Italy into Croatia, Marguerite had left behind her pretense of Red Cross neutrality to assume, if not a formal place in Carlo’s band of Partisan fighters, the role of fellow traveler, witness, helper. Carlo’s men maintained one of the hand-along points in the fugitive chain for those fleeing the Balkans, helping Jews or Serbs or Gypsies or downed Allied pilots or simple deserters to make their escapes. From Budapest to Zagreb to Sobota to Ljubljana to Trieste, and then by boat to Ancona, Pescara, Bari, or other ports in the Allied-controlled south of Italy. Knots of frightened people arriving in the dark, departing in the dark, carrying bundles, the men in long coats, the women wearing babushkas. Few, if any, children.
    Where was Sisak? She wanted to see something of it for herself, but Carlo said it was too risky. At one point, against his wishes, she made her way alone to Zagreb hoping to contact the Yugoslav office of the Red Cross—her colleagues. What did they know of the death camps? But all she found at the appointed address was a bombed-out ruin.
    She approached a woman in the street, but the woman spoke neither Italian nor French. Marguerite mimed the acts of eating, sleeping, an inoculation in the arm. She displayed her Red Cross credential with its insignia. At that, the woman led her to a Franciscan monastery off the city’s main square. There, a timid, brown-robed friar took her into a parlor, where she waited. After what seemed a long time, a man of authority came, another friar, but large, brusque, and with a face whose features were organized around a dramatically pronounced harelip. The notch at his mouth went all the way to the base of his nose, splaying his nostrils. The deformity drew Marguerite’s sympathy. Whatsoever man that has a blemish , the Scripture says, he shall not approach the altar . She had never seen a lame or disfigured priest before, and instinctively grasped with what dogged will he must have pursued his vocation. That facial badge of suffering reinforced the trust she’d have felt toward any priest. She was direct with him.
    In answering her, the friar spoke in fluent Italian, but his voice was high-pitched and had a distracting nasal resonance, an effect of the cleft palate. While speaking, he had to continually wipe saliva from his mouth, drainage from an open nasal cavity. He seemed unselfconscious, though, and flourished a white handkerchief as if for emphasis. And emphasis there was. The Franciscan monastery was itself a center for relief, the distribution of food and medicine, the rescue of the desperate ones. The friar knew whereof he