" had been ripped from her father’s Torah, but also from Torat Ha-Adam, the Nachmanides volume. Both had been utterly destroyed. Intact on the floor, unmolested, she found Historia Calamitatum, the only book not in the divine language from which the entire cosmos was created. Holding the Historia and the valise, she began to leave the room, but her composure failed and she broke into a run, tore down the two remaining flights of stairs and out into the U-shaped courtyard. What she saw stopped her. The nearest part of the quadrangle was vacant, but at its far end a throng of inmates was clustered inside the recently erected funnel of barbed wire. The limit of the courtyard was defined by the platform at the terminal point of the railway track. Rachel ran toward the crowd of prisoners, but as she approached, she saw smaller knots of soldiers, and stopped. To one side, they wore the brown uniforms of the Gendarmerie, and to the other, the gray-green of "

― James Carroll , The Cloister