She grimaced and said, “It hurts. Everywhere.”

“Yes, there will be a man here to help with that soon.”

Johann came behind Adeline, put his massive hand on his daughter’s shoulder with tears in his eyes. “Rese.”

“Papa,” she said, and smiled as her eyes shut and her head lolled a bit.

Rese took two big deep breaths before she suddenly stiffened and clenched Adeline’s hands. Her cheeks drew back, her lips thinned, and her eyes stretched wide.

“I fell,” she said.

“Yes,” Adeline said.

“I landed by the tracks.”

“On the tracks,” her father said.

Rese seemed confused before looking toward the ceiling with an expression that fluttered between disbelief and total dread.

“No,” she said at last. “Tell me it didn’t . . .” Then she smiled crazily at them. “No, I feel . . . feel them! You see?”

With that, Rese struggled upright and looked down her skirt, seeing the bloody, round bandages about the stumps where her feet, ankles, and lower calves used to be. She gaped at them, wrenched her hand from Adeline’s, and reached for them.

“They’re there! I feel them! They’re under the bandages! I feel them!”

Karoline appeared at the foot of the stretcher, facing the doorway, unable to look at her daughter directly.

“Mama?” Rese said. “I feel them.”

Adeline feared her mother-in-law was going to launch into her damnation sermon from the night before. But instead, Karoline said coldly, “You’re feeling the ghosts of them, Rese,” she said. “My mother knew soldiers who lost their legs in the Great War, and they swore they could feel them years later.”

Much went out of Rese, then. She blinked at her mother blankly and then at her bandaged stumps. She lifted the left leg, pain rippling through her, and then bent it at the knee. After doing the same with the right, she burst into tears.

“Now Stephan will never come find me to marry me!” she sobbed, and threw herself backward on the stretcher. “Oh God, he’ll leave me with the baby! We will be left to beg in the streets of Germany, the freak girl from Russia with no feet and a child!”

Rese went hysterical, inconsolable, tortured and racked with agonies Adeline could not begin to fathom until Marie appeared at her side. The sun had risen. The train was slowing.

Marie took Rese’s hand. When Rese tried to pull it back, Marie held her firmly by the wrist and stroked her forearm, saying, “I have delivered many children, Rese, and have two of my own. See them there in the basket?”

Rese’s tears slowed, and she opened her eyes to blearily look at the basket Adeline held tilted toward her so she could see the infants in the increasing light.

“My sons are both my greatest blessing and my greatest curse,” Marie said. “God gives you children only when he thinks you are ready for the experience of holding your greatest blessing and your greatest curse in your arms at the same time.”

Rese winced in pain and reached for her left leg with her left hand.

“My legs hurt like fire. Both of them.”

“The medic is coming now,” she said. “But do you understand what I’m saying, Rese? God decided that you were not ready to be a mother. I’m sorry.”

“What?”

Karoline said, “You lost the baby, Rese.”

For a moment, it was as if Rese had not heard her mother and was transfixed on something above Marie. Then the skin on her forehead twitched, her eyes dulled, and she slowly drew her hand from Adeline’s cousin’s. Wrapping her head in her arms, she turned away and tried to draw up her legs, only to scream and twist in pain.

Sergeant Decker appeared. Karoline said, “Thank God. Put her out of her misery. I don’t think I can take any more right now.”

The medic nodded, introduced himself to Rese, and asked if he could examine her legs.

“No!” Rese screamed. “No, you can’t!”

“I’m going to give you a shot first to help with the pain, okay?”

Rese didn’t reply. Decker retrieved his syringe and a vial of morphine and gave her a healthy dose. Within minutes, she’d stopped crying and had rolled over on her back, staring lazily at the ceiling while Decker cut off her bandages and examined the stumps, finding that the smaller arteries and veins had indeed clotted.

“No sign of infection that I can see,” the medic said. “You are lucky to be alive, Rese.”

She laughed softly. “I admit you got me feeling pretty good right now, but I know when this stuff wears off, I’ll rather be dead.”

Chapter Seventeen

The train crawled north through hilly and then mountainous terrain in dry, windy heat, past Zilina and Cadca before crossing the border at Bohumin into Poland around noon. Midafternoon, the train stopped in farmland just east of the city of Lodz, which the Germans had renamed “Litzmannstadt.”

Emil and Adeline were atop the boxcar with the boys when Major Haussmann exited the locomotive and strode along the train, shouting that everyone was to exit with their belongings. The mob spilled out and away from the train and crossed a county road.

The sun and the wind were near infernal as they brought down Rese on the stretcher and then the Martels’ two little wagons and the last of their things. The boys were excited to be off the train after the twenty-seven-hour trip and began a game of tag despite the heat.

Major Haussmann returned, said, “The girl will be taken to the military hospital along with the other wounded soldiers.”

“I’ll go with her,” Karoline said.

“No one goes with her. The rest of you are in quarantine. A fever spread through the train ahead of you, and we can’t take the chance of infecting the city.”

A young, burly medic named Praeger arrived to help Decker take Rese to an ambulance. She had not spoken in hours, but he managed to get through to her by appealing to her slightly warped sense of humor.

As Decker prepared another injection to carry Rese through the bumpy ride to the military hospital, Praeger squatted by her side and said, “My older sister lost her leg above the knee in a farming accident.”

Rese showed no reaction.

“She didn’t get over the loss of her leg until she started telling amputee jokes.”

Rese scowled in disgust. “There’s nothing funny about this.”

“No?” Praeger said. “What did the driver say to the one-legged man needing a ride?”

She glared at him. “I have no idea.”

“Hop in.”

Rese shut her eyes and pursed her lips not to smile.

“What do you call a one-legged woman?”

She opened one eye skeptically. “What?”

“Peg,” he said.

Rese scrunched up her lips sourly, said, “What do you call a no-legged woman?”

He smiled at her as Decker thumbed the plunger and said, “Beautiful.”

Maybe it was the drugs hitting her or the sentiment, or the soft tone in his voice, or all three, but something in Rese unlocked and softened. She smiled weakly at Praeger before her head lolled, and he and Decker picked up the litter and took her away while Johann called to her with promises that he would come find her once he was allowed.

The Germans took the refugees by boxcar, starting with the one closest to the coal car. The Martels pulled and pushed their wagons behind three soldiers who led them and the other refugees on a dusty, hot road that led out through fields that still lay fallow, awaiting the plow.

Emil was pulling, and Adeline and her mother, Lydia, pushing. Malia had gone to help Karoline and Johann. The boys were trudging along behind. As he was nearest to the three soldiers leading them, Emil could hear most of the discussion they were having.

“Like clockwork,” one of them said.

Another said, “More vermin left last night, just in time for this new blood to take their places.”

“Clothes and bugs off them first,” a third said, sounding disgusted as they crested a rise to see a group of four buildings, two on each side of the road.

A sign said “Einwandererzentralstelle (EWZ).”

“Immigration Control Center,” Emil said to Adeline.

The soldiers stopped at the center of the four buildings, and Major Haussmann appeared around the front of them.

“Men and women are to be separated here briefly. All boys are to be with their fathers. If they have no fathers and are under the age of four, they will go with their mothers and sisters. Over four years old, they go with the men.

“Keep your papers with you,” Haussmann went on. “Your belongings will be tagged and returned to you as soon as it is allowed. Bitte, men to my left, women to my right, enter the front doors before you.”

Emil kissed Adeline, then took the boys by the hands and with his father led the way up to open steel double doors in a brick wall about three meters high with barbed wire strung across the top. On the other side, they entered a courtyard of sorts with soldiers waiting behind long tables and piles of clothes thrown behind them.