Adeline and her family were less than twenty-six kilometers from the German border, trudging in relentless heat on a road jammed with refugees and Soviet army trucks, when Marie began to scream because Hans had stopped breathing. The panicked nurse tried mouth-to-mouth and beat on her son’s chest. But her second boy was gone, and with him went Marie’s mind.

After an initial torturous outpouring of grief, Adeline’s cousin seemed not to hear anything said to her, even when Adeline told her the only place that she could bury Hans was under cinders by the railroad tracks. Her cousin watched blankly as Malia covered her second son and did not react when Adeline handed her a kerchief with the cinders of his grave in it.

Marie put it in her wagon beside the one with soil from Rutger’s grave and then began pushing her cart vigorously toward Germany. Adeline and the boys struggled to keep up with her. Marie did not look back. Not once. Nor did she seem to cry.

An hour later, they reached a slowdown in traffic. A truck carrying young Soviet troops rolled by them and slowed to a stop. The soldiers were drinking vodka and singing. They noticed Marie pushing her cart, her blouse sweated through, her breasts swollen with milk. One of them called to her in Russian.

“Beautiful lady, why are you alone? Come in here with us, and we will party!”

Marie did not answer, just kept walking past them. The soldier got up and peered around the canvas at her.

“Did you see the size of her tits?” he asked his friends. “Bazookas!”

His friends roared with laughter and seemed not to notice Adeline and her boys as they walked past the truck. A few moments later, she saw other vehicles ahead begin to move and heard the brakes of the truck behind them sigh. It rolled past her, and she saw that same soldier hanging out the side of the truck.

“Beautiful lady!” he called as the truck passed Marie again. “You should not be alone like this. Come with us. We will have fun.”

The truck stopped. If Marie heard him, she did not show it. She just kept walking in that same quickened pace she’d adopted since leaving Hans’s grave. And Adeline and the boys again hurried by the truck and were ignored once more.

The soldier was, if anything, determined. When his truck went by Marie a third time, he held out a full bottle of vodka and said, “Beautiful lady, forget your miserable refugee life! Come with me. We will drink and party all the way to Berlin!”

The truck kept moving and got a good fifty meters ahead of Marie before it stopped. Adeline’s cousin did not break stride as she abandoned her cart and started toward the truck. The soldiers saw what she’d done and started yelling encouragement and waving their vodka bottles at her.

“Come on, beautiful lady!” cried the soldier who’d been heckling her. “You’ll never get a chance like this again!”

“Marie!” Adeline shouted. “Don’t!”

But then the truck started up again, and her grief-shattered cousin broke into a run. The Russian soldiers went wild screaming and yelling to her. Marie sprinted and caught up to the truck. Hands reached out and hauled her up and inside.

A bottle of vodka was shoved into her hands while many other hands roamed over her. To the delight of the troops, Marie began writhing her body sinuously against their hands, tilted the bottle back, and started guzzling.

The truck sped up, and Adeline’s cousin spiraled out of her life like a leaf caught in a gale.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

July 3, 1945

Poltava, Ukraine

In the five weeks since his arrival at the prison camp, Emil had learned to cherish the wind. Even the thought of it blowing against his skin was enough for him to survive the nights. The Soviets kept Emil, Nikolas, and six hundred of the remaining two thousand prisoners in the vast basement of the Poltava museum. The upper floors had been destroyed in the bombing.

They slept one hundred men to a room on long, low, crudely built wooden bunks with no mattresses. That many bodies in that confined a space created its own infernal heat and humidity, so, in the dense air, water dripped from the ceilings and upper bunks all night long. Emil couldn’t decide which was worse, being outside in the raging sun, or in the dank hole of the bunkroom, crammed in with all those stinking men snoring, moaning, farting, weeping, and crying for deliverance in their sleep.

The sanitary conditions were beyond abysmal. Men went outside, sat on flat boards, and shit into a long trench that they dug and buried every three days. The city water was compromised. Prisoners began to fall ill almost immediately from giardiasis and dysentery. Emil could hear the afflicted men groaning and quick-footing it to the latrine all night long.

They slept in their clothes so they could be woken, brought up from the museum basement quickly, and then mobilized to march six blocks to a makeshift kitchen set up in front of the ruins of the Poltava city hall. Several of the remaining women in the city cooked for the prisoners, whose diet consisted of thin vegetable soup, a pound of bread to last the entire day, beets, potatoes, and the occasional chunk of boiled fatback.

Other men complained, but Emil closed his eyes and imagined every meal was cooked by Adeline. As he spooned the soup, he tasted her chicken soup with handmade egg noodles. When he bit into the bread, he imagined the strudel she used to make in the fall, filled with fresh berries picked from the vine. And when he put the fatback in his mouth, he swallowed it as if it were her finest schnitzel.

They were assigned to crews. The first few crews were put to work reconstructing the main waterworks, the city hall, and the museum.

Emil and Nikolas were assigned to a two-hundred-man unit charged with rebuilding the hospital. They had a hand in all of it at first: clearing the rubble from the ruins of the facility, digging out the remains of the foundation, and then building wooden forms to hold concrete.

When the forms were in place, Emil was put to work on a team mixing lime, clay, and fly ash for the cement, and then mixing that with sand, gravel, and furnace slag to form concrete, which was poured into the forms. The assignment kept him off to the side of the fury of activity on the hospital site, and he preferred it that way. The guards barely gave him a glance as he mixed concrete. He held his head down, worked hard, and kept his mouth shut.

I can survive this, he told himself over and over again those first few days. I will survive this place, but only if I rely on myself alone. No allies means no betrayals.

Emil also kept alert for opportunities to escape. So far there had been none. They were guarded at the hospital site. They were watched marching to meals and on their way back to the museum basement. Once down there and on the wooden bunks, Emil ignored the men shifting to either side of him and tried to fall straight asleep, hoping to be in a deeper, darker place when the night suffering began.

But in the middle of the night, when he’d been pushed or kicked or snored awake, he’d try to think of Adeline and Will and Walt to give him hope of making it through another day.

July 5, 1945

Cottbus, Germany

As they approached the first large town in Soviet-held eastern Germany, Adeline was still shaken by Marie’s decision to jump into the truck with the Russians. But then, she’d look back at the boys, still pushing the cart. What might I do if both of them were taken from me or killed?

Those thoughts haunted her every step of the next four days, which unfolded in blazing heat and humidity. At a fork in a road that passed through woods near the town of Falkenberg, Adeline called for a rest. Her mother limped over and sat on a boulder in the shade.

“You can all go on without me,” she said. “I’ll live here.”

Adeline sighed. “On that rock, Mother? In this forest?”

“No,” Lydia snapped, and gestured to the road sign. “I am going into that town, finding out who is in charge, and asking for a place to stay.”

“Mother,” Adeline said, “we’re less than two weeks’ walk from Berlin. Two weeks from finding a way to the western Allies and—”

“Stop that nonsense!” her mother shouted, pounding her bony little fist against her thigh. “That was Emil’s crazy idea, not mine and not yours. For better, for worse, we know how it works under Stalin. The sooner we settle down and adapt, the better. Admit it, Adeline, once and for all. Karoline was right. Emil is gone, just like his brother. He will never find a way back to you. Don’t waste your life waiting for him. Your foolish dream of a green valley is over.”

Adeline was surprised at the fierce bitterness that pumped through the old woman. “It is not over, Mother, until I say it is over. My husband, who I love and trust, told me to go as far west as I can, and he’ll find me. I believed him then. I believe him now.”

“I believed your father when he said he’d come back, too.”

Adeline ignored her and looked at Malia. “We can find a place for her to stay, and you can come with us.”

Her older sister smiled sadly and took Adeline’s hand in hers. “My place is with Mother; you know that.”

Adeline gazed at Malia, both of them blinking back tears. “I told you once I couldn’t do this without you.”