Shortly after the Brown Sisters’ visit, Rainer receives orders requesting two of his best boys to report for duty at a nearby labor camp. They are shutting it down and moving its prisoners farther west into the Reich. The boys are to assist with the prisoner transport. Rainer selects Heiner, the bully, and Gerald Eisenblatt.
But on the morning of their departure, Rainer doesn’t come out of his room.
“You’ll have to do it,” he says when Ania knocks on his door. He is lying in bed, one arm thrown across his face, still in his nightclothes.
Ania stares at him, appalled. “I won’t,” she says.
Rainer turns and faces the wall.
So Ania, creature of duty and slave to her own fear of punishment, takes them herself. Arthur Greiser, the leader of the Warthegau, is known for his harsh response to insubordination, and she has her own sons to think about.
She kisses her sons and tells them to stay in their room, pretend they are sick.
And as dawn is breaking, Ania and the two boys set off. A weak gray light illuminates the road through the winter haze. There is always haze here, a dulling white cloud of steam that rises from the manure in the fields and hovers in the air.
Heiner sees the journey as an opportunity for unfettered bullying, which he begins by tossing pebbles at Gerald’s narrow back. “Stop it!” Ania commands. “Stop it this instant.”
But Heiner just laughs. “What will you do—send me back?”
“I will tell whoever is to oversee you.”
“What, that your ‘best and brightest’ don’t follow your orders?” He hoots with delight at his own cleverness and begins flinging even larger stones at the smaller boy. Gerald yelps and turns to hit Heiner with his own stealthily palmed rock. In an instant they have fallen into a flailing heap.
“Stop! Stop it!” Ania shouts, slapping at Heiner’s back. They are on a long stretch of uninhabited road and her voice sounds like the chirping of an irrelevant bird. She can only stand and stare at them. Gerald is beyond her help. By what sleight of hand did her enthusiasm for national service, for shaping young men and building community, turn into this?
“You should be ashamed,” she says, speaking equally to herself.
When they stand, Gerald is bleeding. His lip is split, and he has a black eye. She takes the handkerchief from her pocket, spits on it, and wipes his cuts.
They continue the rest of their walk in merciful silence, occasionally interrupted by Heiner’s tuneless whistling. From Gerald she hears a quiet, choked breathing sound. His face has swollen to a livid purple; she tries not to think of his mother. It will be up to Ania to explain his condition to the authorities.
The station at Kutno is packed with people. Since Stalingrad, the Russians have been advancing. The chickens are coming home to roost. Everyone in the east knows it, never mind what Hitler and Goebbels and Der Stürmer tell them to believe. Here are the first waves of evidence: wizened grandmothers, bedraggled young women and babies, old men with long faces and an air of desperation, all fleeing before the advancing Russian troops.
Ania and the boys are the only ones waiting on this side of the tracks. The camp where they are headed is farther east. Hitler has ordered Germans in the territories to stay put, but meanwhile Himmler quietly moves their prisoners deeper into the Reich.
“Will we take the prisoners west by train?” Gerald asks.
Ania has no idea. Truthfully, she has not given the details of their task much thought. Ania has become skilled at not thinking beyond her own sons.
It is late afternoon when they arrive. The sky is vast and gray. The station has no name, and there is no town or village anywhere in sight—only a fence surrounding long, low barracks beside a giant quarry. Ania is confused. She has understood the camp to supply labor for an SS farm. But this does not look like a farm.
Even Heiner seems cowed. They make their way along the fence toward what appears to be the front gate, flanked on both sides by rudimentary guard booths, from which two SS men emerge. “Halt!” one shouts.
Ania and the boys freeze.
An eerie silence follows, punctuated by the whirring and hammering of heavy machinery. The men continue their approach.
It occurs to Ania that she is expected to speak.
“We’ve come from Lager 428, in the Warthegau,” she says. “I am delivering trainees.”
The older of the two men holds out his hand for the papers. The younger one grins and nicks his chin toward Gerald’s swollen face.
The man glances up from the papers and eyes Heiner and Gerald, his gaze lingering on the black eye. Then he nods. Apparently they are in the right place.
He gestures for the boys to walk.
As they continue toward the gate, they can see the activity on the other side. Prisoners are sorting piles of stones and loading them into wagons bound for a cement works. A group of them pull an impossibly heavy-looking cart. And, as Ania watches, something becomes clear: they are all women.
Ania stops and stares.
“Move along,” the SS man barks, and Ania complies automatically. But she keeps her eyes on the women. As she watches, one of them sinks to her knees, causing confusion down the line—the others continue to pull, even though she is still attached to the rope of her harness. Her body sags forward but cannot completely drop. No one stops, and for a grisly moment, she is pulled along, in danger of being run over. Then the accompanying guard lunges forward and slices the rope that holds her and she tumbles to the ground. The woman behind her manages to kick her body to the side, out of the way of the wheel.
Without thinking, Ania stops and covers her mouth.
“Nha?” The younger guard grins. “Arbeit macht frie.” Ania can make out the words despite his Polish accent. A grim parody of what she once understood them to mean: Work will free you. Reeducation through labor, Hitler’s promise of redemption through hard work.
On the other side of the fence, the fallen woman gets to her knees. Ania’s whole body is swept with relief. She is all right! But then, in one motion, the guard smacks her with the butt of his rifle. She falls sideways, this time facing the gate.
“Frau Brandt!” the senior SS man says sharply. “Unterscharführer Pretski will take your boys to their quarters. You will follow me to sign the papers. There is a train due in half an hour that you can take back.”
As if underwater, Ania returns her eyes to the boys, these fifteen-year-olds she has delivered to this hell. “Heil Hitler!” Heiner says loudly and salutes. Gerald, more shakily, follows suit.
Ania knows what is required of her. But she cannot move her arm, or open her mouth.
Their eyes are all on her.
“Mach’s gut,” she says in something like a whisper as, on the other side, the woman is dragged away.