“You’re going through the proper application process.”

Feeling relief as well as a thrill of anticipation, Adeline reached over to cover Frau Schmidt’s bony hands with her own and looked into her friend’s eyes. “Can you tell me where you were going to try to escape? And how?”

Greta swallowed hard and nodded. “But I have no idea if it will work, Adeline.”

Five days later, on March 18, 1947, Adeline arose at two thirty in the morning and roused her boys. Walt came awake groggily while Will groaned, “Why are we up so early, Mama?”

She whispered, “Quiet. We’re going to see Papa.”

Will took the pillow off his head. Walt snapped alert. “Really?”

“It’s now or never,” she whispered, and touched them both on the cheek. “Get dressed in your warm clothes. Lace your boots tight. We’re going to be taking a long walk. And please, quiet as a mouse when you come outside. We don’t want to wake our neighbors or their dogs.”

Will said, “Mama—”

“Not another word until I say so!” she hissed. “Do you understand?”

Both boys shrank but nodded. It was rare to see their mother so intense.

“Good. Wait for me outside. Close the front door slowly behind you.”

Adeline left the room as quietly as she could, put on her coat and boots, and eased out the front door, leaving it ajar. It was above freezing and nearly pitch dark, with only a sliver of a waning crescent moon above, when she went to the front gate and opened it on hinges she’d oiled two days before. Then she padded over to the big sliding doors across an arch of the brick barn. She’d oiled the wheels on those doors, too, and pushed them smoothly aside before retrieving their little wagon packed with their essential belongings covered by two blankets.

Adeline found the boys by the stoop and motioned to them to follow her. They went down the street to the other side of town and the small train station there. The three-fifteen to Berlin was late and largely empty that morning. The conductor recognized her when she paid for the tickets.

“The early train and with the little ones today?”

“We’re going to spend the day and evening with my sister and mother in Falkenberg,” Adeline said, and stared at the boys in a way that told them not to correct her.

“You’ll be there before ten o’clock,” he said. “You’ll have to buy Falkenberg tickets in Berlin.”

As the train began to roll, Adeline could see he wanted to linger and talk, but she got out one of the blankets and put it over their laps.

“Let’s get some sleep,” she said to the boys, and promptly closed her eyes.

She waited to pull the boys close to her until the conductor had walked off. She kissed each of them on the head, closed her eyes again, and imagined rushing into Emil’s arms, envisioned them all rushing into Emil’s arms, a family again. Once she saw that clearly in her mind, she began to pray to God over and over to make it real. She smelled Emil’s scent and felt his big arms around her. She heard his gruff voice telling her how much he loved her and how they would never, ever be apart. She surged with joyous emotions and saw herself in his arms again and again and again. The entire hour-long ride, while the boys drifted off and slept, she kept seeing herself in Emil’s embrace and thanking God for making it real, for bringing them back together after more than two years of separation and longing.

It was still pitch dark when they arrived in Berlin at four twenty-five that morning. She shook the boys awake and then folded the blanket and put it back in the little wagon.

“Are we there yet, Mama?” Will asked grumpily.

“Another train, a walk, and a train,” she replied, pulling the little wagon down the platform into the central station. She checked the schedule, seeing the train she wanted was leaving at four forty-five on the far track.

“C’mon boys, push,” she said. “We have to hurry now.”

The station was surprisingly crowded for that early an hour. They wove through the crowd, seeing two soldiers smoking cigarettes and chortling about something over near the main entrance. Adeline kept glancing at them until they reached the correct track, turned their backs on the soldiers, and hurried toward a ten-car train.

The first car was packed. So was the second. A conductor was smoking outside the third car.

He was in his midtwenties with a sparse beard and acne. He turned surly the moment he saw Adeline and the boys coming down the platform, pushing and pulling the little wagon.

Grimacing, he pointed his cigarette at the wagon. “Where do you think you’re going with that? And you’d better have papers if you’re going through to Wolfsburg.”

“Oebisfelde,” Adeline said.

His chin retreated as he puffed and shook his head. “Last stop before the British Zone. You’re not getting on my train, lady. I know what you’re up to. If I let you on and don’t report it, I’ll end up on a shit list. And aren’t you putting your kids in danger, trying something like this?”

Adeline looked over her shoulder and saw no one coming.

“Not if we’re not caught,” she said. “And you won’t end up on that list. I promise.”

“Why would I ever take the chance?”

Adeline reached beneath the bottom blanket laid across their belongings in the cart and came up with two jars of molasses. “I made this from sugar beets I gathered myself.”

The conductor looked at the jars and laughed. “That wouldn’t get one of your kids on.”

She grimaced but reached beneath the blanket again and came up with a bottle of whiskey and a carton of Turkish cigarettes that had cost half her last paycheck at the Soviet officers’ commissary. She held both out.

“They’re yours if you let us on, help put our wagon in the baggage car, and help take it off in Oebisfelde. The whiskey now. Cigarettes when we leave you.”

The conductor chewed his lip a second, then dropped his cigarette and ground it with his heel before taking the bottle. “You and your brats wheel the wagon down there.”

Five minutes later, Adeline and the boys were inside the crowded sixth car, seated on the side opposite the platform. Will and Walt were so tired, they fell asleep against her as soon as she spread the blanket over them. She wanted to do the same, to seek refuge from her growing anxiety, to make her mind stop racing. But she could not.

Adeline stayed hypervigilant, listening to the people talking around her and wondering whether they, too, were making a run for freedom.

The train began to move. The boys shifted in their sleep against her, and it took everything Adeline had to fight the fear that built in her in tandem with the speed of the train. When the conductor came by to punch their tickets, he already smelled of whiskey.

“How long?” she asked.

“We’ve got clear tracks,” he said. “You’ll be there around five minutes to six, just before sunrise, in time for them to see you and shoot you when you make your run.”

He walked away, seeming almost amused. Adeline felt a caustic taste in the back of her mouth as she did the math against the sunrise, which a book in the Soviet officers’ billet said would be at 6:23 a.m. Subtract half an hour, and the conductor was right; they would be arriving in Oebisfelde at the crack of dawn. With every step she and the boys took after leaving the train, the light of day would grow along with the chance of discovery, the chance of gunfire, and worse.

I should have come earlier! I should have taken the midnight train to Berlin!

But the midnight train would have been more crowded, and the central station most certainly so. They would have ended up in Oebisfelde at roughly three a.m. with only a sliver of a waning moon above. How would we have seen? How would we have known we were going the right way?

She did not own a flashlight and had feared stealing one from the officers’ billet, only to have its light betray them as they ran for freedom. In the end, she decided a night run was not worth the risk. Now, however, as the train hurtled toward dawn, she was feeling regret.

No, she thought, clamping down on the emotion. I have to believe this is the right time and the right way to go.

Adeline closed her eyes and was actually starting to doze when she heard the conductor’s question echo in her mind. Aren’t you putting your kids in danger?

She came to again, alert, tense, her chest heaving when she glanced at Will and then Walt, feeling her heart pang with alarm for them and for her. They were in danger, terrible danger, all of them. They’d been in peril from the moment they’d left the house with the wagon. If they were caught, the Soviets could separate her from the boys. They could send her east to a work camp and Walt and Will to an orphanage. With every kilometer that passed along the route heading west-southwest from Berlin toward Oebisfelde, the border, and the British Zone beyond, her anxiety rippled through fear toward terror.