“Were you Selbstschutz in Rastadt?” he asked.

“All of us,” Nikolas said, and raised his mug to the other men. “It’s how we showed we were good Germans worthy of being brought home to the Fatherland. With the documents to prove it. You have them, yes? These documents, Emil?”

Emil nodded. “Since the first days of the invasion. Proving it was not difficult. My mother had our family Bible going back generations all the way to Germany and all of our birth records from the church.”

“They didn’t draft you into the Wehrmacht?”

“They wanted to at first, but I told them that I was the last useful man left in my family, and I would be a better farmer to the Germans than a soldier. They told me to go back to our farm, start growing, and we did.”

“How lucky for you,” Nikolas said, but he didn’t sound satisfied.

Emil drank more of his wine and was offered a second cup and a third while the militiamen sang, got maudlin over the lives they were leaving behind, and anxious about a future away from the Soviets. Near the bottom of Emil’s third mug, one of the men called it a night.

Emil knew he should be getting back to his family. But then Nikolas poured him a little more. Last one, he promised himself as the other two men waved off Nikolas’s offer and announced that they, too, were going to sleep.

“We never know where life will take us,” Nikolas said when they were gone.

“I am trying to live life,” Emil said. “Not life living me. Not anymore.”

“You are drunk, my friend.”

“A little,” Emil said, raising his mug. “Thanks to you.”

Nikolas clinked his mug, and they drank and then lapsed into silence the way men are wont to do. Emil was pleasantly studying the glowing coals of the dying fire and thinking he really should go back or he was going to have a headache come morning, when Nikolas spoke.

“How many?”

Emil looked over to see the man staring at him. “How many what?”

Nikolas curled his hand into a gun shape, closed his left eye. “How many Jews did you have to shoot to get your land back and be on this trek?”

Emil felt as if he’d been punched and must have looked it.

Nikolas smiled and nodded. “Uh-huh. I thought so. You had to do something for them, the Germans. Everyone did. Otherwise they wouldn’t be taking you with them, protecting you and your wife and your sons. You were a shooter just like me, weren’t you, Emil?”

Emil had a vivid memory of himself staring at a Luger in his hand. His head swirled, and his stomach boiled. He’d had far too much wine.

“I knew it,” Nikolas said smugly. “I see it in your face, Emil. How many?”

Emil shook his head, but Nikolas was having none of it. He came closer, loomed over Emil. “How many stinking Bolshevik Jews did you have to shoot to get a spot on this trek?”

“None!”

Nikolas sneered at him. “Bullshit. Hell, I got no problem saying it, and neither should you. We did a good thing, a noble thing, wiping the earth free of those lice-ridden kikes. That’s how it started for us. The Romanians sent all their Jews to that farm at Bogdanovka, and the Yids started to die of typhus because of the lice crawling on them. Could have become an epidemic. Could have killed everyone for hundreds of kilometers—German, Russian, Ukrainian, everyone—if they didn’t keep it contained. The Nazis knew they had no choice, so we, the Rastadt Selbstschutz, had no choice. Took us eighteen days to shoot them all and twenty days more to boil or burn their clothes.”

Eighteen days shooting? Emil thought in horror, staring at the man’s newer clothes before he staggered a few feet to his right and vomited up Adeline’s bread and four mugs of wine.

“There you go,” Nikolas said. “We’ve all felt that way, one time or another, because of what we did. Get it out; you’ll feel better. And the way I see it, we had no choice, right?”

Emil turned, glared at him, acid burning the back of his throat as he said, “You had a choice. And I’ve never shot or killed anyone in my life. We’re on this trek because of an old Bible and because I’m a good farmer and smart with my hands. Thanks for the wine.”

He picked up his lantern and headed by dead reckoning back into the darkness with Nikolas yelling drunkenly after him, “Bullshit! I saw it in your face. It takes a man like me to know a man like you, Emil. You see them when you’re sleeping, don’t you? Hear them, too. All the lice-ridden rats you put down!”

At that, Emil began to run blindly, trying to put space between himself and Nikolas, and terrified that Adeline might somehow be hearing the ravings of a drunken killer. He tripped and almost went down but caught his balance and slowed. The shouting had stopped.

“I never . . . ,” Emil muttered shakily after he’d lit the lantern and found the road to the bridge. “Never.”

He passed his horses and scrambled down the embankment. Then he extinguished the light and crept toward the sleeping forms of his wife and children. None of them stirred when Emil slid under the blankets behind Walt.

He lay awake on his back with Nikolas’s cruel voice echoing in his head: I saw it in your face. In his mind, Emil heard people crying, then the flat cracks of guns, saw their flashes in the darkness beyond Captain Haussmann, who stood there, thrusting a loaded Luger at him.

That memory was seared so deeply in Emil, it took his breath away. He felt hollow and alone, a sense magnified when he thought of Nikolas shooting Jews for eighteen days.

He’s a threat to me. I don’t know why yet, but he’s a threat. I can feel it in my bones.

Emil closed his eyes, understanding that he needed to stay far away from Nikolas and he needed to rely on himself to do it, certainly not on a God who’d create a man who could shoot innocent people for eighteen days on end.

And then he was fearfully wondering if meeting Nikolas and seeing Haussmann were part of some bitter punishment for that night outside Dubossary. He drifted toward sleep, thinking, Once you decided, Emil, you were as guilty as Nikolas.

Chapter Nine

Early April 1944

Twelve kilometers east of the Romanian border

Four more days and five nights passed, and the Martels were seeing as many retreating Romanians as Germans. Whenever they passed a group of marching Wehrmacht soldiers, Adeline found herself searching their faces, hoping against hope to see her younger brother, Wilhelm, Will’s namesake, among them. Or Emil’s older brother, Reinhold. But she never did.

Emil had turned quiet and brooding since they’d camped below that bridge west of Hincesti. Adeline had learned to give her husband distance when he was like this and focused her attention on supporting him and the boys as they passed through muddy low country laced with creek bottoms, and then climbed forested ridges made treacherous by lingering ice and snow.

Parts and pieces of the broken German war machine had been discarded on both sides of the route. They saw unburied frozen soldiers being pecked by crows. And charred abandoned tanks. And transport trucks buried up to their axles in muck. And the blasted black barrels of artillery cannons that the Wehrmacht had decided to blow up rather than leave for Stalin’s forces to use against them.

Now some twelve days into their ordeal, members of the trek had begun to die from exposure, weakness, and disease. Not an hour passed when they weren’t rolling by a wagon pulled off to the side of the route so survivors could bury their dead.

“When I was getting water this morning, a woman told me they think it’s typhus,” Adeline said when they were about to turn northwest toward the Romanian border town of Iasi.

“Lice,” Emil said, thinking of Nikolas. “The lice carry it.”

“I checked both boys last night.”

“We’ll check everyone every night until this is over.”

The caravan halted. Word soon came back that tanks and forces with the Soviet Second Ukrainian Front were now moving to the west-northwest, trying to split German Army Group South into two pieces. The SS men protecting the trek kept them stalled for two hours before directing the caravan south, away from Iasi.

The sun came out an hour after they changed routes, which Adeline took as a good sign. The temperature warmed the farther south they rolled. As the hours passed, the boys dozed under the bonnet. Emil was at the reins, looking all around and taking in their surroundings.

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

His brows knitted. “I don’t know that I’m looking for anything. I’m just looking around because I never intend on coming back this way ever again.”

“Does that make you happy or sad?”

“That I’m never coming back here? Happy.”

“Good. I thought you’d forgotten how to be happy.”

He looked at her, his mouth slightly agape. “I’m sorry, Adella. I just get caught up in my worries about you and the boys and whether we should have come with the Germans or, I don’t know, gone our own way to freedom.”

“Do you know the way to freedom?”