Summary

In Chapter 1, in April 1945, a 16-year-old German girl in Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp holds her bunkmate, an elderly woman named Rivkah and sings to her as she dies. Suddenly, British soldiers burst into the barracks. They start removing the dead and those that are still alive watch in a daze. In Chapter 2, they are all carried out of the barracks and laid on the floor. Our young heroine is named Gerta Richter, and she thinks to herself how before she was captured, she did not even know she was Jewish. She is feverish and is set apart from the others because she is contagious. She starts to sing but her voice gives out. She meets a young man who tells her that they are free; the British have liberated them from the Nazis. She is in disbelief and thinks this young man must...