Whenever they hear word of a checkpoint, Ania and her boys are forced to tromp into the forest with every other paperless refugee. Their progress is painfully slow. They are not the only ones frustrated by this. The woods are full of anger and panic. Everyone talks about the Russians: they will eat German children, rape German women, burn German houses to the ground. At least these fantasies distract them from the cold. What is frostbite when compared to the threat of being eaten by a hungry Russian? They are suggestible masses, used to basing their beliefs and actions on ideology rather than experience.
As it is, the cold causes enough trouble: chilblains and frostbite, sores on the fingers and lips and eyelids that won’t heal. People strip clothing from the corpses of less fortunate refugees and huddle together in woodsheds and haylofts, pressing their bodies against those of strangers to survive. In the north, where the refugees are forced to cross the frozen Haff, there are rumors of horses stuck in the ice, and whole wagons of families who have disappeared into the freezing lagoon.
Ania is less afraid of the cold or the Russians than she is of being sent back. The Russians are not individuals but an army. And in her experience, armies are less interested in individuals than the individuals think they are. The stream of refugees is like blood from a severed arm—a troubling side effect, not a root cause. The Russian army is after the German army, not this human by-product of their fighting.
She and her boys move south as well as west, and the front grows closer. At night, they can hear the shelling and drumroll of the big guns. The more frightened travelers scramble to their feet at one, two, three a.m. and resume their march in the dark, clutching their sacks, pushing their handcarts. No one has wagons here. The horses are all gone. If the Nazis didn’t whisk them off to the front, the Russians have stolen them.
For a few weeks, Ania has noticed a sympathetic-looking woman among the crowd of fellow travelers. She is of average size with light brown hair that she keeps tucked under a grubby scarf. Her face is kind—not old, but timeworn—and intelligent. She has a son, a boy of about Wolfgang’s age, but smaller, and sickly. Ania has seen them several times sleeping in the abandoned barns and train stations in which they take refuge along the way. She finds solace in the woman’s presence: a reasonable-looking person, someone with whom she might have, in another lifetime, become friends.
Ania does not have warm feelings for the other familiar faces. The Polish grandmother in jarringly shiny men’s riding boots, the Ukrainian mother accompanied by six children and a dim-witted young man she smacks on the head and gives only the smallest portions of food, the bone-thin young woman with the lifeless baby wrapped against her chest, the old man pulling his listless, swollen-legged wife on a wheelbarrow. Her legs look like they’re going to explode, Wolfgang remarked when they first saw her. Ania can barely look at any of them. Instead, she concerns herself entirely with her boys: whether they need to stop, whether they are sick. For two weeks, Anselm suffered from terrible diarrhea and they had to camp in place. She is responsible. It was her choice to flee.
For the most part, people on this journey do not share. They do not establish camaraderie in their misery—their supplies are too meager, the mood too grim. They are fleeing from, not to, and the uncertainty of their destination renders them mute.
Then one night, the eastern front falls and the Russians overtake the village in which Ania and the others are hiding. The ground reverberates with the weight of human footsteps—an entire battalion approaches, accompanied by the rumble of tanks. Panic runs through the crowd sleeping in the nooks and crannies of the village. For the first time Ania can recall, people begin to run, even stampede. Shots are fired. And the road, narrow here in the village between the ancient barns and stables, becomes clogged with human beings.
Ania and her boys remain hidden in the hayloft where they have taken shelter. They are nearly the only ones left. “Shouldn’t we leave, too?” Anselm asks. He looks at her, eyes wide—he is anxious by nature and has developed a tremor on the march.
From the street below they hear screams. “Better to stay,” Ania says with confidence she doesn’t feel. But at least here they will be safe from the human avalanche.
When the Russians finally enter the village, the beams and girders of the barn shake. Several heavy artillery vehicles precede the soldiers and can barely fit down the narrow street. Without speaking, Ania and her boys creep toward the shuttered hay chute to watch. Only then does she realize they are not alone. The woman she’s noticed these last few weeks and her son are at the opening, already peering out. Without speaking, the woman shifts to make space for them, patting the floor beside her as if they are old friends.
Outside, the scene is one of absurd chaos. After the vehicles, the Russians press down the street on foot. They are in high spirits, shouting back and forth in their rough language, singing, and passing flasks. Scattered through the stream of soldiers are the last of the fleeing civilians, small and gray and terrified, clutching their bundles, pressing back against doorways, crouching, even covering their heads. But the Russians barely see them, and it strikes Ania as perversely funny—here are the troops that sent these masses scurrying ahead for weeks and now they simply march past. After all the panic, their disregard is almost insulting.
“They can’t be bothered,” the other woman says, as if she has read Ania’s thoughts.
“Look at that one.” Wolfgang points to a stocky, bearded soldier, singing, dancing a Russian jig.
“Like a trained bear.” The woman laughs.
The situation is weirdly cozy, with all of them clustered around the window, and they remain for hours, until the last of the Russians have passed. From time to time a soldier or two bangs into the barn below in search of livestock, knocking open the empty stall doors, firing unnecessary shots. In the loft, they hold their breaths. One particularly persistent man starts up the ladder, then is shouted down by someone outside. In the hayloft, relief makes them giddy.
Ania is the other woman’s name too, although she has always been called by her middle name, Gerda. “I knew there was a reason I liked you,” Ania says when she learns this. It is the first time she has made anything resembling a joke in God knows how long. The boy’s name is Olgar. He is sweet with bright eyes and a mischievous sense of humor. His cough is alarming. It sounds like a scraping Tomahawk plane. He doesn’t complain, though, and carries a pack of cards in his breast pocket. He teaches Anselm and Wolfgang to play poker while they wait.
When the last of the battalion finally marches past, Ania, her boys, and their new friends climb down the ladder.