On June 4, 1944, a siren wakes the prisoners at four o’clock for morning roll call. In the courtyard, Rose watches a guard strike a prisoner with a baton. When Rose moves to help, Muriel warns her to stay in line. After standing at attention for three hours, the prisoners receive a watery coffee substitute and bread containing wood chips before being marched to their work assignments.

In the SS tailor workshop, Rose and Muriel sit at a long assembly-line table sewing sleeves onto Nazi winter coats. Though handling enemy uniforms disgusts Rose, she forces herself to comply to avoid endangering the others. After six hours without breaks, her unprotected fingers bleed from the repetitive needlework.

Rose notices the guard only inspects the tied-off ends of seams during quality checks. She secretly cuts the center of a seam under the armpit before passing the coat along. Muriel observes this, nods, and does the same. Rose begins sabotaging one in every three coats. For the first time since arriving at Ravensbrück, Rose feels that they are actively fighting back against the Nazis rather than enduring imprisonment.

By September 10, 1944, months of forced labor and dwindling rations have severely weakened Rose and Muriel. Their daily routine consists of a four o’clock wake-up, three hours of morning roll call, 12-hour work shifts, three hours of evening roll call, and minimal food. The camp population has swelled with new arrivals, further reducing rations and increasing deaths. Smoke pours constantly from the crematorium chimney as death rates rise throughout the camp. When political prisoners have food withheld for a week in August, Rose interprets this as confirmation that the Allied invasion of France has occurred, giving her hope they might survive a few more months.

In the workshop, Rose has increased her sabotage rate to four out of five coats and has recruited all the assembly-line women into the scheme. Women from multiple countries and speaking different languages now participate in the sabotage effort. During a quality check, the guard discovers an unraveled seam on a coat sewn by Muriel. When the guard demands to know who is responsible, Rose stands and takes the blame. The guard kicks Rose in the stomach and beats her with a bamboo stick while other prisoners restrain Muriel from intervening.

Guards remove Rose and lock her in a ground-floor cell near the crematorium. Two hours later, an SS officer informs her that the commandant has ordered 90 days of solitary confinement. When her evening meal arrives, Rose discovers she has been given half rations—they intend to starve her to death.

On October 7, 1944, Rose wakes in her cell to construction sounds near the crematorium, suggesting expansion. She passes her days sleeping to conserve energy, walking laps to prevent muscle atrophy, reciting childhood poems, and daydreaming about Lazare. During morning meal delivery, a prisoner slips a dried sausage through the door slot and tells Rose it is from a friend. Realizing Muriel is smuggling her food, Rose weeps with gratitude. Over the following days, she receives a beet, another sausage, and margarine. The extra sustenance gradually restores her strength, and Rose vows not to let Muriel’s sacrifice be wasted by dying.

On November 11, 1944, Rose listens to the ongoing construction near the crematorium. When a cold wind begins blowing through her barred window, she initially thinks winter is arriving. Then she notices a fine layer of ash covering the floor and realizes the wind is carrying cremation ashes from the bodies of murdered prisoners. She tries to block the window with her blanket, but it does little to stop the flow. Rose curls in a corner, weeps for the dead, and resolves to survive to bear witness and seek justice for the victims.

On December 9, 1944, after 90 days in solitary confinement, Rose is released and ordered to report to her cellblock. Malnourished and wearing only summer clothing, she struggles through the snow back to the barracks, which are horribly overcrowded, with three or four women sharing each bunk and others sleeping on the floor.

Rose searches for Muriel and encounters Yana, a Soviet political prisoner and former Red Army medic who speaks French. Yana explains that thousands of prisoners evacuated from eastern camps have arrived, causing the overcrowding. A typhus epidemic is spreading, and Muriel has contracted the disease. Yana has established a quarantine area in the back of the cellblock, refusing to take Muriel to the camp hospital, where doctors euthanize patients with petrol injections. Yana also reveals that a gas chamber disguised as a washroom near the crematorium is nearly complete, and she fears the Nazis will soon begin mass murder of prisoners, starting with the sick.

Rose agrees to help care for Muriel. She finds her emaciated, feverish, and covered in a rash. When Muriel says she has forgotten what her daughter Mabel looks like, Rose describes the child in detail from a photograph she saw during SOE training. Rose’s descriptions help Muriel briefly recover her memory of Mabel and regain a small sense of hope. As Muriel sleeps, Rose realizes she must help her recover before the Germans begin selecting the sick for extermination.

On December 19, 1944, Muriel’s condition has worsened despite Rose’s care. Because textile shipments have stopped, Rose has been reassigned from the workshop to hard labor shoveling sand and unloading coal barges and can only tend to Muriel at night. Rose is disturbed by the thought that the coal may be fueling the crematorium and SS facilities but knows refusing to work would leave Muriel without care. Muriel asks Rose to write a letter to Mabel. Rose protests that there is no need, but Muriel insists.

Rose trades a slice of bread for a pencil, then secretly collects burnt cigarette remnants from areas where guards smoke to use as scraps of paper. She presents them to Muriel as shredded newspaper and explains she will number the pieces and transpose the message onto proper paper later. Muriel whispers her message to Mabel, and Rose transcribes it in shorthand. When finished, Muriel asks Rose to sew the letter into her dress. Recognizing the request as Muriel’s attempt to preserve a final connection to her daughter, Rose tearfully agrees.

On January 2, 1945, Rose finishes a day of hard labor shoveling frozen sand. She feels guilty about choosing which sick women receive the limited smuggled food, as two political prisoners have recently died from typhus and malnutrition. Muriel’s fever has subsided and her appetite is slowly improving.

On the march back to camp, guards force the prisoners to walk close to the crematorium. Rose sees stacks of clothing bearing yellow Jewish patches near the disguised washroom and realizes the gas chamber is now operational. Resolving to survive and bear witness, she returns to the cellblock only to find the quarantine area filled with unfamiliar women. Muriel and the others are gone. Yana tells her that prisoners acting on SS orders loaded the quarantined women onto a lorry and took them away. Understanding Muriel and the others were likely taken to the gas chamber, Rose runs outside screaming for her. Two female guards intercept her, beat her with a baton, and douse her with cold water.

Rose is forced to stand through the three-hour evening roll call while her soaked clothes freeze to her body. Afterward, Yana and two prisoners help her inside and wrap her in blankets to warm her. Rose clutches the hem of her dress containing Muriel’s letter and weeps.

On March 27, 1945, Rose watches lorries depart carrying prisoners rumored to be relocating to other concentration camps. Over the past three months, conditions have deteriorated drastically. Several thousand prisoners have been killed in the gas chamber. New prisoners from evacuated eastern camps continue to arrive, food supplies have dwindled further, the death block overflows, and daily suicides occur on the electrified fences. Air raid sirens sound more frequently, and rumors spread that Soviet forces are advancing as the SS begin relocating records and workshop equipment.

Months of hard labor have left Rose severely emaciated, kept alive only by rations Yana smuggles from the hospital. Her deepest pain remains guilt and grief over Muriel’s death. She believes that if Muriel had not given her food during solitary confinement, Muriel might have had the strength to avoid typhus. Rose wonders if she will live to see liberation and contemplates entrusting Muriel’s hidden letter to a stronger prisoner more likely to survive the camp.

On April 27, 1945, SS officers rush into the administration building as lorries rumble outside the camp walls. Yana tells Rose she overheard that Commandant Suhren has ordered the camp evacuated—the Germans plan to force all capable prisoners on a march, leaving no witnesses, while abandoning the weak to die. Determined to stay and care for the sick until Soviet liberation, Yana insists on trading coats with Rose. Rose finds food and bandages Yana has smuggled into the pockets.

Thousands of women are herded through the gate, beginning what becomes known as a death march. A few hundred yards from camp, the first execution occurs, as SS guards shoot prisoners too weak to maintain the pace. Rose realizes the SS are deliberately scattering corpses across the countryside in an attempt to hide evidence of atrocities. To endure the pain, Rose focuses on happy memories of her family, her work in Churchill’s war rooms, her SOE training, and her time with Lazare.

After nightfall, the survivors rest at a train station. Rose shares some of Yana’s food with a young Polish prisoner before the march resumes before dawn, leaving behind women who died during the night. By evening, Rose is in a subgroup of 50 prisoners led by two young SS soldiers who lock them in a barn for the night.

On the third day of the march, Rose’s subgroup has dwindled to 22 women. Rain falls steadily, and Rose’s feet throb with open sores. When she loses a wooden clog in the mud, she continues on one bare, ulcerated foot. The two SS soldiers, now in civilian clothes, force the prisoners off the road into a clearing in the woods. Rose and the other women realize they are about to be executed. They huddle together as the soldiers raise their rifles. Rose raises her chin in defiance, closes her eyes, and waits.

Gunfire erupts. Rose opens her eyes to see both German soldiers dead on the ground. Soviet soldiers emerge from the forest, and their leader stares in shock at the emaciated women. Rose falls to her knees and weeps with relief.