Lydia seemed happier now that they were settled into their quarters, as depressing as they were. And Malia always seemed happier, or more amused anyway, when she was living with their mother. After the mule had kicked her, Lydia had held Malia for hours on end, telling her she was going to live and come back to her. Adeline had always understood their bond was special, and accepted it as best a daughter could.

Marie looked exhausted and grateful whenever Adeline knocked on her door and offered to help with the twins, who were nearly six months old now. Her cousin’s emotions swung whenever she talked about her missing husband, the surgeon.

“How do I even find him?” Marie fretted and cried one day. “How will he find me?”

Adeline remembered Mrs. Kantor’s advice and said, “You have to trust in God that you will be brought back together. Crazier stories have happened, Marie.”

“Tell me one.”

Adeline told her about Corporal Gheorghe and Stalingrad.

“You believed him?” Marie asked.

“I did. I do.”

Adeline never knew what kind of mood she’d face taking Rese for walks, either with her artificial legs and crutches or pushing her sister-in-law in the wheelchair so she could get air. There were days when Rese seemed content, smiling with glassy eyes when Adeline came for her, talking about a future when they were alone. But there were more days when Rese was fully in her misery, berating her mother and father and Emil and God for having saved her.

“I should be dead,” she’d say over and over again. “Why live like this? No one will ever want a no-legged woman. I’m useless, Adeline.”

“Not to me,” Adeline said. “You’re brave and alive because you are a fighter by nature like your brother. He gets knocked down by life and gets right back up. You’re the same way.”

“I’m not, and I hate my life, our life. Have we had one good day in our lives? Any of us?”

“I’ve had many wonderful days in my life.”

“Name one.”

“The day Walt was born. The day Will was born. The day I met Emil. The day I found a chicken for Mrs. Kantor. You will have days like these, Rese. I know from experience that the shadows can’t last forever. Eventually good fortune will come your way.”

Adeline tried not to think about Emil’s plan to run toward the war when it came close enough and let herself be consumed by her work and her family. But then, out of nowhere, she’d remember the ghosts in her clothes and the apartment, and that would start another cycle of guilt and despair. After a while, these circles of thought seemed to link up and become a figure eight in her mind: guilt of the past arching into anxiety about the future over and over again until she’d think about their food stocks and winter coming, and that would set off another figure eight of starvation memories twisting and spiraling into her singular abject fear of having to go hungry again, to starve again.

Luckily, Emil was able to skim enough fruit, vegetables, and grain from the harvest to supplement their food rations, which were getting smaller each and every week. Emil also went to Wahl’s house several times a week to listen to the shortwave and to look at the maps with the sergeant, keeping track of the Allies’ positions. They heard about the first V-2 rocket hitting London and the fear that Hitler’s superweapon would turn the tide. But then the Allies liberated Luxembourg and launched Operation Market Garden with paratroopers attempting to take the important bridges crossing the Rhine.

Over Wahl’s radio, they heard Hitler’s call for all men from age sixteen to sixty to join the Home Guard to fight the Allies to the last drop of German blood and about battles all along the “Siegfried Line,” the western wall of Nazi fortifications. On October 21, 1944, Emil rushed home to tell Adeline about the taking of Aachen, the first city in the Fatherland to fall.

Emil and Wahl thought for sure they would all be packing and leaving within days. But German resistance proved fierce. More than ten thousand Allied paratroopers died, and another six thousand were captured in Market Garden, and the Rhine did not fall, dashing all hope that the war would be over by Christmas.

During this time, Rese went through a series of wild mood swings where she was her normal caustic self, then sleepy and withdrawn, and then howling with laughter, followed by days where she was deeply bitter, lashing out at whichever closest family member was in range.

“Why did this happen to me?” she asked over and over again.

It wasn’t until the end of November, however, that she turned agitated, violent, and then brutally ill. It took Marie and her nursing skills to figure out that Rese, who’d been left to self-administer her medicines, had become addicted to painkillers. Now that her supplies had dwindled, she was going through withdrawal. Marie contacted Praeger, and he sent a new supply of pills to Marie so she could administer them to Rese and begin to wean her off the opiates.

In early December 1944, the north winds blew hard and came laden with snow. The icy gale found every crack and seam in the building, which whistled day and night. They used whatever they could find to stuff and chink the cracks and huddled around their coal stoves for warmth. Emil fell ill with chills, a low-grade fever, and a cough that would not quit. By December 12, he was weak, hacking up mucus, and spiking fevers that had Adeline and the boys frightened because during them he would often scream out at terrors unseen and then cry and moan in inexplicable shame and regret. More than once, Adeline thought she heard Emil say he was doomed and there was nothing he could do about it.

Chapter Twenty-One

In the nightmares and hallucinations provoked by the soaring fevers, Emil traveled back in time and faced torments he had spent years avoiding, denying, and then crated away in the deepest recesses of his mind. But as the refugee lay sweating, twitching, and twisting in his bunk in Wielun, the screws and slats of those crates failed, and the events inside broke free.

September 15, 1941

Dubossary, Transnistria

On his way to buy roofing supplies for the house he was building for Adeline and the boys in Friedenstal, Emil had driven his horses into town by a back route, a two-track shortcut that brought him to the south end of Dubossary around three o’clock that afternoon. It began to rain almost as soon as he’d arrived at the lumberyard south of town, and he knew the shortcut would now be too muddy and slick for his horses to navigate while pulling a load in the rain and the dark. Leaving the lumberyard, Emil decided to take the northern route through Dubossary. It was a much longer way back to Friedenstal, but the roads would be better.

He had not been in Dubossary since before his father was taken to Siberia and his family was thrown off its land. As he rode through the town, he was surprised at how much he remembered and how much he did not. Near the town center, Emil saw a high barbed-wire fence he did not recall around several blocks of buildings and two SS sentries guarding a gate in the fence.

Beyond the town limits, all traffic slowed at a German checkpoint. When he reached the front of the line, he showed his papers to an SS soldier, who studied them.

“Are you from Dubossary?”

“Friedenstal,” Emil said. “It’s about thirty kilometers from here. A farming village.”

“Why are you not in the Wehrmacht?”

“I am the only able-bodied man left in my entire family,” he said. “The VoMi decided it was better for Germany to have me back on my farm, growing wheat for the Fatherland.”

The soldier looked skeptical. “Have you not enrolled in Selbstschutz?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“A home guard to protect your village against the Romanian swine. And a way to show us that you are a true German and a useful person.”

“I’ll look into it,” Emil said, expecting the sentry to send him along.

Instead, the soldier glared at him. “Bring your horses and wagon over there by those trees. They’ll be watched.”

“Please, my wife is expecting me. We have two young sons and—”

“This is an order,” the sentry barked. “Bring your wagon over there with those others. They will be watched.”

“Watched? Why?”

“Because you’ll be busy elsewhere,” the sentry said coldly. “Proving your worth and allegiance to the Fatherland.”

Emil did as he was told and led Oden and Thor and the wagon over by two army lorries and several other wagon-and-horse teams tied up at a fence near a two-track path that ran north. The rain had stopped. Clouds broke in the west, revealing a sinking, bloodred sun. The air was cooling, so he put on his jacket and climbed down to hobble the horses. When Emil stood to join several other civilian men there, the stuff of night terrors entered his life for the first time.

He strode up in a dark uniform and said, “I am Hauptsturmführer Haussmann, Einsatzkommando 12, Einsatzgruppen D. I understand you wish to demonstrate your loyalty to Germany and to our führer, Adolf Hitler.”

Emil wanted to say he did not wish to do anything except go home but nodded along with the other men.