“Was he?” Emil said. “He asked me where the medical clinic was, and I showed him. Are you sure?”

Adeline was almost sure but gave Emil the benefit of the doubt, and they walked back to the tent in silence. He immediately took his coat off and climbed beneath the blanket. She soon put out the lantern and joined him, spooning him from behind.

“They’re asleep,” she whispered.

“What?”

“You know. If you want?”

There was a long silence. “I’m beyond tired.”

Adeline rolled away from him onto her back and closed her eyes. She could feel the tension coming off her husband in waves. When he got like this, she’d learned to give him room. If something was bothering Emil, he’d come to her once he’d figured out a way to solve the problem. It was just the way he was, and she fell asleep telling herself that maybe he was right: some things were not worth knowing.

The following day, the Martel family went through five hours of interviews and document inspection. At each of eight stations, they were questioned by as many as six immigration and naturalization officers about everything from their personal history to potential occupations to the value of the lands they left behind. They were also photographed and subjected to full medical examinations that included detailed measurements of their skulls, jaws, and arm and leg bones as part of racial research commissioned by Himmler himself.

At the end of the process, each family was given a framed picture of Adolf Hitler, granted provisional resettlement identity cards, and told they would be moved to more permanent quarters once the quarantine was lifted.

The newest residents of the führer’s Greater Germany quickly fell into the military-like rhythm of refugee-camp life. Though the boys had spoken German and some Russian from birth, they were enrolled in a makeshift school within days, learning to spell, read, and write in proper German and to master the basics of mathematics. Except for Karoline and Lydia, the adults were given jobs. Malia and Marie worked in the laundry, while Adeline toiled in the kitchen, which suited her because she adored cooking and learned something new from the cooks there every day. Johann swept the pathways between the first eight rows of tents. Emil was ordered to work emptying the latrines, which he did stoically. As he told himself repeatedly, My family is safe. The food isn’t what it was the first night, but we’re being fed and given a place to live. Cleaning the latrines is the least I can do.

Emil came back to the tent every evening after removing the coverall Haussmann’s men gave him and after taking a shower with a strong lye soap that gave him its own peculiar, lingering odor. Day after day turned into the middle of June 1944, and still, Adeline never once heard her husband complain about his shitty lot.

About that time, however, Adeline began to notice the food deliveries coming into the kitchen had dropped in both quality and quantity; and she overheard one of the cooks talking about Rome falling to the Allies and the Wehrmacht in pitched battles against the Allies in France, all of which was drawing manpower and supplies from all regions of the Reich west into France and south into Italy.

When she murmured this all to Emil, he became excited because he said it meant the western Allies had invaded Europe and were coming for Hitler.

“Don’t you see?” he whispered. “The Allies? They’re our way west, Adella. All we have to do is get to them and surrender.”

She looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “You want to walk through Poland and Germany into France, past the Wehrmacht, through the battle, and live long enough to surrender? First of all, you’re not a soldier. Neither am I. We can’t surrender.”

“It doesn’t matter. If we can get to the Allies, however we do it, we’d be their refugees. We can work for them, Adeline. If I must, I’ll clean toilets the rest of my life. Maybe they will send us west across the ocean as thanks for our hard work.”

Adeline frowned. “That’s a big maybe when I have two young boys, a mother, and a sister to think about, not to mention your parents and my cousin and the twins. And Rese. Do you want your sister to run through bullets and bombs to surrender?”

“No,” he said. “We’ll carry Rese if we have to. And the bullets will miss us.”

“Now you are sounding like Corporal Gheorghe. And you haven’t even been hit in the head.”

She was trying to be funny, but it got him outright angry. “That’s right: I have not been hit in the head. And I am not anything like Corporal damned Gheorghe!”

She held up both hands. “Take time to think it over, Emil. We can’t leave the camp’s grounds, so we can’t go looking for the Allies at the moment anyway.”

That calmed Emil down for several days until word spread through the camp that the quarantine would soon be lifted and they’d be moving into permanent quarters in the small city of Wielun southwest about twenty-two kilometers. Emil started studying the position of the stars in the northern hemisphere from a book the boys had been given in school.

“You haven’t read a book in years,” Adeline said. “Why are you interested in that?”

He scowled at her. “I may only have a fifth-grade education, but I can read and write, and I’m not stupid.”

She blushed. “I never said you were, Emil. I just wondered.”

“If you know the position of the stars, you can find your way at night, Adella, which I think might help us getting to the Allies and becoming their refugees.”

“Walking at night?”

“Yes. Only at night.”

“We’ll fall on our faces,” she said. “We’ll break our noses or our legs.”

Emil sighed. “Or we might make our way to freedom.”

He tried to spend time every day listening behind the SS officers’ latrines for news of the war and trying to figure out how long it might take them to get to the Allied lines. At night, Emil stood outside, studying the North Star in relation to the constellations. But every time he brought up the subject of running west after they were released from the camp, Adeline became more and more upset.

“I won’t do it,” she said finally.

“You will,” Emil replied. “At some point, you’ll have to decide where you want to spend your life—in slavery or in freedom—and if you choose freedom, you’ll have to run through a no-man’s-land with bullets zinging around your head to get there. I don’t think there’s any way around it. If we want that life, we’ll have to risk death for it.”

They were awoken at dawn on a late-June day, told to gather their things and to report to the parade ground, where Major Haussmann was waiting at the microphone.

“Your quarantine is over,” Haussmann said. “The belongings you surrendered at the train station will be returned to you, and you will be given an address, a key, and a map to your home as well as an explanation of the food-rationing system, which is important if you wish to eat. Once in their new homes, adults must report to their EWZ officer to be assigned to jobs according to their skills.”

“What about Rese?” Emil’s mother fretted.

“I told you, Mama,” Emil said. “The doctors said she’s recovering and will be brought to us in Wielun as soon as she is able to travel.”

They were told to organize themselves by the boxcars they arrived in, with the Martels’ boxcar the first to go. Soon they passed through the gates for the first time in five weeks. It was a beautiful, warm summer day. Their little wagon was one of the first to be unloaded from the truck, and everything was as they’d left it, even the dried foodstuffs.

Emil received the key, the map to their quarters in Wielun, and their first ration cards. Emil studied the map, which showed their new homes reachable by one of three routes. He was lost in calculating the distance of each route when he heard Major Haussmann say, “Martel?”

Looking up, Emil saw Major Haussmann standing there, in an at-ease position, gazing directly at him. He felt his gut roil. He’d thought once they were beyond the gate that they were rid of the man forever. But there Haussmann stood.

He lowered the map and said, “Yes, Major?”

“A word before you go, bitte,” the SS officer said. “In private.”

“Of course, Major,” Emil said, feeling worse, looking at his wife and kids, wondering if it was for the last time, before following the SS officer down the fence line of the camp, over a roll in the terrain, and down into a deep dip in the field where they could not be seen from the road.

The major pivoted to face him, his Luger drawn, with the same furiously amused expression Emil had seen on Haussmann’s face that night in Dubossary long ago. Emil threw up his hands, terrified.

“I knew I’d seen you before, even with all the hair and the beard,” Haussmann said. “But with it all gone, I knew it was you, which is strange because I’ve seen tens of thousands of faces since that night. Yet yours stood out. Why is that, Martel?”