Emil hated to do it but nodded. “In this heat, they are already gathering disease. They’ll be gone in hours once we’re gone, probably to buzzards and crows.”

He could see his older son was upset by that idea, but Walt finally nodded, walked around Emil, and started up the ladder. Adeline appeared in the open door to the boxcar, saying, “Emil, the medic needs you, and your mother’s having a fit.”

“Go up on top with Walt,” he said as he climbed in. “I’m predicting a meltdown up there pretty soon. He saw Rese’s legs.”

Adeline closed her eyes and nodded.

Inside the crowded boxcar, the heat was stifling, and his mother was wailing. Emil went to her and told her not to make things worse than they were. “This isn’t about you. This is about Rese and keeping her alive.”

“I have to do something!” Karoline said. “My God, I can’t stand this!”

Emil did not reply for a pause, and then said, “If you still believe in God, Mother, I guess you should pray.”

He went to Rese’s side, however, confirming his own disbelief in God or in any higher force. No decent spirit would allow such a tragic thing to happen to a wild but innocent creature like his sister. No fair universe would put her on a stretcher near the door of a packed and stifling boxcar in northern Hungary with an SS medic putting an IV line into her arm while her lower legs, feet, and shoes lay below on the tracks.

“Do you know her blood type?” Decker asked.

“Type O negative,” Emil said. “I am O negative, too. The Communists tested us all. We were required to know.”

“You’re a universal donor. I need you to be by her side and slightly higher for the transfusion.”

Emil looked past his father and saw several wooden crates stacked there. He went to the owner, a woman with two small children, and asked her if he could use them for his sister. She agreed as long as he would return them so she would not lose her space.

Once Emil had two crates moved and stacked, and he was sitting on them, slightly above his sister, Decker moved quickly, efficiently, like the veteran battlefield medic he was, and soon had blood traveling from Emil’s left arm into Rese’s right. Haussmann appeared at the door to the boxcar and said, “How long until you have her stabilized?”

“Forty minutes?”

“You have ten,” the major snapped. “Be creative.”

The sergeant looked ready to argue, but then said, “Very well, Major.”

Decker told Emil to stay where he was and that he’d be back in a few moments.

“Don’t you have to loosen the tourniquets at some point?” Emil asked.

“If I do this right, we should be able to remove them for good in about ten minutes,” he said, and got down from the train. He walked forward and climbed up into the locomotive where Emil could not see him any longer.

Emil looked over at Rese’s face, battered, swollen, and filthy from the fall. The siblings were separated by a lifetime; he was more than a decade older, a father to his boys much more than he was a brother to her. It made him feel guilty that he’d often been short with Rese, especially the past few years when her emotions had reeled between hurricane and dust storm, all of it compounded by this trip, her near-constant illness, and now this.

He saw Decker climbing back down the ladder of the engine, wearing one glove that held a smoking tin bucket with a wooden handle that stuck out of it. The medic jogged back, put the smoking bucket on the floor of the boxcar, and climbed in. The smell of the smoke was harsh and acrid. People began to cough and hack. Emil looked into the bucket and saw the iron tip of the poker buried in glowing red, smoking coals from the locomotive’s firebox.

“What are you going to do with that thing?” Karoline demanded. “You’re not burning her with that thing! She’s been through enough—”

Decker turned his back on her, saying, “She’s going through a little more to save her life.”

He looked at Emil, took Rese’s blood pressure. “Better,” he said. “Who else in your family is type O negative?”

“I am,” said Johann, who’d been largely quiet, watching it all unfold from the sweltering shadows. “Her father.”

“You’ll be next,” he said, and removed the transfusion line from Emil’s arm.

When Emil stood, he felt light-headed, but managed to move aside while Decker replaced the needle assembly of the transfusion line and Johann took a seat by his beloved daughter. It was only then, as the medic worked the needle into his arm, that Emil saw Johann shed tears.

Decker saw it, too. “She’s going to live because of you and your son, Herr Martel, and because of what I’m about to do. I promise you that.”

Johann nodded. “Do it. Some things are worth the pain.”

A tired, pretty woman in her late twenties who looked vaguely familiar to Emil appeared at the side door, holding a basket with two infants sleeping in it. She looked in at the makeshift operating table and then up when Adeline called down from the roof, “Marie? Is that you?”

“Adeline?” the woman said, surprised. “I didn’t know you were on this train. I came because I heard about the accident and wanted to see if I could help.”

“I’ll come right down and take the twins,” Adeline said.

While Decker cleaned the wounds and prepared them for what was to come, Adeline climbed down. “Emil, you remember my cousin Marie from Birsula? She worked in a hospital there.”

“With the surgeons,” Marie said.

“Get up here, then,” Decker said. “I can use the help.” The medic looked over at Emil. “I’ll need you to hold her down. I don’t have any ether, and even with the additional morphine I’m going to give her, she may buck some.”

“You’re going to torture her!” Karoline said, and turned away, weeping again.

Marie gazed at the scene. “No time to flap and suture?”

“No.”

Outside, Major Haussmann hurried up. “You have four minutes. We are on a schedule from Berlin now. Himmler himself.”

The sergeant nodded. Marie gave Rese another injection. Decker put gloves on to pick up the poker from the still-smoking bucket. The tip of it glowed ripe-pumpkin orange.

“Hold her now,” the medic commanded.

Emil pinned his sister’s right thigh to the blanket below her. Marie took her left. Decker went to the right stump, peered closely at it, and then touched the tip of the red-hot iron to the first of the three severed arteries that had been spurting and misting Rese’s blood away. There was a hissing noise and a smell like meat searing before Rese jerked, arched, and screamed from some depth of consciousness not deadened by shock or opiate. She twisted her hips hard and bucked, almost got out from under Emil and Marie’s grasp.

“Hold her!” Decker shouted. “Don’t let her tear out that transfusion line!”

In a panic, Emil threw his entire weight onto his sister’s right pelvis and thigh, and Adeline’s cousin did the same. Johann took Rese’s arms. Together they pinned her down as Decker went about his brutal business, cauterizing two more major blood vessels in the right leg before turning to the left. By the time he finished, Emil was sickened to tears by Rese’s wailing, which by the sixth searing touch of the glowing iron had died to whimpering and delirium.

Sergeant Decker handed the fire bucket and the poker down to Major Haussmann, saying, “We’ll disinfect and bandage her. The smaller arteries and veins will naturally produce a clot. Barring infection, she’ll live for a surgeon in Poland to do a better job.”

“Well done, Sergeant,” Haussmann said. “Heil Hitler!”

Decker and Marie applied hydrogen peroxide and iodine salve generously over the wounds and especially over the open bone cavities. When they were dry, he released the tourniquets around each leg and watched the wounds. Seeing little seepage, he doused the stumps with sulfa powder, applied layers of pads that he had Marie hold in place, and then wrapped them with roll after roll of tan gauze until they looked like large mittens where her lower legs used to be.

There was a sharp whistle. The train lurched yet again and rolled on.

Marie spun around, went to the open side door, and called up, “Adeline?”

“We’ve got the twins up here,” Adeline called back.

Emil did not have it in himself to think about leaving Rese’s legs on the tracks where she’d lost them. As they gathered speed and the lake and the town of Tata were swallowed by spring forests and green meadows, he watched Decker remove the transfusion line from his father, now feeling more anger than pity for Rese’s plight.