Emil tried to smile at her. But he had a growing conviction that this apartment and this building had been chosen for him and for his family by Major Haussmann to make them all suffer for what he’d done to the SS officer back in September 1941. And hadn’t he seen Nikolas enter a much nicer building? Of course he had. Nikolas was being rewarded while Emil and his family were being punished.

“No running water,” Adeline said when she went to the kitchen area.

“We’ll have to find the community well,” Emil said. “And latrine.”

“This helps,” Adeline said, reaching into the corner for a stubbly straw broom and dustpan. “Could you do that? Take the boys to find water? There are two buckets there in the corner. And before you go? Please open all the windows.”

She took the scarf off her head and tied it around her nose and mouth. Emil grinned. When his wife got to cleaning, she was a whirlwind. After getting the windows open for her, he took the pails and went downstairs, seeing into Marie’s and his parents’ apartments, which were also miserable and austere.

Outside, Johann shook his head the moment he saw Emil.

“The windows leak,” his father said. “The winter will be cold.”

“I’m going to ask for other quarters tomorrow,” Emil said.

“We’re going to find water,” Walt said. “Do you want to come, Opa?”

Johann thought about that. When Karoline started yelling about something inside, he nodded before fetching two tin buckets. In the street, they found a Pole who spoke enough German to direct them to a public well several blocks away.

By the time they’d gone there, waited in line, drawn their water, and returned to the third floor, Adeline had swept up most of the flies and rodent turds and dumped them out the window. She found lye bar soap beneath the stack of plates and pans in the sink. She and Emil used the sweater and torn shirt left behind as mops to scrub the floors and bunks with the soapy water.

Since the boys knew the way to the well, Emil gave them the job of resupplying the water. With the next two bucketsful, they washed the dishes, pots, and pans and then took inventory of the kitchen. Only then did they start to bring up the last of their belongings from the little wagon.

There was no fuel in their stove, but her mother’s range produced a flame. That night she baked the last of the Zwieback rolls in her mother’s apartment. They also made a soup from the dried foods and two bruised onions Adeline pilfered from the quarantine-camp kitchen before they left that morning.

They waited to eat until after the sun had gone down and with it the summer heat. In the lantern light, Adeline made them all join hands and give thanks to God for their deliverance from the Soviets and for the food and the roof over their heads.

She could tell that Emil didn’t share her gratitude. He seemed to be putting on a brave face, but she knew he was brooding about their living conditions.

After the boys had fallen asleep, she said, “This isn’t forever, my love.”

“I know,” he said, “but I didn’t expect to leave one bad life for a worse one.”

“We’ll make a better life for ourselves. You don’t expect it to just fall from the sky, do you? A better life?”

“I don’t expect anything to fall from the sky. I’m willing to work for it.”

“You work harder than anyone I know, Emil.”

“Except you,” he said, and took her in his arms. “My queen.”

Adeline laughed. “A queen with her king and princes in their grand new palace.”

“You forgot your green valley.”

“Never.”

They kissed and held each other for a long time. When they parted to get ready for bed, through the open windows, they saw lightning and heard thunder. They climbed into the lower bunk and held each other as the rain began to drum on the roof. Within minutes, Adeline could hear water dripping and spattering off the floor beside her.

“Nowhere to go but up,” Emil said, and held her tighter.

The days passed. The boys attended school, made friends, and were soon out in the streets, playing long into the evening. Adeline negotiated the German ration system and managed to put decent meals on the table. When Emil sought out the VoMi officers to ask that they be moved to other quarters, he was denied and told he was being ungrateful for having been saved from the Judeo-Bolsheviks.

Adeline was assigned to work in the town bakery. Emil was put to work in the few fields that had been plowed and planted. He hoed for hours in the heat without complaint, glad for the familiar feel of the farm tool in his hands and the satisfaction he got from a job done right. As a boy, before his family was thrown off its lands and later when the Nazis returned them, he had toiled like this, long and hard, day after day. He liked it. This kind of brute labor suited him. It felt honest.

As he worked his hoe, Emil did his best not to think of Major Haussmann but did not always succeed. He kept flashing back to the fear that had seized him when Haussmann shot the first time, just missing his head. That memory was enough to get his heart tripping in his chest and adrenaline erupting through his veins, clouding his recall of all that had happened, especially after Haussmann’s second shot.

What had the major said? Something about the clothes he’d been given and the place they were to live and how he should decide whether he wanted to be part of a Greater Germany. But he could not remember the exact way Haussmann had said it.

Did it matter? With each passing day, he cared less. Haussmann may have put them in a hellhole, but he was gone from their lives. In the meantime, Emil returned to old habits formed back in Ukraine under Stalin. He did everything he could not to attract undue attention. He did his job. He went home. He spent time with his family. He looked at the night sky and dreamed of the West, not as some fictional green paradise in Adeline’s imagination, but as a place where he’d be left alone by governments to forge a new life through his own best efforts.

As July turned to August and September 1944 approached, however, someone noticed how hard and how diligently Emil was working in the fields. His name was Claude Wahl, a florid-faced Wehrmacht sergeant who’d been wounded near Minsk in July 1941. Soviet bomb shrapnel had broken Wahl’s pelvis, giving him an awkward gait and rending him unfit for combat. He had been assigned to VoMi to work with the new ethnic German immigrants and to oversee the farms in the area surrounding the Wielun refugee camp.

Like Emil, Wahl was in his early thirties and had been raised on a farm. He also had a similar work ethic. One day as Emil was leaving the fields, Wahl approached him, talked to him, and then invited him for a beer at his home. Emil felt uncomfortable about the idea and tried to decline, but Wahl insisted.

“Why?” Emil asked.

“Because you are the hardest-working man in my fields, and I want to know how to get other men to work like you do.”

Wahl lived on the same street as Nikolas in a nice house with running water and electricity, a far cry from the Martels’ living arrangements. The disparity was so pronounced, it turned Emil resentful for his family’s lot, and he wanted to leave almost immediately. Wahl would not hear of it, pouring pale beer from a jug into glass mugs.

After his long day in the field, the beer slid clean and cool down Emil’s throat, and his opinion of Wahl improved slightly.

“I used to work in a brewery, and this is very good,” he said. “Where is it made?”

Wahl beamed. “My father makes beer in the winter on our farm near Stuttgart. This is his hefeweizen beer. Made with wheat just for summer.”

“Excellent,” Emil said, and when Wahl got out a length of dried sausage and cheese and bread, he found that he liked his boss even more.

“So,” Wahl said after Emil had taken slices of each that he washed down with more beer, “what does make a man work as hard as you?”

Emil didn’t know how to respond to that. Hard work was all he’d ever known.

“First thing you think of,” Wahl said, and grinned. “That’s the answer. First thing.”

“Starvation,” Emil said.

The German’s grin faded. “You have been starved?”

Emil nodded. “Twice. By Stalin.”

Wahl was pensive for a moment. “And how does starving make you work hard?”

“When you can remember not having eaten in days and having no hope of eating tomorrow . . . when you can remember that feeling, you just work harder to make sure you never feel it again. After a while, it’s just what you do.”

Wahl thought about that and then smiled. “Well, I don’t think I’m going to starve someone to get them to work harder someday down the road.”

“Thank you for that,” Emil said, and raised the beer toward him.

The German studied him. “Are you just surviving, or do you have a plan in life, Emil?”

“I don’t understand.”

“A plan. The life you lie awake at night and think about.”

“I think about how I can protect my wife and family and what we are going to eat tomorrow and when we will sleep somewhere else.”

“That’s surviving.”

“Then I am surviving, and that is a good thing.”

“It is, but let me ask you: What do you think about when you stare at the stars?”

Emil stared at Wahl suspiciously. “How did you know I stare at the stars?”