The Stars and the Cookie Jar

Hey, y'all, I re-did the ending of my book. This is only the very, very ending -- I'm still working on some transitions in the scene itself - but comment, please. Please comment.

           Before sunset, she hung at the Strashun gate.
            Fayge sounded muffled, though she walked at Hirsh's side. "God in Hell, could they not let her be?"
            Raissa's eyes were closed. Naked to the waist, and lash-marks standing out even on her stomach, she dangled above their heads and her blood stained the golden stone of the ancient wall; Hirsh could see the ropes at her wrists, and her shoelaces, and the faded thread-marks on her trousers where the button had been lost and lost again
            They had hung a piece of stiff card around her neck, placed so that her breasts were mostly covered. Its edges were beginning to soften and crease where red dried to black. The words, in block German, were still legible, standing out from her like another wound.
            Vor Dem Welt, Der Wort
            "What does it say?" Hirsh asked. He could not look at Raissa, any longer, but he could only stand to look at Fayge sideways, from the blurred corner of his eye; broken blood vessels bloomed purple and black where Kittel's truncheon had caught her, from temple to chin, and Hirsh could not imagine speaking around pain like that.
            And when she did speak again, translating the placard aloud for him, he trembled and stood still in the middle of the street, one foot banked against the trolley track. She was telling him what the rhyme said, in worn-throated whispers that must have tasted like blood in the back of her mouth; but he heard her screaming, please, please, she cannot count so high and he was in the wings with a fold of moldy wool curtain blocking his eyes and his words but not his ears. Someone had taken up the count, when Raissa could not…
            "Fayge?" Hirsh blinked a little, and she touched his arm; he stopped hearing those numbers, high, clear and cold from the lips of a woman already dead. Her voice now did not hold such courage. It only went a little hoarse, as she repeated herself.
            "In the beginning was the word."