The gunshot caused prisoners ahead of Emil to panic and break formation. Several began to run. Other guards yelled in Russian and shot into the air to stop them, but that only created more of a riot up and down the ranks. One of the uniformed German prisoners decided to use the commotion as a diversion to try to escape, sprinting directly away from the march into a fallow field, heading for woods about a hundred and fifty meters out.

He’d made it more than halfway when Lebedev saw him, ran forward, dropped to one knee, aimed, and shot the runner in the back ten meters before he reached the trees. The sight of him pitching forward into a mist of his own blood was enough for the remaining prisoners to settle and scurry back into line. During the confusion, places were changed, including Emil’s. When they started again, he looked to his left and found Nikolas limping beside him, a miserable expression on his face.

“You could have found somewhere else to stink, Martel,” Nikolas said.

“How’s the knee?”

Nikolas glared at him with utter loathing. “Getting better every day. Soon I’ll be good enough to stick a knife in your back when you’re not looking.”

“Except I will be looking,” Emil said. “And when you try, I will take that knife away from you, and I will stick it up your ass and give the blade a twist or two. You’ll die shitting blood if you try, Nikolas.”

That infuriated the bigger man, but he did not reply, just glared straight ahead now, gritting his teeth and limping on, stride for stride with Emil for hour after numbing hour until a halt was called in farming country. In eleven hours of walking, they’d covered nearly thirty kilometers and seen ten men die.

Lebedev pointed Emil, Nikolas, and the other prisoners toward a small loose grove of trees in a field that had been recently hayed. Aleksey went with them and allowed them to dunk their heads as they waded across a stream. Though dunking in the cool water was a relief, Emil collapsed almost immediately against one of the trees, grateful for the shade and the green grass; he knew he had to rest if they were going to march like this for two straight weeks.

Nikolas found another spot to lie down. Other men returned to the stream and drank from it, but Emil had seen cows farther out and decided it was too risky. Despite being massively thirsty, he waited two hours until a food-and-water truck came. Dinner was weak cabbage soup, a hunk of bread, and enough water to fill the can they’d been supplied with.

Emil wolfed down the food and water. He got back in line for more water, drank it all, and lay down for good before the sun was gone. Using his clothes for a pillow and hugging his water can and shoes lest they be stolen, he allowed himself to think about Adeline, Walt, and Will for the first time since they’d started marching. He fell asleep with their faces before him, saw himself hugging them, singing the boys a silent lullaby, and wishing them all a good night’s rest.

Chapter Twenty-Five

May 12, 1945

Near Pulawy, Poland

The last part of the march was the worst for Emil. They’d done nothing but hike in the heat for the past three days, more often than not across fields and broken ground in order to keep the roads clear for Soviet military traffic. Prisoners were collapsing and dying by the hour.

Emil had woken up foggy, barely rested, and nauseated. He could already tell the heat was going to be relentless, and he wondered if he could keep going if they were in for a long march. His stomach was so upset, he couldn’t eat his ration of bread, and he spilled half the water in his can before he took a step. By noon, they’d hiked ten kilometers, and the temperature had soared, with air so thick, there seemed to be a mist on the hazy low horizon.

One foot and then the next, Emil told himself. One foot and then the next.

But by early afternoon, sheer thirst was cracking his resolve. He looked everywhere for water. Passing a pond, he wanted to go to it and dive in as his sister had at the lake the day she lost her legs. But he could see that Lebedev and Aleksey were in no mood to see their prisoners do what they could not.

Emil’s tongue and throat felt as parched as the soil in the fields they crossed. His eyelids were sticky with sweat and his lips crusted with salt. Several times he felt so dizzy, he feared collapse. What if I fall and can’t get up again?

In the throes of heat exhaustion, his tortured body began to infect his mind. He heard Lebedev and Aleksey shouting, which became Captain Haussmann shouting at him for the first time in months. Try as he might, he could not prevent the terrible memories of that night from returning in full force. Emil staggered eastward in a feverish trance, seeing parts of that night as if they were happening all over again.

September 15, 1941

Outside Dubossary, Transnistria

“Okay,” Emil said. “I’ll do it.”

“A wise choice,” Captain Haussmann said, waving the barrel of his weapon at the terrified young man still huddled with the two young girls at the edge of the ravine. “Do it, then. Prove you’re fit for the new Germany, farm boy.”

Aware that Haussmann still had his weapon trained on him from just a few meters away, Emil felt himself harden and go to a mental place he’d been many times before. Growing up on a farm, he’d slaughtered animals, and that was how he tried to see the Jews as he turned to them that night. He tried to make them animals in his mind, not humans, and he was not human, either. Besides, if he didn’t do it, the three children would die anyway, and Emil and his family’s chances for survival along with them.

The young Jewish man was pleading with him again, begging Emil not to shoot as he walked forward, clear-eyed as he raised the gun and tried to take aim. As his sights settled on the Jewish boy’s chest, Emil felt cold, ruthless, committed to murder.

“Do it, or I’ll blow your head off!” Haussmann shouted behind him.

In his mind, as he started to squeeze the trigger, Emil had already killed the Jewish boy and the young girls so he could see his wife and sons again.

A shout rang out behind him.

“Captain Haussmann, stand down and lower your weapon!”

Feeling like he was still in a nightmare, Emil gaped over his shoulder. Silhouetted in the truck headlights’ glare, an SS officer with a hawklike nose was striding toward them. Haussmann took one look, lowered his weapon, and snapped into a salute.

“Obersturmbannführer Nosske!” he cried.

Nosske pointed at Emil. “Lower your weapon.”

Haussmann said, “I thought you’d gone to Kiev, sir?”

“Not yet,” snapped Nosske, who seemed to be Haussmann’s superior. “Were you threatening to kill this man unless he shot those Jews, Captain?”

Haussmann nodded with vigor. “I thought he needed to demonstrate his allegiance to the Fatherland, to—”

“He’ll do it in a different way,” Nosske said. “Reichsführer Himmler himself vomited when he saw fifteen men shot to death three months ago. His explicit order afterward was that no one shall be forced to participate unless they wish to.”

“With all due respect, Lieutenant Colonel Nosske, this man is a coward; this man is—”

“Not going to shoot Jews unless he wants to,” the SS assault leader said firmly. “Give him another job, Captain. Give him a shovel to bury them all and find someone else willing to shoot them, and do it quickly. We have two thousand more to dispose of before dawn.”

Two thousand? Emil thought, now trembling uncontrollably and gaping dumbly at Nosske and Haussmann, who saw argument was futile and snatched the Luger from Emil’s hand. He walked over to Helmut, the young guy with the missing tooth, and gave him the pistol. “Go ahead. Show the farm boy what a true new German looks like.”

Helmut nodded, passed Emil with a look of disdain before walking right up to the three Jews. He shot the girl on the left first, then the one on the right, and then the suffering older boy. He used his boot to push their corpses into the darkness.

“Just like shooting hogs in a pen,” he said to Emil before grinning at Haussmann and Nosske. “Sign me up. I could do this all day long.”

Emil stared at the place where the young Jews had been huddled, begging for mercy, just a few moments before. He felt dazed and sickened. I was going to shoot them. I was going to murder those children. How could I have . . . ? How . . . ?

And then Emil processed the first thing Helmut had said and understood that he and the toothless guy had told themselves the same story: The Jews weren’t human. They were animals.

“Martel!” Captain Haussmann shouted, snapping Emil out of his thoughts.

He turned to the SS officer and his commander, seeing Nosske gesture to a shovel on the ground. “Use it, or he will shoot you.”

Emil nodded, lowered his head, and hurried to get the shovel. More rifle and pistol shots were beginning to ring out farther north up the ravine, and with them the cries of the doomed rose once more. It all made Emil feel like he’d gone to hell for reasons he did not understand, and he had to struggle to focus on Haussmann, who pointed south along the ravine.