Adeline turned and walked away to not be seen smiling, but Rese howled with laughter. Emil was trying not to, but soon had his head thrown back, chuckling. His father had his head down, snickering, before Lydia and the boys joined in. Everyone around that campfire was laughing, then, feeding on each other, their worries and pains forgotten. Everybody, that is, except Adeline’s mother-in-law.

When Adeline looked back at Karoline, she had stood up. Her lower lip was twisted with scorn as she spat venomous words at Malia.

“You’ve forgotten the Horror?” Karoline said in a harsh whisper. “You’ve forgotten what it’s like to starve, haven’t you? Of course you have. You’d have to have only half a brain to forget what it feels like to have an empty belly for weeks on end. The things you’ll do to keep living.”

The laughter died. Lydia said, “That’s not right, Karoline.”

“Your daughter’s not right in the head,” Emil’s mother said.

“You spiteful woman. You—”

Malia put her hand on her mother’s shoulder, then looked at Karoline without a trace of self-pity or anger. “No, I am not right, Mrs. Martel. Not as right as you. But I have more than half my brain left, so I remember the Holodomor. I remember being so hungry, we ate field grass. Mama and Adeline and our brother, Wilhelm, were right beside me, on our hands and knees and crying because Papa was taken east two years before, and we had nothing, and we were all choking at the way the grass cut at our throats and swelled in our bellies. I remember that plain as day.”

Adeline’s right hand had gone to her throat, for she could suddenly taste the gritty chaff from the grass stalks coating her tongue and felt a pang of the abdominal pain that built in her gut after days on a grass-and-weed diet.

Karoline appeared shocked to be talked to this way by a younger woman, even more so as Malia went on. “But we kept eating the grass and anything we could find because we wanted to live. I ate worms and bugs and a dead bird because I wanted to live. Even with my head kicked in, I wanted to live so someday I could eat a bowl of good stew like tonight. What did you eat to survive the Holodomor, Mrs. Martel? What did you do to live through it?”

Emil’s mother stood there, staring at the ground for a few moments before glaring at Malia. “You have no idea,” she said, and walked off behind their wagon.

The rest of them ate in uncomfortable silence. When the dishes were done, Will came over and hugged his mother’s skirt. “I’m tired, Mama.”

“Bedtime,” Adeline said. “Bedtime, Walt.”

Their older son was dozing by the fire. Emil went to him, meaning to wake him, but then squatted and scooped him up and carried him to the wagon. The boy never stirred.

Adeline had already laid out the blankets inside beneath the bonnet. Emil handed Walt to her. She laid him on one blanket before covering him with another. Adeline helped Will in beside his sleeping brother and promised him a second blanket when she returned.

The fire was dying. Only Johann was still up, sitting on his stump and staring into the fading embers of his life. Beyond Emil’s father, other campfires had already gone to coals, and voices in the surrounding darkness dwindled with each passing minute.

Emil looked above the trees to the clear night sky, seeing the tapestry of stars and feeling suddenly small, insignificant, as if his life meant little. A truck passed. A German soldier yelled that the bridges ahead would open before dawn and the convoy would begin moving soon after. That worsened Emil’s mood, made him feel like a pawn, made him want to retreat and fight at the same time.

“Emil?”

He startled. Adeline had crept up on him.

“What are you looking at?”

The trance was broken. “The moon and the stars.”

“What about them?”

“When I was a boy, I’d go outside almost every night to look at them, and now I rarely think about them at all.”

Adeline stepped into Emil’s arms, rested her cheek on his chest, and held him.

“Give thanks. We made it through the first day,” she said.

“Somehow,” he said, seeing himself whipping the horses over and over.

“Because of you and because of God.”

He pressed his face to her hair. “We’ll get farther away from the tanks tomorrow.”

Adeline kissed him, said, “Stay strong, Emil.”

“Always.”

“And pray for us. God helps those who ask.”

Emil offered only a noncommittal grunt. “I’ll check the horses.”

He did not wait for a reply but went to Oden and Thor, feeling irritated, and thinking, Pray? A waste of time. You do what you want, Adella, but I’ll figure my own way, thank you. No reason to get God involved if he does not exist.

Emil had been raised Lutheran just like his wife. Miraculously, she had retained her faith through thick and thin, but Emil’s had been taken from him piece by piece over the past fifteen years of calamity, persecution, and situations no man should ever have to face, making decisions no man should ever have to make.

He tried not to but had another memory of himself the day he lost his faith completely, saw himself shaking his fist at the sky, lonelier than he’d ever been. Emil shivered as he tried to block out that hated time and saw to his horses, checking their lead ropes and halters. They fluttered their noses and puttered their lips as he put more salve on their wounds.

When Emil returned to the wagon, Adeline had already retrieved the rest of the blankets and spread another across Will. She was lying down beside their younger son. He blew out the lantern and climbed in beside Walt before reaching across both boys to squeeze Adeline’s arm good night.

The night fell cold and silent for a moment before Will whispered, “Tell me again, Mama, about where we’re going.”

“It’s a beautiful place,” Adeline whispered sleepily. “It’s surrounded by mountains and forests. And snow up high. And below there will be a winding river and green fields. We will live in a warm home, and every morning I will bake bread for you, and there will be a big garden in the back, and we’ll have so much food, we won’t know what to do with it all.”

Emil had closed his eyes and was trying to listen to his wife, trying to see such a magical place in his mind. But despite his every effort, images from the day cycled and wormed through him, made him deaf to Adeline’s description of paradise. He relived the tank battle before drifting toward sleep and hearing the echoes of Malia’s voice from the campfire. What did you eat to survive the Holodomor, Mrs. Martel? What did you do to live through it?

Chapter Five

March 1933

Birsula, Ukraine

In his fitful dreams that night, Emil was twenty-one again and wandering through the misty streets of a small city northwest of Friedenstal. He weighed less than fifty-five kilos by then, not an ounce of fat left on his frame. Though the sensation of hunger came and went, he ached constantly and everywhere, joints, muscles, and bones. Deprived of fat reserves, his body was beginning to eat him from the inside out.

Apathy had begun to set in as well. A fog seemed to shroud Emil’s mind as he roamed far and wide in yet another desperate hunt for food. His most recent meal had been three days before when he’d gone out beyond the city limits and into the farm fields where he’d found a shriveled, soil-caked pumpkin that had survived the winter and other scavengers. After washing it in a stream, Emil had eaten pumpkin until he was beyond full, sat in the sunshine feeling fat and happy, and then promptly slept right there on the bank. When he awoke, he ate the rest of the pumpkin and smiled at how his belly had distended again.

But that was days ago, Emil thought as he searched the streets for something new to eat. How much longer can this go on? How much longer can I survive?

Emil had been fending for himself since his family was thrown off its land in Friedenstal, more than three years earlier.

His father, mother, and his sister, eight-year-old Rese, had gone to live in Pervomaisk, a city to the east on the Bug River. At first, Emil had been lucky. He had farming skills and had little problem finding work on a collective farm as a field laborer.

He was quiet by nature, but he did not miss much. As a boy, he’d learned that the key to survival under Communism was to be silent, do your job, and not aspire to leadership of any kind. Within three months of his parents’ leaving him to his own wits, he had learned that people who spoke up, people who tried to do things better or tried to teach others a better way, tended to vanish or to die young.

Emil slept where he could that first year on his own, and he made enough to keep food in his belly. The second year, 1931, was even better when he was given a tractor to drive.

But in the fall of the following year, Joseph Stalin decided to quash all opposition to Soviet rule in Ukraine. He withheld almost all food to the region. His goal was to starve its entire population.