American bomber planes had been flying overhead for over a week and the rat-tat-tat and boom of Japanese anti-aircraft guns were as regular as clockwork. The Americans flew mostly at midday, but the warning sirens set up by the Japanese would continue to wail well after the thrum of engines could be heard across the city. Bombs were being dropped on Japanese airfields and warehouses on the outskirts of Shanghai and along the Yangtze. It was comforting to know the Americans were close and that they were safe in Hongkew. Everyone knew the Americans wouldn’t bomb the ghetto.

Romy’s dress clung to her back as she made her way to the checkpoint. It had been easier for her to get her monthly pass since Ghoya’s redeployment.

She touched the pocket in her jacket where she carried Li’s pendant and thought about Daniel’s letter. Mutti kept it wrapped in a handkerchief with his other letters. They were her most treasured possessions.

In all my time here, I strived to make you and Mutti proud. To make the best of my circumstances. Every day I asked myself: what would Papa do? It helped on the most bitter of days…

She rubbed her raw red hands together, lamenting she could not hide them with gloves despite the heat. Romy hoped whoever was wearing her old soft kid gloves from Paris was enjoying them. She smiled at the thought of a small child, fists balled into the gloves. If it kept them healthy, clean and off her wards…

There was nothing left of value to steal. Romy had sold their candlesticks in Frenchtown last week to buy some insulin on the black market for Gretel, a little girl on the children’s ward who was going to die. A brooch of Mutti’s had bought a month of ether and sulpha from some surly gangsters. But Mutti didn’t mind. Mutti’s head was full of little Shu—she insisted on the baby coming home from the hospital to live with the Bernfelds. ‘Shu is family, Romy. Li’s baby, Liebling.’

‘It’s safer,’ Romy agreed. There had been two suspicious Chinese officials in suits who had requested a list of orphans in the nursery with their dates of admittance and notary certificates. It was rumoured hospitals and police stations all over Shanghai were being met with the same strange request. Romy couldn’t be sure, but she had a feeling these ‘inspectors’ could be connected with Chang Wu. There had been no such requests before. Either way, it wasn’t worth the risk. Romy had inked out Shu’s record from the hospital files and brought her home that very night.

Mutti blew a raspberry on Shu’s cheek. ‘She belongs with us.’

A very excited Mrs Lam found a drawer for the baby to sleep in and a mosquito net to drape over her, and insisted on getting up every two hours through the night to feed her with a bottle. ‘You must sleep,’ she told the Bernfelds. ‘So you can work at hospital. Besides—’ she poked Romy in the chest ‘—you need to study. Otherwise you’ll be crazy with study fever next year too.’ She snorted at her own joke before turning serious. ‘I worry about these black rings.’ She touched Romy’s cheeks before nudging her out into the lane.

Mutti had shown Romy how to massage Shu’s tummy to release bubbles of gas, how to change nappies and swaddle her tight like an Egyptian mummy so she would sleep through the night. When Mutti was home, she tied the baby onto her front with a sheet like Mrs Lam had shown her. And when Romy had finished her study each night, she took the clean, fed Shu and lay with her on the mattress, mesmerised by this tiny creature who had nuzzled and snuffled her way into all their hearts. She could pass hours just stroking her cheeks, tracing the line of her nose, smelling the sweet musk at the top of her scalp…

Today, like every day, she had to go to university, leaving Shu at home with Mutti. When Mrs Lam had to work and Mutti and Papa were both needed at the hospital, Shu sometimes went too and spent the day hidden in an isolation room—away from patients—to the delight of the nurses on duty in that room who took it in turns to sing and to squeeze her thin little legs.

A fighter plane passed overhead and the sky boomed.

‘Americans,’ someone whispered. The crowd sighed with relief. The Yanks were flying their B-29s non-stop these last months and it felt like an Allied victory was imminent. Mr Lam had a black-and-white map tacked on the back of the front door; there were pins for every spot the Allies advanced in the Pacific. He added new pins every week.

The humming grew louder. An air-raid siren screeched out of speakers on the lampposts but it was too late to seek cover.

The air whistled as a bomb headed towards them. Everyone dropped to the ground and a thud rumbled through the earth as windows shattered. Suddenly, Romy was twelve again and reaching for Mutti’s hand.

‘They’re bombing us! They’re bombing the ghetto!’ someone cried.

‘They wouldn’t—’

Bodies dropped to the ground and screams filled the air. Romy pressed her flushed cheek to the scorching concrete as a spray of bullets flew overhead. She felt a hand on her head and a wiry body covered hers.

‘Keep your head down,’ a familiar voice whispered in her ear.

‘But Mutti, Papa and Shu are at home. We must go and help them.’

‘You’re no use to anyone dead,’ Jian said.

When the bombing had ceased, he took her hand and pulled her to her feet. ‘Quickly!’ he urged.

They ran through the streets towards the longtang lanes where the Bernfelds lived.

Buildings had been razed, piles of bamboo and wood smouldered, and flames flickered out of windows. Bodies lay strewn at all angles, crushed under collapsed brick walls, pinned under window frames.

Japanese soldiers ran among the bodies with first-aid kits, removing debris and loading the injured onto stretchers with the help of coolies. Everywhere she looked, Chinese, Jewish and Japanese people were working frantically together to free or resuscitate victims.

All at once Romy caught sight of Nina, crouched beside a Chinese boy who was trapped under a concrete boulder. She was ripping her petticoat into strips to make it into bandages. She wore a blue dress, though her hair, face and neck were white and red—she was covered in dust and blood.

‘Nina!’ Romy squeezed Nina’s arm then grabbed the big boulder with Jian and together they heaved it away from the boy. Nina poured water from her flagon and started to wipe his crying face. She leaned down close and whispered something to the child before brushing the hair off his forehead and giving him a kiss.

‘Where are his parents?’

They were interrupted by a shriek as a woman ran over and scooped the boy up in her arms. She looked at Nina—her gaze taking in the silken dress, the messy brassy-blonde hair and kohl-rimmed eyes—and mouthed a silent ‘thank you’.

Nina stood dazed, looking at the bodies around them. Then she focused on her friend. ‘Romy!’ The two young women hugged each other fiercely and they were thirteen again. ‘I’m so glad you’re okay. But you need to find your family. Go, let us deal with all this.’

Romy stared at her friend, reluctant to leave her side.

Jian crouched down to help a man dig through a pile of bricks and rubble with his bare hands to reach a whimpering woman underneath. They grabbed her arms and pulled her out. Her cheongsam was shredded and blood ran in rivulets down her legs. Nina directed the men to lay the woman down gently, then, murmuring soothingly, started to clean her legs with a rag.

She turned to see Romy still standing there. ‘Go!’ she shouted.

Chinese men and women from nearby laneways ran between the bodies, lugging lumpy mattresses from their own houses, carrying sheets for the injured. Others carried pots of steaming water and bowls of soup.

When Jian and Romy reached her lane it was a tall pile of smouldering rubble and blocked off by the police.

Romy froze. Japanese soldiers had been marshalled into a line, and were marching out of an office building with machinery on their shoulders, hurrying it to another location.

‘They’re moving their radio and signals station in case the bombers come back,’ said Jian in disbelief.

‘That’s what the Americans must have been aiming for,’ said a man as he marched past with a pile of sheets. ‘They wouldn’t deliberately hit this ghetto, would they?’ Uncertainty and shock hung in the air.

About thirty bodies were lined up on the footpath, and nurses and doctors who had rushed to the scene moved along the row checking for pulses, doing their best to stem the flow of blood and treat injuries with the scant resources they had to hand. The man with the sheets walked behind, quickly covering dead bodies.

Romy ran up and down the line, searching for her parents and Shu. People crowded around the fallen, looking for their loved ones. Her gut twisted with relief when she reached the end of the line and there was no sign of her family. Or the Lams. Mutti and Papa were both rostered on at Ward Road Hospital this morning. If they hadn’t already left for work when the bombs hit, they would have gone with Shu immediately, knowing they’d be needed. The Lams must be helping somewhere. Romy craned her head to look for her neighbours and double-check her parents weren’t nearby. She was relieved they were not here among the smoke and debris. Little Shu’s lungs would struggle to cope with this much dust.

Sirens wailed in the background as people all around them shouted and screamed for help.

Romy’s feet were cemented to the footpath.

Medics ran between patients with bags of fluids and syringes. Japanese troops followed, bearing stretchers and medical kits. Romy had to get to work. She needed to help. It was as if she had to switch on a different engine—her body felt so numb. This was her duty.

Romy kneeled beside the young man closest to her and started to make a tourniquet for his arm. She glanced at the body of a young woman next to him—his wife, perhaps, or sister—and waved to a Japanese soldier for some morphine…

Romy was tapping the arm of an old man, trying to find a vein, when Jian appeared beside her.

He said, ‘The baby…Where is Shu?’

‘I can’t find them, so perhaps she is with my parents at the hospital. I’m trying to get to the Lams’. Can you please help find them? Tell them I’ll be there as soon as possible. I’ll come but I just—’ she gestured at the old man she was treating. She couldn’t just leave him. Jian ran off towards the Lams’ house. Romy administered an injection then gently placed the man’s arm on the ground. ‘Your pain will be gone in a minute. Keep your eyes open.’

She gestured to a Chinese woman who was walking between the patients, looking for someone to help.

‘Could you please sit here for a minute and hold this man’s hand?’ She took the man’s giant hand and placed it in the woman’s tiny one. ‘I’ll be just over there…’

Romy stood up and brushed rubble from her knees, then walked around the corner past two police officers who were lifting the seriously injured into rickshaws and pedicabs that would take them to the hospital.

Romy slowly stepped around the rubble and edged past the collapsed houses in her lane. Her eyes stung. With each step, she was pushed back by shouting police officers putting up barricades and Japanese soldiers carrying stretchers. She tried to pick her way around deep craters that pockmarked the road and coughed from all the smoke. Hair stuck to her sweaty face. Her parents were not among the line of dead bodies assembled at the end of this lane. But rescuers were still clearing the rubble, finding bodies under mountains of bricks—she couldn’t be certain.

Her chest tightened and she started to wheeze when she saw a familiar form through the dust.

Jian was standing with a fellow policeman right where the Lams’ house used to be. The policeman was shaking his head and pointing at the rubble—gesturing at something Romy couldn’t see. Romy ran a few steps to get a better look at her house, and Jian reached for her hand.

‘I’m so sorry,’ the policeman was saying. ‘The top floor of this house—plus the one next door—just collapsed. It was so fast and we were halfway through removing people.’ He gestured towards a row of bodies covered in filthy dust and ash lying on the footpath. Romy’s Chinese neighbours were rolled on their sides coughing, or clutching an injured limb with loud cries. Others lay motionless.

Romy ran up and down the line of writhing bodies on the footpath, comforting three small Lam boys. She covered the round faces of Mr and Mrs Lam with a sheet so their children couldn’t see the blood. She was trying to calculate who was alive, and who might be inside. Did her parents go to the hospital? She kept having to restart her counting as other neighbours, nurses and policemen crowded in to help. Bodies were lined up, wrapped and bundled away.

‘I’m sorry, Romy,’ said a red-eyed nurse she recognised from Ward Road Hospital as she rushed past holding a bleeding Lam toddler.

Romy continued along the line, sobbing for the dear Lam family who had opened their home and their hearts to the Bernfelds.

Romy stopped walking.

She was looking at a familiar pair of black shoes. Handmade by the finest bootmaker in Vienna, now worn thin with holes in the soles.

She stared at the feet for a moment, before finally daring to look at his face. There was a slight gash to the forehead. Papa looked peaceful, as if he were merely sleeping. But when she checked for the telltale rise of his chest, there was none.

Beside Papa, in a white uniform now stained red across the middle, was Mutti. She must have been getting ready to go to work.

Nine of the twelve members of the Lam family were laid out neatly in a row beside the Bernfelds. Several people from their laneway were crouched over the bloody, crushed and contorted bodies, crying and waving fists at the sky.

Romy knelt down, placed her hands on her parents’ foreheads and closed her eyes. She tried to swallow, then sob, but her throat was dry. She rocked forwards and placed her forehead on the ground and shuddered. With her next breath, she howled into the earth for so long she felt empty and her lungs ached. When she sat up, she looked to the sky and sobbed, ‘Baruch dayan ha’emet.’

Jian looked at her and she repeated it for him in English: ‘Blessed is the true judge.’

She looked around in a frenzy. Shu? Where was Shu?

She staggered to her feet, wiping her eyes with the hem of her dress. Spying a second row of bodies shrouded in sheets, Romy ran towards them and started peeling back the coverings one by one until she reached the end of the line. Hands trembling, she pulled back a small shroud and saw the tiniest baby with cherry lips, still sucking her thumb. Pale skinny legs, bent slightly at the knees. There was not a scratch or a mark. Shu looked like a sleeping angel.

Romy’s knees collapsed beneath her and everything went black.