There were no trials. There were days of interrogation, all ending in the same verdict. They were all declared traitors for having been captured and were given six years in labor camps in Vorkuta.

So was I ready to go home? Yura was, despite what he witnessed in 1940. He was ready to see his family in Pinsk, silent about a possible Vorkuta camp diversion. The end of the war was in the air: we knew it when the guards deserted during the night and those of us who could escape, escaped. A day later, the US troops liberated the camp, although there weren’t many of us left to liberate. “So what are you going to do?” Yura asked as we stood in the field, our former barracks still in sight. I didn’t answer right away, and he became impatient. “Don’t you want to go home and live in a great country?” he asked, looking over the forest, where the sun was rising. “The country that won the world war?”

I thought of all of you. I thought of Nadia, wishing I were as sure as Yura, as clearheaded and free of doubt. “I want to live in a normal country, not a great one,” I said. “A country that doesn’t kill its own.” Yura just shrugged, saluted us goodbye, and started walking east. I wish I felt as optimistic as he did, as certain about the future.

I couldn’t go east, not yet. For a few weeks, John and I stayed with the American division that liberated our camp, pulling bodies out of shallow graves, then moving north from Bavaria toward Berlin. The west, despite the magnitude of its colossal ruin, lay powerful and calm, like a large, sleeping lion. By the time we reached Berlin, Germany had surrendered. “Come with me to the States,” said John, who by then—from our conversations in two broken languages and from my drawings—knew about all of you, my art studies, and Nadia. “If you go back, they’ll kill you. You’re talented, and maybe someday you’ll be famous and rich,” he said and smiled, a naive smile showing the gap between his front teeth.

So clearheaded, so simple, so American. I was already in the west—beyond our borders that were soon to close shut and be guarded day and night again—having paid with four years of hell for a one-way ticket out of my motherland’s murderous embrace. But in my mind I saw all of you, even Sashenka; I saw our Ivanovo house, and my Leningrad art classroom, and Nadia on the Palace Bridge, her yellow hat bobbing in the waves.