While the main characters of this novel – Sarah, Marie, Helga, Marta, Zofia and Eva – are fictional, the ground upon which they walk is tragically real. Ravensbrück was the largest concentration camp for women in the German Reich. Between 1939 and 1945, over 130,000 women and children from more than twenty nations were imprisoned there.

Guard towers punctuated the electrified fence line, their searchlights cutting through fog and darkness. The medical block loomed near the crematorium, its windows witnessing experiments that turned healing into torture. Here, Nazi doctors focused specifically on women’s bodies, conducting brutal experiments on sterilisation and bone grafting that differed from the medical horrors of other camps. Yet within these walls, women found ways to resist – through numbers, through music, through medicine, through memory.

This is the story of six of those women. A bookkeeper who turned numbers into weapons. A union leader who never stopped protecting others. A French student who kept resistance alive. A Roma violinist who made music speak when words could not. A Polish nurse who healed until her heart stopped. A Czech medical student who preserved truth in hidden places. Their stories, like so many others, began at the gates of Ravensbrück.