Malia and their mother stood by their wagon, watching Adeline and the boys approach with piteous expressions on their faces. Her sister moved first, came to Adeline, and hugged her. “We’re going to survive. He’s going to come back.”

“Of course he will,” Adeline said.

Lydia showed rare emotion when she took her daughter’s hand, kissed it, and said, “I never wanted this to be your burden, too, Adella. Never.”

Adeline remembered her father being dragged into the night, vowing to return. She heard Emil’s last words echo in her mind: Go west, Adeline. Go as far west as you can, and I promise I’ll find you.

“I know,” Adeline said, shaken inside again as she kissed her mother’s cheek. “But I’ve seen how strong you were for us, and now I’ll just have to be strong, too.”

“Mama?” Will said, tugging at her skirt.

She looked down at her younger child. His face was streaked with dust and drying tears, but the terror of losing his father had been replaced by a surprising earnestness and interest.

“Are we going west without Papa?” he asked. “That’s what he said to do, didn’t he? Go as far west as we can, and he’ll find us?”

Adeline gaped at him a moment, then looked over at the little wagons, already packed and ready to act on Emil’s mad idea to make it to the western Allied lines and to surrender as refugees. She knew he was serious, but she kept thinking of the last time they’d been caught between two armies, the snowstorm, the warring tanks, and the brutal way Emil had lashed at the horses until they’d bled to save them.

Could she do that? Did she have that kind of courage and resolve? Had Emil been right? Was the only way to freedom through a hail of bullets and bombs?

“Mama?” Walt said. “Are we going? Or not?”

Her sweet, innocent boys were looking to her for guidance, and she knew the decision she was about to make might change everything about their young lives, for good or for bad. She felt anxious and alone, and then heard an explosion in the distance to the northwest that shook Walt, who held tight to her leg.

“I want to go back inside,” he whined. “I don’t want to be near tanks again.”

Seeing how traumatized her son was, Adeline made her decision and looked at her mother and sister. “We won’t go west if there’s combat anywhere near us. I can’t put the boys through it again. We’ll stay put until things calm down and . . . things are safer.”

“Oh,” Will said, scrunching his brows. “But Papa said, ‘Go as far west as—’”

“I know what he said, Will,” she replied sharply. “But do you want to see what it’s like to run on foot between the tank cannons and men from both sides shooting at us?”

He took a step back at the sudden, harsh change in his mother. “No, Mama.”

“Good. Then I expect you and Walt to help me as Papa would want you to help me. We start by unloading the little wagon and bringing it all back upstairs.”

When they clomped up the stairs past Emil’s parents’ apartment, the door flew open, and Karoline was looking at them, puzzled. “I thought you’d all gone for good.”

“Soldiers took Papa,” Will announced. “He’s going to Siberia.”

Emil’s mother stared at her grandson, then saw it confirmed in Adeline’s puffy eyes and almost fainted before she grabbed the door frame and screamed the news to Johann and Rese. When they’d come, Emil’s father pushing his daughter in the wheelchair, Adeline told them what had happened just down the stairs when they’d been seconds from leaving.

Karoline took the news like one more club to her battered body and soul, dumbfounded at first at the unfairness of it, then angry, then bitter. All within a few moments, what had happened to her son had gone from shocking to confirmation of the unending suffering that was her lot in life.

“Why’d we come all this way?” Karoline asked Johann. “We could have stayed in Friedenstal, and Emil would have ended up the same way.” She looked at Adeline. “You would have ended up the same way, Adeline, even if we hadn’t come. This is what they do to our men and to us.”

There was such compelling anger and defeat in Karoline’s eyes, Adeline almost succumbed to the rancor that thrived in her mother-in-law’s core.

Then Karoline spat, “Face it, Adeline. This is what they will do to your boys, too.”

That rocked Adeline, and fury boiled out of her. “That will never happen, you evil-thinking shrew! I will protect them and get them west when the time is right. And your son? He’s coming back to find us, because I know the kind of man he is.”

Karoline’s face twisted with mock pity, but before she could reply, Lydia, who was on the stairs at the edge of the landing, said, “You know, Adeline, that’s what I said at the beginning and for too many years.”

Adeline spun around and glared at her mother, shouting, “What? Should I think Emil’s dead and never going to return when he’s only been gone thirty minutes? I can’t think that way, Mother! I won’t give up hope! Not now. Not ever!”

Lydia bowed her head, and when Adeline swiveled back to Karoline, the older woman had lost some of her spite. “You can’t give up hope. I did after Johann had been gone six years. I gave up hope. In my mind, Johann was dead. Fifteen months later, he knocked at my door.”

“And look at me,” Johann said. “A wreck of a man.”

“You’re not a wreck,” Adeline said. “And I promise you, Emil will not be wrecked, either.”

Emil focused on putting one step in front of the other, trying not to let a predicament he’d spent a lifetime trying to avoid crush him before he could figure a way out and back to Adeline and the boys. As he and the two Polish militiamen walked farther and farther from his family through the streets of Legnica, he realized his mistake had been admitting his German heritage. He wasn’t a soldier, but it did not matter. To them, he was the last vestige of a conquering army in retreat. He should have spoken to them in Russian, but he didn’t, and now they could do anything they wanted to him and probably would. He was powerless in that respect, but not so powerless in another.

As he walked, he remembered what his father had told him not long after his return from the frozen East and one of the few times he’d spoken about his years in a Siberian prison camp, slaving below ground. Emil had asked him how he’d managed to survive. Johann had said some of it was luck and some of it was learned. Despite all his hard work growing up on a farm, for example, Johann was lucky in that he’d been a little chubby from all the good food he’d been eating before the Stalinists came to take him away for hoarding. The extra flab around his belly had allowed him to survive the trip east when so many died.

Emil thought about all the food they’d had and how much weight and strength he’d regained since Adeline found Esther. In that way, he was somewhat ready to survive a long journey. He put that in his favor.

His father had also said he tried never to speak German in the presence of any of the Soviet guards. It seemed to enrage them and often resulted in a beating. Emil decided to speak only Russian from that point forward. Maybe he could convince someone that these two had him all wrong.

Johann said he had trusted very few people in the camps. Everyone at first should be considered a potential informer. Trust should be something hard won. So was the ability to avoid illness. Emil’s father had been fanatical about cleaning himself after leaving the mines and the latrines. He’d also forced himself to eat whatever he was given, no matter how grisly, and to drink the cleanest water he could find and lots of it.

“The important thing was to stay standing as long as you could,” his father had said. “Every day you stayed alive, you had the opportunity to be set free or to escape. I escaped twice, but they brought me back and beat me senseless. Then I got sick.”

That confession had surprised Emil when he’d first heard it. He’d never seen his father as the kind of man who would try to escape. But now that he was a prisoner himself, he thought he understood Johann at a deeper, gut level, better than he ever had before, and he vowed to follow those four survival tactics and others he had heard that day long ago.

I can only rely on myself, he thought. But in a sense, my father has prepared me.

Emil was certainly better prepared than the fifteen men in the back of the truck they threw him into an hour later. Nervous, thin, suspicious, they would not meet his eyes, as if they instinctually knew to trust no one now. He sat on a bench near the rear gate and saw other men being led to other trucks under armed guard.