“Yes, you are right. I will not like leaving her and the girls again. But sometimes there are works given men that require sacrifice of their family. This is such a time for all Jews, in one way or another. Many lives may depend on my success.”

Another pause.

“What about you, my friend Kropf?”

“What about me?”

“What will you do?”

“After the safe house?” Jakob sighed. “I do not know. We have no place to go, no hope for safety. I suppose we must keep hiding until this terrible time is past. Perhaps we can obtain new identity cards, change our names—how, I have no idea—and somehow find a way to start a new life… as Gentiles.”

The network the rabbi spoke of was one of many small organizations within the overall resistance and underground movement, joined but intermittently with one another. There were many such peopled lattices of help, some attempting to move families eastward into Russia; some toward Switzerland, where Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s sister and many like her now resided in safety. Others simply connected safe houses, large and small, in a loose, invisible confederation of compassion for those who had no place to go.

It was an uncertain life for the Jews who found themselves at the mercy of those they did not know, made all the worse by realizing they were endangering the very lives of those who showed them mercy.

But it was better than the camps.

Their conversation was cut short by the approach of young Angela behind them.

In a few minutes Ulrike and Helga were also up, followed by the entire troop.

The previous night had been like so many of the others during their three-hundred-kilometer westward pilgrimage across northern Poland, all of which faded into a continuous string of fields, barns, woods, back streets, basements, attics, darkened rooms, unfamiliar voices, hushed conversations, and constant fear of discovery. They had been huddled into the back of a rickety old wood farm wagon, covered first with blankets, then with hay and straw, and transported over bumpy terrain, eventually arriving, just as the sun was coming up, at this deserted building, which had served as their accommodations for the day’s repose.

It was never easy to get all eight of them to sleep at the same time. Sometimes weariness overtook the children at the most inconvenient moments. Angela often had to be carried by one of the four adults. But on this day, by noon, all had slept, for some hours at least. Now, with dusk falling, it was time once again to be on their tired and travel-worn feet.

The remaining four kilometers they must travel alone, without benefit of a guide, they had been told.