“That way,” he said, gesturing out of the park.

Not knowing that she was changing the course of her life, Adeline turned her sons and the little wagon in that direction. An hour later, they walked toward the bombed Reichstag, and she knew she’d gone the wrong way; a giant Soviet flag—bloodred with gold hammer and sickle—flew off the top of the damaged dome. The sun came out and hit the flag as it fluttered, causing it to glow brooding yellow and scarlet, like jaundice and fever. That’s what tyranny was, Adeline decided, a sickness, a fever, a poison in the liver of mankind. The workers’ flag, those foul colors, and the Nazi flag had waved above almost every injustice and harm she had ever lived through. Right then, she thought about turning around, going back into the British Zone and begging for food.

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

She heard him but did not answer.

“Mama,” Will said. “I’m hungry and—”

Adeline couldn’t take it anymore. She spun around and glared at her sons. “I know you’re tired and hungry and thirsty, but I am not a magician. I cannot make things appear with the snap of my fingers or by closing my eyes and wishing it were so.”

Unsettled by the unusually harsh tone in her voice, the boys retreated a step.

She saw them do it and felt terrible. She went to them, got down on her knees, and hugged them. “I will get us food as soon as I can. Please, I’m just as hungry and as tired as you are. Okay?”

Will squeezed her tight. “Okay, Mama. I’m not that hungry.”

“Neither am I,” Walt said.

Adeline rested her head on theirs a moment, realizing that once again her children might go to bed without a proper meal and a proper bed in which to sleep. In the shadow cast by the flapping Soviet flag, she felt cut off from everything she’d ever known and everyone she’d ever loved but for her boys.

She looked to the sky and said, “You’ve got to help us. We have no one else to turn to.”

PART FOUR:

A TALE OF TWO PRISONERS

Chapter Twenty-Eight

September 27, 1945

Poltava Prison Camp

Four months into his imprisonment, Emil awoke to the shouts of the Russian guards and realized he’d survived another night. He sat up, relieved to see that the men on either side of him on the bunk were moving as well. After lacing his boots, he shuffled to the staircase and climbed out into the dawn.

Emil lined up in the now-familiar formation, shivering in the cool fall air after the inferno of the basement. Nikolas stood three rows in front of him and to his left. They worked on the hospital but never together and had not spoken since June, which was how Emil preferred it. Two prisoners led a pony pulling a large wooden, four-wheel, flatbed cart into view.

The pony cart came empty and left the museum laden every morning and every evening. Emil saw the pony cart as he marched off to eat and as he marched back to sleep. Not once since he’d arrived back in May had he seen the cart depart the museum empty.

Every dawn revealed dead men in the bunks. Every dawn their corpses were dragged out of the basement, loaded on the pony cart, and taken to be buried in a field near the woods at the edge of the ruined city. The men who’d died at work during the day were loaded on the death cart and taken out in the evening by a second team of two prisoners.

The burial details were voluntary. Prisoners who agreed to handle the dead were rewarded with double rations of bread, soup, and fatback.

Despite his father’s rule of eating everything offered to him, Emil had not volunteered for the detail even though it would have meant extra food. The idea of burying the dead brought back excruciating memories of that night in Dubossary.

He could also see that, despite the extra rations, the prisoners on the burial details did not last long. Disease was rampant in the camp. Handling the bodies struck Emil as a straight road to eternity. Like a many-headed hydra, the sicknesses came and went, only to return. Dysentery fluctuated between a scourge and an epidemic. Mosquitos thrived in the wet basement. Malaria reared and attacked. To prevent the spread of typhus, their hair was kept scalp-tight, and their clothes were boiled every other week to kill the lice that transmitted the disease. The Soviets tried to boil enough drinking water for the prisoners as well, but there were outbreaks of cholera.

Indeed, nothing seemed to stop the men around Emil from dying. Some two thousand men had entered Poltava with him. By his count, two hundred and fifty men had died since, leaving seventeen hundred and fifty of them to rebuild the city.

As Emil worked, as he marched, and as he slept, that fact kept worming around in his head: seventeen hundred and fifty men were left to rebuild a city of three hundred thousand people. It’s impossible. It would take us twenty years.

He had been telling himself every morning that he was enough, that even if he could not escape, he could survive Poltava.

But for two decades? And what would I have to go back to?

Emil would be in his early fifties by then, close to his father’s age when the Soviets let him go. His sons would be grown strangers. Adeline would have given up on him long ago and found another man and another life. And how would he ever find them in the first place?

Emil’s confidence started to slip. He noticed how much weight he’d lost and with it some of his strength and stamina. Mixing concrete was hard labor, and he was unable to work at the same pace he had just the month before. His slowdown attracted the attention of the guards and the foremen, who berated him twice that afternoon to speed up the production of concrete blocks while the foundation cured.

Marching back to the museum that evening, chewing the last of his bread ration, Emil knew he’d broken two of his father’s rules, work hard and stay unnoticed. But how was he going to work hard and stay unnoticed if they didn’t give him enough to eat?

Twenty years with men dropping at this pace? he thought as he watched the burial detail set off with three more who died at work. The numbers are wrong. They’re lying. We won’t last a year. I won’t last a year. If I don’t escape, I am going to die.

Emil felt caged and had trouble breathing as he climbed down the stairs into the dreaded basement where he found a spot on the bottom bunk against the wall in the far corner where he would not have men to either side of him. Already feeling the heat building in the low-ceilinged room, he took off his boots, put them along the wall in a defensible position, and used the coat he’d been given for a pillow.

Closing his eyes, he remembered Adeline the day he married her, when his lips had touched hers at the ceremony’s end and she was all he needed in life and their future had seemed impossibly bright. They had a small celebration afterward. Mrs. Kantor had hired an accordionist so everyone could dance. Emil had been nervous about slow-dancing with Adeline, but when she came into his arms, it was as natural as breathing. When their first dance ended, the accordionist played a toe-tapping tune that set their feet afire and made him deliriously happy, maybe the happiest he’d ever been.

“I love you, Emil Martel,” Adeline cried at one point.

“I love you, too, Adeline Martel,” Emil said. “You make me feel like I fell asleep in Russia and woke up in paradise.”

Lying in his bunk in the prison camp, he drifted off to sleep, thinking, You still make me feel like that, Adella. Be strong and wait for me.

September 28, 1945

Gutengermendorf, Soviet-Occupied east Germany

The following morning, Adeline felt her heart swell with happiness as she watched almost eight-year-old Walt and almost six-year-old Will trot away from her down a grassy knoll and through a field of ripening sunflowers on their way to the rural village. It was a Friday, and this was their first day at school. They would be tested today and assigned to classes. Actual studies would begin on Monday, but she remembered her own first days of school and felt excited for them.

They’ll love it, she told herself. They’re boys. They’ll love it here, and I will learn to.

They’d already adapted to so much, hadn’t they? After sleeping outside hungry near the Reichstag, she’d found a shelter for refugees for two nights before the Soviet occupying authority sent them on a train to Gutengermendorf.

An elderly man named Peter Schmidt had begrudgingly picked them up at the station and taken them to his farm a kilometer and a half from the village. His wife, Greta, wasn’t happy to have a family of three foisted on her on top of the Russian soldiers already billeted in their home, but she’d given Adeline and the boys their own room in an outbuilding that was clean and dry and safe.