Her lower back began to burn again as they pushed the wagon across the dirt road onto the lane, which was flanked in places by low rock walls. When they were one hundred meters out from town, Adeline straightened enough to glance south toward the medieval tower and saw someone moving in its open window.

She swallowed hard and had to will herself not to scream at the boys to abandon the wagon and the last of their belongings and make an all-out sprint for the border. Having grown up in big open spaces like this, however, she knew a running horse got noticed whereas a drifting cow rarely drew attention. With that in mind, she kept them moving at a slow, steady, maddening, and backbreaking pace. Time dragged, but soon they were two hundred meters from town and then three and four. The farther they went down the lane, the more Adeline felt as if her arms were being yanked from their sockets. Her lower back was still barking at her, and she had to rest every hundred meters to tolerate the pain.

Five hundred meters west of town, as they came up out of that low spot the patrol had passed through, she stumbled and felt as if something sharp had been stuck between her shoulder blades. Adeline gasped, dropped the rail, and was almost overcome with an agony she recognized from her many long days bent over in crop fields. She hunched there, trembling.

“Mama!” Walt said. “Are you okay?”

Adeline couldn’t talk as she forced herself to straighten up and then rotate her shoulders back and her shoulder blades down. A few seconds later, she felt her spine shift with a crack. The pain lessened, and she stood there panting, wiping at the sweat pouring down her forehead and swallowing at the nausea in her throat.

“Mama?” Will said.

Before she could answer, Adeline heard a volley of gunshots from back where she’d last seen the patrol. Panic began to well in her. Are they shooting the people who tried to cross the border last night? What will they do to us? They wouldn’t shoot the boys, would they?

For a moment, she was frozen in place. Should we go on? Or turn back?

She thought she heard a woman scream before a second round of gunshots went off.

Walt said, “They’re not going to shoot us, are they, Mama?”

She saw how scared he was, and it shook her.

“No,” she said, aware of the squeak in her voice. “Here we go now.”

Adeline took two deep breaths and then squatted gingerly to pick up the rail. She raised the front end higher than she had before, pinning the rail across her lower thighs, not caring that the wagon’s balance was off as they walked out to eight hundred meters and then a full kilometer from town. The sun had risen higher now. The snow had begun to melt in earnest.

With every step, more of the two-story farmhouse that served as the Soviet guardhouse came into view off to the south-southwest. By the time they were less than five hundred meters from the guardhouse, she could see the stumps of what had been the forest that was supposed to shield them as they crossed the border. Some of the stumps had been turned up out of the ground. She could see their root systems blocking the lane beyond the driveway to the guardhouse.

Turn around, Adeline! a voice in her head cried. They’ll shoot you! They’ll shoot the boys!

But she knew that if they stopped now, they had no chance of being with Emil before sundown, maybe ever. Another voice, stronger and more powerful, began to speak to her.

No doubts now. Have faith, Adella. Walk right by that guardhouse the way Corporal Gheorghe walked through the Battle of Stalingrad and survived the Elbow of the Don.

An odd little smile began to form on her lips. To her surprise, the pain between her shoulder blades, in her lower back, shoulders, and hips eased as they walked nearer.

Then the frightened voice flared up when she realized the guardhouse was not one hundred and fifty meters south of the lane. It was much closer, no more than fifty meters to their left. On its ground floor, there were two large glass windows facing the driveway.

They’re going to spot you, Adeline. They’re going to shoot you before you find . . .

Adeline stopped to rest and to shake off the feeling of despair. She looked right at the windows from less than seventy-five meters, and, imagining the beekeeper, she smiled.

Have faith, Adeline thought over and over as they came abreast of the driveway and the upturned stumps blocking the lane. Still smiling, she glanced at the windows and saw two Soviet soldiers in the left one. They were in some kind of argument with a heavyset man wearing a homburg and a dark long coat. One of the soldiers looked their way. She smiled as she took her eyes off the window.

“We’ll go around, boys,” she said, trying to sound confident as she veered the wagon around the root balls to see that the lane beyond the stumps was split in two.

The left way turned south toward the improved road. The right track was muddy, rutted and gouged in places, and blocked by more uprooted stumps in others. The right lane seemed to peter out altogether near the far end of the stump field.

Have faith, Adeline thought, peering forward and believing she could see a clear path through the stump field, across the border, and into thick trees on the other side. She glanced back over her shoulder at the guardhouse windows, seeing all three men facing her and the boys now, but still in the midst of argument, with the man in the homburg waving his hands all around.

“How far are we going, Mama?” Will asked.

Adeline smiled, shifted her grip on the rail, and said, “To those trees out there.”

“That’s not far,” Walt said.

“Half a kilometer. No more. Like walking to school from Frau Schmidt’s.”

She looked back a third time when they were a hundred meters out from the guardhouse and could no longer see the lower windows, which meant the men could no longer see her and the boys. Adeline’s heart began to soar as they kept moving the little wagon across the ruts and around the stumps, heading steadily west.

It’s done, she told herself as they walked another fifty meters toward freedom. We’re already in those trees out there. We’re already on that train to Alfeld. We’re already with Emil.

A gunshot split the cold morning air, a crack and whoosh that seemed to go right by them. Adeline startled, cowered, and then twisted around as another shot went off from back by the guardhouse. She couldn’t tell who was shooting at them or where they were firing from.

But there was no doubt about the man in the homburg and the black long coat, who was running up the drive now, waving his arm and shouting at her. “Halt! Stop!”

Her eyes widened. He’s secret police! she thought.

Positive now that they were going to be caught or shot, Adeline felt her faith turn to abject terror, as if she were about to be burned alive or drowned before her sons. She lunged forward against the rail, screaming at the boys. “Push! Run! Fast!”

Within twenty seconds, her lungs felt ready to burst, and her leg muscles turned rubbery. For a moment, she could not find the way through the stumps.

“My God!” she gasped. “Help me! Please!”

She took a few more steps and saw a path through the maze. She hauled the little wagon and her boys down it, looking back with three hundred meters left before the trees, and seeing that the man with the homburg was well out the driveway into the stump field and gaining on them.

Realizing he was going to catch her at this pace, Adeline surged with an emotional energy that she’d never felt before and never would again, a mother determined to save her children, a wife desperate to hold her husband again, a woman fueled by fear, by love, and by prayer.”

Her vision tunneled. Her hands ached, her shoulders howled, and her back felt ready to break in two places. But her legs had returned and kept driving as she yelled again and again at Walt and Will to keep going, to not give up.

Suddenly, they were almost there. Less than two hundred meters. Even through the stinging sweat in her eyes, Adeline could see where the stump field stopped at a brush line with a few scattered trees beyond that before the real forest began.

A gun barked. She swore the bullet passed right by them.

Fighting hysteria, she screamed, “Stay low and don’t stop, boys! Just keep going!”

Another flat gunshot sounded before three more followed in slow, deliberate, aimed succession as Adeline, Walt, and Will propelled the little wagon toward that brush line, those sparse trees, the woods, and freedom.

“Where’s that man?” she yelled.

“He’s getting closer, Mama!” Walt cried.

Adeline put her head down and used those words like the whip Emil used on the horses during the tank battle, goading her through the next hundred meters. It felt like an eternity before she could see the end of chaos and want, right there in front of her.

In moments, they were out of the stump field, stumbling across a small path and then plunging down another that wound west through matted dun grass, willows, and thorn brush before entering the thick woods. At the edge, she looked back to see the man in the homburg still out there in the stump field, still coming after them, maybe one hundred meters behind them.