One day my mother went to work and never came back. The three of us were left without parents.
—Alla Rakovshchik, Prisoner, Minsk Ghetto
Minsk, Belorussia, October 1941
On her way home, Elena Bruskina saw twelve women she’d presumed were dead reappear. The full dozen. Her breath hitched. People sent to jail usually vanished. Her thoughts slid to her father and her older brother, Yakov, arrested months ago with hundreds of other men from the ghetto. There were no charges. No trials. No letters from Siberia saying they’d been exiled. No sign of them whatsoever. In her heart, Elena knew they were gone forever, but without proof, without bodies, graves, or a funeral, she didn’t know how to mourn. She was frozen in grief.
Elena strained to see the twelve women marching ahead of her, guarded by German fascists in crisp black uniforms and brimmed caps. In the drizzling rain, the women were ghostlike with wispy, hunched silhouettes.
Twilight had set in and Elena was on her way back to the Minsk ghetto with hundreds of other women after their shift at the Oktyabr Garment Factory. She appreciated this in-between time, when she wasn’t loading and unloading crates or imprisoned in the ghetto as if she were a convicted criminal. Walking to and from work was the only part of her day where she could almost remember what it felt like to be a university student, to be free.
Almost.
There was the Lower Bazaar, a popular department store where her mother had shopped for coats and hats, now hollowed out by a bomb....
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