In their wake, the Russians have left massive confusion. A farmer who guarded his pigs with a rifle has been shot; his pigs have been taken and his wife is wailing in the street. Another woman claims she has been beaten, and her two daughters raped. Several people have been trampled in the chaos. And they find three Ukrainians in German uniforms slumped at the bottom of a brick wall—apparent victims of an impromptu firing squad. The Russians show no pity, even for their own soldiers who have been captured and conscripted to fight for the Germans.
On the bright side, they have not bayoneted women through their private parts or cannibalized Germans or hatcheted the children and cooked them on spits as Goebbels forecast. Ania hopes they at least bayoneted a few SS men at the checkpoints. She leaves her boys with her new friend and helps pull the Ukrainians’ bodies off the street. They will be buried in the local graveyard unless someone comes looking for them. Which seems unlikely at best.
When evening falls, Ania and Gerda and their boys retreat to the hayloft. Gerda shares a heel of black bread and Ania cuts into the blood sausage she’s been saving. Outside, a layer of frost covers the village rooftops and they glitter in the moonlight. Smoke from a burning house billows toward the sky, and the boys take turns naming the shapes it makes. A mermaid, a leaping deer, a dog’s head. It feels like a celebration—of what, they’re not sure. Certainly nothing is over, and they have a long way to go. A celebration of camaraderie, then. It has been years since Ania felt such a thing.
A family of refugees from distant Galicia lights a fire in the woodstove downstairs with straw and foraged wood. The boys, basking in the rising warmth, fall asleep and the women talk. Mostly they speak of their journey west, sharing only the banalities: the nasty, apple-faced woman who screamed at passersby on the bridge, the family with scarlet fever, the way people flocked to a barrel of rotten chestnuts on the roadside like a swarm of flies. “No, like SS men to a checkpoint,” Ania corrects, and they both laugh. When was the last time she laughed? Anselm startles awake, unfamiliar with the sound.
In the morning, they set out together. When they reach Breslau, they don’t even bother with the train. They have heard that Karl Hanke, the gauleiter of Lower Silesia, has ordered the city evacuated so they can transform it into a military “fortress.” The crowd of people waiting at the station spills so far beyond the platform they can’t even see the tracks.
As they walk in the other direction, a train rumbles into the station: a line of open-goods wagons filled with what appears, at first, to be sacks of food.
“Mary, mother of God,” Gerda says, looking back. “Those are prisoners.” The sacks of food are human beings in striped uniforms, half covered with snow.
But Ania does not look back.
“Which would you rather: sit in an armchair and sew or kneel in a sunny garden and pull carrots?” Ania’s new friend introduces this game and they play often. “Which would you rather: eat Sauerbraten or fresh cream?”
It distracts them from their bleeding feet and grumbling stomachs.
Over the next weeks, they fall into a rhythm. Wake, share what little they have to eat, and play a game like this to still their minds. In the afternoon they submit to the bare necessity of walking, continuing toward the next piece of bread or moldy potato Anselm and Wolfgang manage to dig up, left over from last year’s harvest. Occasionally they come across stations set up by the National Socialist People’s Welfare, where boisterous volunteers hand out soup and propaganda: the Germans are merely waiting for the newest installment of weapons before they turn back the tide; the Russians are so desperate they are conscripting women; the supposedly kindly American troops advancing in the west are only the frontrunners—they are followed by Jewish Einsatzgruppen eager for revenge. That is why it is imperative to continue the fight. The Germans must triumph or be killed. No one believes it. The Germans are losing. This is clear from the flood of humans marching west.
In bits, the women learn more intimate details about each other. Gerda is an ethnic German, born outside Warsaw to parents who were both chemists. She studied music in the university, where she met her husband, a gifted trumpet player. He is now dead. Killed by the Nazis.
She shares funny, romantic stories about her husband—the time he serenaded her from outside her dormitory window at midnight and woke the matron, who ran outside brandishing a stick. How they honeymooned aboard a barge on the Danube. About the kitten he gave her when they first met. And while the children sleep, the women exchange darker, more painful stories about the families and homes they have lost. This way they fall asleep.
Gerda is heading to Dresden with her son, where she hopes to stay with her cousins. “Come with us,” she urges Ania. “I’m sure they will put you up, too.” It seems a promising destination. Florence on the Elbe, as it is known, a beautiful city still largely intact. Everyone says it is safe from Allied bombing on account of its lack of heavy industry, the International Red Cross station, and its cultural significance. There are also rumors that Winston Churchill has a favorite aunt who lives there, and that the Allies are preserving it so it might become the capital when the war is over. Ania is happy to go along.
It is January 1945.
Their journey to Dresden takes three weeks. They are not happy weeks: misery is the prevailing sentiment. But somehow, in Ania’s mind, they are lighter than the rest of the time around them—the years before and those that follow. They are like the last odd burst of energy from a dying man. The weather becomes kinder—it is cold but suddenly sunny. They are hungry, but they have their combined food and the little fat left on their bones—and they have their precious boys, while so many other women do not.
Every night, they fall asleep curled together—an economical row of bodies: Ania on one end, her friend on the other, and the boys in between. Sometimes Ania falls asleep midsentence. Somehow she is capable of this. She doesn’t battle the usual what ifs and hows and what thens that tend to dominate her thoughts at night.
And so despite everything that follows, this is the improbable oasis Ania returns to in her dreams.
Chapter Ten
Burg Lingenfels, August 1945
A week after the Grabareks came to Burg Lingenfels, the Russians arrived.
Their approach was eerily silent, a collection of dark figures climbing the hillside. Three of them fanned out like scouts in front of a platoon—but they were not a platoon. Though maybe they once had been. Now they were a kind of human wreckage: gaunt, tattered, hungry eyed.