God, please, no. Anything but that.

Emil did not know what to do, or how to reply, so he didn’t move. Haussmann’s face turned to stone, and he walked over, the butt of the Luger still extended before him, until he was directly in front of Emil.

“I said, take the Luger.”

Emil had never held a gun in his life and reached for it awkwardly, gingerly, surprised at the weight of the loaded pistol in his hand when the Nazi let go.

“There,” Haussmann said.

The SS captain took a step back and then gestured toward several Jews being led in front of the execution squad, including a young man who knelt by two little girls, who were hugging him and crying. The young man stared defiantly through his tears at the men, preparing for his death.

“Those three Yids,” Haussmann said, pointing right at them. “Kill them. Now.”

Emil saw the captain as if he were down a long tunnel and heard him speaking a language he did not understand. He looked at the Luger and then up at Haussmann, who said, “Come on, farm boy. Show us what kind of blood runs in you.”

Please, God. Don’t make me. I . . . These people are good. They’re innocent.

“Shoot them!” Haussmann shouted.

Time seemed to slow. As if in a trance, Emil understood they were all watching his every move. He glanced to the young man and the two little girls in his arms.

The young man was staring at Emil now. “Don’t do it,” he said. “Please, sir, you know this is wrong. You know it is!”

“Kill them!” Haussmann shouted.

Emil looked down at the Luger again . . . and felt hot, salty sweat roll down his forehead and into his eyes, stinging them, blinding him.

He panicked, took a step, and felt himself fall into an unseen hole or shaft of some kind. As he plunged, Emil screamed, “I can’t! I can’t . . .”

Chapter Twenty-Two

December 23, 1944

Wielun, Poland

Adeline dipped the washcloth in the icy bucket of water as Emil thrashed and sweated after burning up yet again with fever. He moaned, “I can’t. I can’t . . . see.”

“Then open your eyes, Papa,” Will said from the doorway as Adeline returned the cold cloth to Emil’s fevered brow.

“Shhhh,” Adeline said, looking at her younger son sternly. “Your father could—”

“He opened his eyes!” Will yelled, pointing past her. “Look, Mama!”

She did look, and it was true. Emil’s eyes were fluttering open, glazed, and trying to focus on her. At last, with a thick tongue, he said, “Sick.”

“Yes, dear, you’ve been very sick for a long time,” she soothed. “Eleven days. But here you are. There’s no stopping you now, is there?”

He smiled and closed his eyes. “Eleven days?”

“It’s Christmas Eve tomorrow, but I feel like I’ve opened the best present already.”

Adeline got him hot tea and some thin soup, not having it in her to tell him that the rations had been cut almost completely the week before. She’d set aside enough flour and sugar to make cookies and a last decent dinner for Christmas, but after that, they had only about a week’s worth of provisions left.

The Martels held an impromptu service the next evening with the entire clan crammed into the upper two apartments and the hallway between. Because it was Malia’s birthday, they all sang to her before Adeline read the Nativity from the book of Luke in the family Bible and gave thanks that they were all still alive when the war and the trek had taken so many. Emil had listened from his sickbed at first, but then insisted on getting up when Sergeant Wahl came by to give them two large bottles of beer.

Wahl seemed appalled at their living conditions but sat down with them and drank. While Adeline, Malia, and Lydia sang old songs and taught them to the boys, he told Emil about the battle raging in the Ardennes Forest of France where snowstorms had put the Allies on the defensive after eight days of brutal combat. The sergeant also said that he was going to Lodz for two weeks but would be back earlier if he heard the tide of the war had turned toward Nazi collapse.

Later that night, after putting the boys to bed, Adeline wrapped a blanket around Emil and kissed his forehead. “You scared me,” she said. “I thought I’d lost you.”

“Never,” he said, rubbing her arm. “Never ever.”

With sixty-kilometer-an-hour wind gusts, an arctic blast hit Europe on New Year’s Eve. It would be the start of two of the coldest months on record. Temperatures in western Poland dove to thirty-one below zero Celsius. The entire building where the Martels lived shook in the gales. Windchills approached minus forty-five and overwhelmed their individual coal stoves. The four families took to crowding into Adeline and Emil’s apartment because it faced south out of the wind. They used their combined coal rations to keep a fire burning hot.

But their food stocks were almost drained, and Adeline was unsure whether new rations were coming anytime soon. On January 2, 1945, Will went down with the fever. The following day, Malia did and then Rese. Emil relapsed on the morning of the fourth.

On the evening of January 6, 1945, Adeline gave the last of the vegetable broth to Emil and Will and the last of the bread to Walt, who had also fallen ill. There was not enough for her to eat. After talking to her mother and her mother-in-law, she went to bed tired, hungry, and determined to go in search of food in the morning.

When she awoke, it was snowing lightly and well below zero. She put on every stitch of clothing she had, took a canvas bag, and went out into the bitter cold. With the hunger building again in her stomach and the memory of real starvation echoing from her past, Adeline went to the edge of town where an SS soldier stopped her and asked her where she was going.

“To Lodz,” she said. “To find medicine and food. My sons are sick and starving.”

“Where did you get money?” he asked suspiciously.

“I’m going to sell my wedding ring. And my mother’s. And my mother-in-law’s.”

He must have heard the desperate emotion in her voice, because he flagged down the next truck heading north. When she told the driver that her family was sick and starving and she was going to Lodz, he was kind and let her sit up front in the cab.

Two hours later, the driver dropped her at the outskirts of Lodz, and she walked into the small city, asking where she might buy food on the black market. She was directed to a shop nearby and went there directly, finding food on the shelves, mostly staples, but more than enough to keep the family all alive.

The shopkeeper, however, refused to take Adeline’s wedding ring or Karoline’s or Lydia’s as payment, deriding them as “worthless.”

“Bring me Reichsmarks,” he said. “Or better yet, bring me gold.”

The next shopkeeper said the same thing and the one after that and the fourth and the fifth. She even went in desperation to the VoMi office, seeking to inquire about rations, only to find it locked and dark.

Walking away, Adeline felt like that fallen leaf that had caught her attention the day the trek began: dried and curled brown, blown by the wind on some strange, haphazard journey that she now saw as futile and meaningless. Her family was destitute. Her husband was sicker than she’d ever seen. And her boys were facing starvation, something she’d vowed would never happen. She felt angry and helpless in one breath and terribly alone in the next. Her throat swelled, and she swallowed at it, determined to forge on without admitting defeat. She knew no one in Lodz except Rese’s friend, Praeger, the medic. But how could she find him? She couldn’t. It would take too much energy. Adeline knew how hunger worked, the stages of starvation and how they sapped you. Before she lost more energy, she was better off getting a ride back to Wielun to tell everyone that they were going to go without food for a while.

All at once, an overwhelming mix of raw emotions began to well up through Adeline. They made her feel small and discarded by life, displaced, landless, refugeed, and as worthless as the wedding rings she carried. Her heart began to bump and to ache. She got dizzy, and the crown of her head felt hot beneath her scarves, and then she simply couldn’t go on. She stopped there in the middle of the street, flurries hitting her face, and gazed up at the leaden sky. She raised her arms and more than prayed. Afire with anguish and desperate love that felt pumped from the very depths of her soul, Adeline beseeched God for aid for her family.

“Please, help me, Lord,” she whispered. “I don’t know where to go. I don’t know what to do. Please, we’ve come so far. We’ve been through so much. It cannot have been for nothing. We cannot have been people who were supposed to come this far, only to die. I don’t even have grass to give my sons!”

A lorry beeped its horn behind her. She jumped, her heart slamming in her chest, and looked back at the driver who leaned out his window.