“I know, but now you have to,” Malia said. “I don’t want you to go, but you have to do what you think is right.”

“We’ll find each other again, won’t we?”

“That’s in the hands of a power far greater than us, dear,” Malia said, taking Adeline in her arms. “But take my love with you wherever you go. And I’ll take your love with me. And hopefully, someday, like your friend Mrs. Kantor, we’ll be able to see the beauty in every cruelty we’ve had to endure. Even this moment.”

Leaving her older sister’s arms felt like roots were being ripped from her chest. That feeling amplified when Adeline went to her mother, who would not look at her as she said, “Don’t promise me anything.”

“I won’t, Mother,” Adeline said. “This is good-bye, then.”

For a few gut-wrenching moments, she thought Lydia would be cold at their parting. But then her mother’s shoulders trembled, and she got up to hug her daughter.

“You always were braver than me,” Lydia whispered. “Like your father.”

“I got the rest of me from you,” Adeline said, her throat constricting as she felt how thin her mother had gotten on this most recent walk toward freedom.

When they broke apart, Adeline called to the boys to say good-bye to their oma and aunt Malia. Walt was stoic, but Will began to cry as he hugged Malia. And then they had to go.

“I can’t sit here watching you leave,” Malia said. “We’ll each go our own way at the same time.”

Adeline nodded, unable to stop the tears from flowing down her cheeks as she went to the front of the little wagon and picked up the handle. She wiped at the tears, then looked at the boys, forced a smile, and said, “Here we go. The Martels are off on another adventure.”

With a weak last wave toward her mother and older sister, Adeline turned fully away, mentally chopping the ties, drenched with fear, but taking a step in her own direction and another and a third. She would later think that the first step she took that day, away from her past and toward an uncertain future, was like a leap between cliffs and the second-most courageous act of her life.

On July 16, 1945, Adeline, Walt, and Will walked down a road that passed through beautiful fields of ruby, purple, and white wildflowers glistening in a light mist and fog. The chill on the northerly breeze felt good after so many days walking in the heat. She smiled as the sun came and went, gleaming, giving her a show and making her realize just how much she loved flowers. Their hue, delicateness, and shape. Their tragically brief time on earth.

“It sure is pretty here, Mama,” Walt said.

“It is,” Adeline said.

“Is this our valley?” Will wondered. “I can’t see any mountains.”

“I can’t see much of anything except flowers and fog, and that’s enough for now,” Adeline said, relaxing, feeling less anxious about their future.

Will ran off the road, picked her a bunch, and ran to catch up. “So you can look at them all day, Mama,” he said, which got her choked up and more in love with her little boy than ever.

They reached the southeastern outskirts of Berlin about an hour later. What they saw in the next five hours made Adeline question her decision to leave her mother and sister behind. She had never been in a city as large as Berlin, so at first, she felt the excitement of newness. But as the fog swirled in and out and they walked deeper into Hitler’s fallen capital, she soon realized that nearly ten weeks after the Nazi surrender, even with many streets cleared for traffic, Berlin remained a landscape of ruin, a deeply scarred and wounded place, a charred, haunted maze where the smells of bomb soot, burned chemicals, and death vied for dominance. Eighty-one thousand Soviets, one hundred thousand German soldiers, and one hundred and twenty-five thousand civilians had died in the Battle of Berlin, street by devastated road and building by rubble and wreckage. Depending on location and the wind, the stench of death rose and fell. Some bodies had evidently not yet been found, gathered, and buried or burned.

There were Red Army soldiers and prisoners everywhere, picking at the debris. They were stacking usable bricks and loading the rest into dump trucks. As she passed each knot of prisoners, Adeline scanned their faces, hoping against hope that she’d somehow spot Emil among them. But no one even resembled him among the men at hard physical labor.

Is this what Emil is doing? Is he like these prisoners?

In the ebb and flow of mist and fog, and the closer they got to the center of Berlin, the more the city was revealed as a ruptured, alien place with many of the structures being amputees, or skeletons, or debris. In that vast graveyard, she saw thousands of people living in apartments where some of the walls were missing, or under sheets and tarps amid the destruction. Adeline and the boys walked past hundreds of burned-out buildings, and women washing clothes in buckets of water from a hydrant, their children streaked with bomb soot and playing on mounds of shattered brick and bent steel.

She heard them speaking in German, all telling a similar tale of still being shell-shocked by the vicious street battle waged in Berlin during the last nine days of the war and worrying about their sorry lot in life now that Hitler was dead and the great Reich had been destroyed.

You have no idea of the suffering your Hitler caused, Adeline thought a little angrily. Everything we have is in this cart, and I don’t have enough food to feed my children tonight.

One prisoner picked up a chunk of cement, turned, and walked at her with vacant eyes that made her shudder. He reminded her of Johann when he first came back from Siberia—a broken man—and she felt ill at the idea that Emil might return to her in a similar condition.

Adeline pulled and the boys pushed the little wagon a good three kilometers into the city before they were finally stopped at a Soviet checkpoint by a soldier who asked to see her papers. She spoke to him in Russian, which seemed to confuse him, as she lied and said she had no papers. She told him a convoluted story about being dragged out of Ukraine by the German army and getting separated from her husband.

“I was told he is here, working in western Berlin,” she said in a pleading tone. “We are just trying to find him.”

The soldier glanced at Walt and Will, filthy and exhausted by the last few weeks of walking. Adeline intentionally thought of Emil and summoned tears. The sentry got a disgusted look on his face and waved them through.

When she saw the first British soldier, she threw back her head and cheered. The boys looked at her like she was crazy.

“We made it, boys! We’re where Papa wanted us! In the West, with the Allies!”

Adeline hurried up to a British soldier and tried to ask him where she could get food and shelter. But he did not speak German. When he heard her try in Russian, he pointed her back the way she’d come, shrugged, and turned away.

She pushed on, figuring she could find at least one American or British soldier who spoke Russian or German. Soon after, she and the boys were looking high up at the ruins of a church, seeing its spire split: one side was whole and barely scorched, and the other a blackened maw where some explosive from the sky had struck it a glancing blow, cleaving it in two. She couldn’t believe how one side could remain untouched while the other was blasted and burned. She stared at the split spire for several more moments without understanding exactly why before pushing on.

Had it been a clear day, she might have used the sun as a guide to keep going west, deeper into the British Zone. But the skies darkened around noon and rain came. They ran, seeking shelter, abandoning all sense of direction and getting lost.

“Where are we going?” Walt asked as they huddled in an empty building.

“I don’t know,” Adeline said, so tired she felt confused now, unsure.

Will said, “I’m tired of walking, Mama.”

“And I’m thirsty,” Walt said. “And hungry.”

Irritation and then anger bubbled inside Adeline. With the rain and the relentless uncertainty all around her, she almost took out her fear of not being enough on the boys: not being enough to make it to the West, not being enough to find Emil, not being enough to get food and water for her children. But she didn’t. Instead, she took a deep breath and got them the last of the water from the wagon and the last of the bread she’d bought from a bakery outside the city.

The rain finally relented. They walked and soon found themselves in Tiergarten, a giant forested park that had been turned into a base for the British. Men were sawing down trees and clearing the land.

She tried two more British soldiers. Neither spoke German. But the second one understood some Russian.

“I need food for my children,” she said.