The truck coughed to life after an hour of waiting. As they pulled away, putting more and more distance between him and his family, Emil swore he saw Nikolas and two other men he recognized from the trek and Camp Wielun climb into another waiting truck.

They began to drive east. With every kilometer that passed, Emil felt more and more betrayed by life. He’d spent almost a year since they’d left Friedenstal doing everything in his power to get his family west, and now he was heading in the exact opposite direction. To the north and east, he heard sporadic cannon fire and knew the Red Army was not far. Two hours later, approaching Breslau with the noon sun glinting off the Oder River, he could see the Soviets had the city surrounded. Mortar shells were exploding inside the fortress the Nazis had built.

They turned due north for several kilometers and then looped back toward the river. Not long afterward, Emil saw the first Soviet tank and then another and then seven, all of them rolling west, unimpeded. He watched them and the Soviet troop carriers that followed the tanks, knowing that he’d failed miserably. He’d wanted to get to the western Allies, and he’d come up short, got captured, and was soon to be delivered to Stalin’s men. And Adeline, Walt, and Will were back there, right in the path of the tanks passing him, thrown to the wind and the wolves.

He remembered how the militiamen had pushed Adeline to the ground and tried to use his anger at that to weld in himself the belief that he would survive whatever he was going to have to face. But try as he might, Emil could not do it. He kept thinking about Adeline and the boys and felt in his heart the first acid trickle of despair.

That despair grew over the numbing six weeks that followed as Emil and hundreds and then thousands of ethnic Germans were put to work by the Polish militias, who treated them as slave labor. They were not trucked anymore but made to walk in long double lines under the supervision of armed guards, moving from one war-torn little town to the next, spending twelve to fourteen hours a day removing the debris of collapsed buildings and clearing roads so more Soviet troops could be brought to the battle lines.

Emil tried not to speak unless spoken to by one of the Polish guards and then only in Russian. But he listened in both languages and heard the news that the Allies were forcing Hitler back on every front. The Soviets were preparing to attack Berlin from the east while the Americans and British were fighting their way there from the west, though they appeared to be stalled by pockets of fierce resistance from the remaining Wehrmacht forces.

As March turned to April 1945, the brutal cold that had gripped all of Europe gave way to climbing temperatures that made the heavier clothes Emil wore intolerable. He took to carrying most of his clothes with him wherever he went and placed them where he could see them as he toiled. He thought of his father constantly, following Johann’s lead, keeping his head down, laboring without comment or complaint, drinking only the water given to him by the guards, eating all the food given to him as well, and sleeping whenever and wherever he could.

The prisoners spent their nights in abandoned barns or in the woods, often side by side in the dirt, with the guards under orders to shoot any man trying to escape. Emil had been looking for a way and a chance to flee, but they’d been under tight control, no more than one hundred men in a group with eight armed militiamen watching.

Rumors spread that they were headed much farther east once the war ended, but they seemed to move between war-ruined town and war-ruined town in a lazy S pattern, sometimes north, sometimes south, and even a few times west. Emil began to hope he would be imprisoned somewhere close to Germany so if he did escape, he would not have to go far to find his family. But where would they be?

He’d told Adeline to go west, as far west as she could go, but now he feared he’d sent them into harm’s way. He imagined them following his orders faithfully, walking west despite being shot at and dodging bombs, and tried to tell himself that they would somehow make it to the Allied lines. Or had he been a complete fool and sent them all to their deaths?

That last question gnawed at Emil whenever he lay down under the watchful eyes of the militiamen and escaped into sleep. He had nightmares in which Adeline, Walt, and Will were out in the middle of a muddy battlefield, hurt and screaming to him for help. But in those dark dreams, he always seemed to be behind a fence, gripping the barbed wire so hard, blood seeped down his hands as he screamed to them that he’d found them; he’d come west, and he’d found them.

Four weeks after Emil was taken, Soviet guards took over from the Polish militiamen, but his assignment was the same in every town they entered: clear debris, stack bricks, stay alive.

The first day under Soviet control, he heard a squat, flat-faced guard named Lebedev boast, “Stalin will have Berlin. It is certain. The Red flag will fly above the Reichstag by Workers’ Day!”

“Maybe before Workers’ Day,” said his usual partner, Aleksey—a skinny kid, no more than twenty—who seemed to always follow the older Lebedev’s lead.

The Soviets finally attacked Berlin on April 16, 1945. Two full army groups fought toward Hitler’s capital from the south and the east. A third Russian army overran the Germans from the north.

Within four days, the city was encircled. The pitched and hand-to-hand battle with the last of Hitler’s fervent loyalists unfolded in the same brutal heat Emil was experiencing. More than eighty thousand Red Army soldiers would die in the next ten days, wresting Berlin from Nazi control. Hitler committed suicide on April 30. His generals formally surrendered two days later, and the rough boundaries of East and West Germany were effectively set where the various Allied armies stopped moving forward.

The day the war ended, Emil was in a small town south of Kielce, Poland, stripped to the waist, moving busted concrete and brick in infernal heat, when he heard the same two guards talking.

“I told you the Red flag would fly on the Reichstag by Workers’ Day,” Lebedev said, grinning and lighting a cigarette. “I wish I was there to see it.”

“I wish I was there for the party,” his comrade, Aleksey, said. “I heard they’re trucking in vodka, and any German woman is yours for the taking. No one will stop you.”

“Instead, we watch these German swine pick up bricks and march east with them tomorrow, nowhere near Berlin. I saw the orders myself.”

“How far?”

“Almost two hundred and fifty kilometers,” Lebedev said bitterly. “Probably two weeks on foot to the train.”

Two weeks? Emil thought morosely when he took his first hated step straight east early the morning of May 3, 1945. And the Soviets are free to rape every woman they see. Including my Adeline. The thought made him so sick and angry, he wanted to kill one of the men guarding him with his bare hands, but he knew he’d surely be dead the next minute. And where would that leave his family?

They were in marching formation, two abreast, and every few kilometers that day, they were joined by more groups of prisoners, many in German army uniforms, until Emil lost count at twenty-three hundred. One of them, unmistakably, was Nikolas. Emil could see him fifteen men ahead of him and to the left, limping only slightly.

The heat that day soared along with the humidity. The four times they were given water, Emil guzzled two-thirds of his ration and soaked his brim cap with the remainder so he could keep his head cooled. By three o’clock in the afternoon, it was brutally hot, in the upper thirties Celsius, not a cloud in the sky, and the weakest men among them began to stagger and drop. The man next to Nikolas was one of the first. Nikolas ignored his fallen partner and kept walking. The next man in line stepped over him as did the next eight.

Emil stopped, grabbed the man under the armpits, and tried to help him to his feet.

“Leave him be!” Lebedev shouted. “Keep marching. Close your ranks!”

Emil reluctantly let the man sag into the dirt, stepped around him, and hustled forward to close the gap in the line. He heard Lebedev shout at the fallen prisoner that he had one more chance to get to his feet. Then he heard the Russian shout for Aleksey to finish him off and throw him in the ditch. Glancing back, Emil saw the young soldier walk up and without hesitation put a bullet in the fallen man’s head.