“Where will you go? Try to go.”

“Argentina.” Esther laughed. “Don’t you like the sound of it? Ar-gen-ti-na? In my dream, I’ll meet some handsome Latin man, and we’ll be passionately in love and have passionate children. I mean, why not?”

Adeline felt tipsy and said, “Why not?”

“What’s the point of living if you don’t have a dream like that?”

“I believe that.”

“What is your dream? Where will you go?”

Adeline hesitated, but then described the beautiful green valley surrounded by snowcapped mountains in the painting she’d seen in that folio book at Mrs. Kantor’s house.

“Sounds like a dream,” Esther said. “Where is that valley?”

“I don’t know,” Adeline said. “Somewhere west, Emil thinks. Maybe across the ocean, in America or Canada.”

“Or Ar-gen-ti-na,” Esther said, stood up, shook her hips, and drained the rest of the bottle into her glass.

After finishing her wine, Adeline felt more woozy than tipsy, and said, “I think you’re one of the bravest, strongest women I’ve ever known.”

“No,” Esther said, lighting another cigarette. “I’m not.”

“You are. You made it here alone.”

“Not alone. Because of the documents you got for me.”

“But you used them and got here on your own. And now you’ll go to Ar-gen-ti-na the same way. That takes inner courage and strength.”

Esther thought, took a drag, then relaxed. “I guess it does. I thank Mrs. Kantor for that.”

“I thank her for a lot of things,” Adeline said. “I miss her. Still.”

“I do, too,” Esther said. “Did she ever tell you any of her ‘secrets to a happy life’?”

“A few of them.”

“I admit I wonder sometimes if all her secrets are real and true.”

“Like what?”

Esther shrugged. “She told me once that she believed that life does not happen to you; it happens for you, and that your whole life is a blessed journey of discovery. But you can only see life clearly and relish it when the journey is almost at an end.”

“Your life isn’t over,” Adeline said.

“I know,” she said. “But I don’t think I’ll ever understand why so many people like me were killed or persecuted around me. And I won’t ever get why their lives had to end the way they did. Where’s the blessed journey of discovery in any of that?”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Early on the morning of January 9, 1945, Emil shivered and coughed in his bed, echoing the rattling and hackings of his sons in the bunk above him. He could see his breath billow and move on the frigid air still finding the cracks in the walls, but he forced himself out from under his blankets and upright.

Chattering, a little dizzy, he made his way to the outer room and then the window to once again look out to see if Adeline was returning. Even as he’d lapsed in and out of fever, he’d known she was gone and that more than a day had passed since she set out for Lodz. But the storm could have slowed her, he told himself as he checked the boys, both asleep, both flushed with fever, though Will’s seemed to be lessening.

Will this ever end? Emil crawled back into his own bunk. I’ve never been sick like this in my life—more than three weeks now.

As he pulled his wool hat down and the blankets up around him, the only good he could see of being sick like this was that he and the boys had little appetite, which helped when you had almost no food. Better than being dead, he supposed, but then thought about the clothes he wore and the place he was living and the things he had done to survive the war.

It’s like we’re being tortured, Emil thought as his fever rose again and his eyelids drifted shut. Tortured for something I didn’t . . .

September 15, 1941

Outside Dubossary, Transnistria

“Shoot them now!” Captain Haussmann shouted.

Emil looked at the young man holding the two crying girls at the edge of the ravine, squinting in the headlights and begging him not to do it.

Emil turned from them, looked at the Nazi, and knew he was about to die.

“I can’t,” he said, holding the Luger out to Haussmann.

“Can’t?” the SS captain said. “Or won’t?”

Emil kept his eyes on the SS captain, and said, “Can’t and won’t.”

The Nazi stared at him, then over at the execution squad watching, growing visibly infuriated until he drew his own Luger from his holster, pushed aside the gun Emil had offered him, and pressed the muzzle of his pistol to the bridge of Emil’s nose.

“Make your decision, farm boy,” the SS captain said. “They die one way or another. Your choice is whether you live or die with them.”

An execution squad to the north and behind Emil began firing, further terrifying him until all he could see was the barrel of the Luger and Haussmann’s rage before his wife and sons appeared in his mind. His love for them was suddenly overwhelming. Would dying instead of killing these people do Adeline and the boys any good? Adeline would be a widow. Walt and Will would be fatherless. It all hit him with full and violent force, a blow so powerful, it blew away whatever convictions he had always held true, and with them went his belief in a benevolent God. Emil had begged not to be put in this position, and now here he was. There was no God in that, no God at all. There were only Adeline and Walt and Will, and what he would do to survive and protect them.

“Okay,” he said coldly to Haussmann. “I’ll do it.”

The SS captain smiled and lowered his weapon. “A wise choice.”

Emil felt outside himself, then, as if his body were a stranger’s. He shifted the Luger in his hand and started to turn toward the young man and the little girls.

Someone grabbed his shoulder from behind and shook him. The grip tightened. The hand shook him harder.

The nightmare slowly vanished.

Emil roused enough to blearily open his eyes and see Adeline gazing down at him, her hand on his shoulder, a big smile on her lovely face, and her cheeks rosy from the cold.

“I hope you’ve had a good sleep while I’ve been gone,” she said, stroking his beard tenderly. “I’ve brought you all something to eat and some coal for the stove. It’s already burning. Did you have good dreams of me?”

Emil had a fleeting memory of that moment when he decided to kill the three Jews, that moment when he lost his faith in God, and said, “I’m feeling better just seeing you. I was worried sick when you didn’t come home last night.”

“I had to wait out the storm and get a ride down this morning after it passed,” Adeline said. “Get up, then, and help me cook, or at least keep me company. I have a story to tell you.”

He groaned at the idea of getting up into the cold again.

“Up!” she said, smiling at him and tugging at his blankets.

He made it up onto his elbows and winced. “You’re a cruel woman, Adella!”

She laughed and tickled him. “Oh yes, I’m putting a gun to your head.”

Emil stared at her a moment in disbelief, the memory of that night playing again.

He felt the steel of Haussmann’s gun between his eyes again, saw the SS captain’s rage, and felt himself go primal, savage, godless, willing to kill two little girls and a young man so he could return to protect his own wife and sons.

Would she ever understand that decision? Emil wondered as he searched Adeline’s puzzled face. How could she? I don’t understand that moment myself.

“Hey,” Adeline said in a soothing, concerned tone. “Do you want to just stay there, and I’ll bring you some food?”

It was only then that he smelled something savory and almost indescribably delicious in the air. “What’s that cooking?”

She smiled and whispered, “Fresh sausage and onions. I want the smell to fill the apartment, seep into the hall, and call everyone to our feast.”

“Feast?”

“Feast,” she said, smiling and standing. “Now, get up and come out. We’ll let the boys sleep as long as they need to.”

She left the room. Emil threw back the blankets, sat up, and then stood without feeling dizzy. He walked out into their little living area, surprised at how warm the coal-fired stove had made it and how good the smells were coming from the tiny range where Adeline was turning over sausages and onions. And the table! It was covered with more food and ingredients than he’d seen in years.

“Where did you get all this?” he asked in wonder.

Adeline tapped the edge of the skillet and turned, grinning as she said, “It was a miracle, Emil. You won’t believe it.”

And Adeline was right. At first, Emil did not believe her story of running into Esther after begging God for help and then the woman repaying her with enough money to buy food for a month, maybe longer. As far as he was concerned at that moment, God did not answer prayers like Adeline’s because there was no God that he could see or hear or touch. The only thing we can rely on is ourselves.