Poltava, Ukraine

For three days, Emil fought for and held his position by the door. When it was shut, the air in the boxcar was stifling and rank, but he had a crack that allowed him fresh breathing air and a sliver of a view as the train rolled east between a crawl and a trot.

At those speeds in the pulverizing heat and humidity, the boxcars had become coffins. In Emil’s car, five men weakened by the march had died. Men were expiring at higher rates in the other cars. He’d watched at least thirty corpses carried out.

That morning, as a body was being lowered from an adjacent boxcar, other prisoners were on the ground, relieving themselves and stretching their legs, when two men made a break for it. The Soviet Red Army soldiers guarding the train cut them down within fifty meters.

Hours later, Emil kept his lips and eye to the crack in the door and did everything he could not to think about the bleakness of his situation. It was one of the other things his father had told him about surviving the gulag. The worse it was, the less you thought. You had to figure out a way to go down inside yourself, find a place no one could get to, and just be. Like a bear hibernating. By that point in his captivity, Emil believed he’d found that place deep inside and was telling himself he could last a week, even two, in the train just by keeping one eyeball to the crack in the door, catching glimpses of the passing countryside, breathing fresh air, and not thinking at all.

The brakes squealed. The train ground slowly to a halt. When the door slid back, Emil threw his hand to his brow against the brilliant, hot sun, seeing that they’d stopped beside a long, wide, fallow field and beyond it another and another. He smelled horses and cattle and looked around, thinking that the land looked familiar. Too familiar.

The soldiers told them all to climb out and assemble in the field. When they did, a big muscular Soviet officer stood in the back of a lorry and spoke through an amplifier.

“Welcome to Poltava prisoner of war camp. You are here to make amends for Adolf Hitler’s destructive acts of aggression against the Soviet people. Hitler took Poltava in 1941 and made it his base for bombers that attacked Stalingrad and Moscow and killed tens of thousands of innocent Russian people. The Allies had no choice but to bomb Poltava and its airfield, and there was a long battle here with your army. You are to rebuild what was destroyed. When that is done, you will go home. Not a day sooner.”

Poltava. Emil knew where he was now and felt a little better. He was back in Ukraine, far-eastern Ukraine, almost to the Russian border, a good four hundred and seventy-five kilometers east-northeast from where he, Adeline, and the boys had set out on the trek fourteen months before.

I am a long, long way from where I left Adeline, but at least I’m not in Siberia, he thought. Ukraine I can escape from. I’ve done it before. I can do it again.

Though he was smiling inside at these thoughts, Emil kept his face grim as the soldiers got the prisoners in lines to receive clothes: a set of prison grays, including a cap, a jacket, and work boots. They were warned to protect their clothes. There would be no replacements.

After being deloused in tents by the railroad tracks and leaving their old clothes behind, they were marched into the city. Though the heat was stifling, the route unfolded along a babbling stream in a shaded forest that smelled of pine and wildflowers until the wind shifted and all Emil could smell was doused fire and chemical burn.

The trees ended. They walked out onto a rise in hot aluminum sunlight, which afforded them their first view of Poltava. The city was once home to three hundred thousand people, but more than 80 percent of it now lay in scorched ruin, a wasteland of war where fewer than six thousand people were eking out a living.

Emil looked down on the soot-and bomb-blackened maze of low broken walls, twisted steel skeletons, and ragged black spires jutting from the rubble as far as he could see and felt his bravado fade. Though he did not believe in God or heaven, his own eyes told him he was about to enter hell.

Chapter Twenty-Six

June 27, 1945

Legnica, Poland

More than three and a half months after Emil was taken, the sun was rising over the building that had given the greater Martel clan refuge for nearly five months. Adeline and the boys were in the street out front with their little wagon and Marie’s. Lydia and Malia, Emil’s parents, and Rese were there as well with their loaded carts.

Karoline said, “You all should come with us. We’ll be back in Friedenstal in a week. A place we know. A life we know.”

“The Soviets are lying to you,” Adeline said curtly. “You’ll go back to a life worse than what we knew. And besides, Emil told me to go west and he’d find me.”

Her mother-in-law looked like she’d tasted something foul before she said, “Face it, Adeline. Your mother’s right. Emil is gone and not coming back. Just like your father.”

“I don’t believe that,” Adeline said, her hands gathered to fists. “I’ll never believe that.”

“This is good-bye, then,” Karoline said.

Adeline nodded and told Will and Walt to say good-bye to their grandparents and aunt. Rese had tears in her eyes, but Karoline hardly looked at them before tousling the boys’ hair. After Adeline hugged Rese and Johann, Karoline said, “Come with me a moment, Adella.”

“I’m not changing my mind.”

“I know that,” she said before leading her far enough down the street to not be overheard.

As sour as ever, Karoline looked her in the eye, and said, “Will you forgive me before we walk away from each other forever?”

Adeline knew exactly what she was referring to, that incident long ago when the first Waldemar was starving, and Karoline nevertheless drank much of the cream a friend had left for him two days before the infant died. For years, she’d held that against her mother-in-law, told herself that she could never forgive the spiteful bitch for that greedy, uncaring act.

But standing there, she listened not to her mind but to her heart. “I forgive you, Karoline. You didn’t cause his death. My malaria did. He would have died with or without the cream. I held it against you for so long. It was unfair of me.”

Her mother-in-law’s features melted, and she grabbed hard onto Adeline’s forearm before choking, “Thank you. I don’t know what got into me that day. I . . . Take care of those boys. They’ve got Emil all through them, you know.”

Karoline’s hard expression returned before she nodded and went to her cart. She got behind the push bar while Johann took the front handle. Rese, sitting on the wagon, waved at them, her face red with pressure before she broke down sobbing.

“If Emil finds you, tell him to come find me,” she said before her parents-in-law pushed and pulled their cart toward the train station and a ride back to Ukraine and little Friedenstal.

“Will we ever see them again, Mama?” Walt asked, tears in his eyes, as they vanished.

“I don’t know,” she said.

He seemed more upset, so she added, “If it’s part of God’s plan, we will.”

She went to the handle of the little wagon, Emil’s normal position, before looking back to Walt and Will at the push bar and then over at her sister and her mother and her cousin with her twins in her cart.

“Ready?” she said.

Lydia and Malia nodded. So did Marie.

Will said, “I’m ready to go west.”

Walt, fretting, said, “But how will Papa know where to find us after we leave here?”

“I left a letter for him with the owner in case he comes here first,” she said. “It says we’re going to Berlin to get to the British or the American zones where we’ll be waiting for him.”

“He’ll never get to read it,” Lydia said.

Malia, who stood beside her at the push bar to their wagon, said, “Mother, you need to learn to keep your yap shut sometimes.”

Lydia stared at her older daughter and then raised her chin and looked away, saying, “I don’t know why they won’t let us stay here.”

Malia said, “No one in Poland wants us here. If we don’t go back to Friedenstal, we have no other choice.”

Adeline’s sister was right. Like every other country Hitler invaded, Poland had decided to expulse all people of German heritage from its borders no matter their role in the war. They’d been given forty-eight hours to pack and decide to either return to the East on a train or go west on foot.

Marie had asked for extra time given Rutger’s fever but was denied. The sick child was fussing atop Marie’s little wagon, and Adeline’s cousin was looking overwhelmed as they got ready to depart.