Bette saw the tracks of the tank as it lumbered past the cellar windows, close enough to buckle the frames, shaving the outside wall. The ground was trembling, the grind of the engines deafening, the squeak of the tracks like a screaming, tortured beast, on and on until it passed their building and hobbled on down the street, its echo drifting back. The explosion threw them backwards. There was a roar as if the Devil himself had belched. Thick smoke billowed through the broken windows, and Bette could hear the flames crackling, clicking their fingers as the paint outside blistered, pop-pop-pop.

Soldiers burst through the cellar door, their machine guns poised at the ready, ash and carbon on their filthy uniforms, searching, searching, eyes left, eyes right. They could shoot us all, Bette thought. That’s what they did at Nemmersdorf, it said so in the newspapers and on the wireless. That’s what they’re going to do. She shut her eyes, screwed them tight, hearing herself breathe in short, grating rasps, hearing everyone else do the same. The soldiers backed out. A woman across the room began to cry. No one moved. Bette didn’t know how long they sat, petrified. Stone shapes in the dust.

Two more soldiers entered the cellar. Mutti sat the other side of her with her hand on Bette’s knee, pinning her to the ground. Her mother’s lips were tight and narrow, her neck taut, the pulse throbbing. Lieselotte was the other side of Mutti, her face hidden by her hair.

Bette leaned forward and retched, right there, thin yellow sick all over her socks and shoes, and over Greta’s too, and splattered on the soldier’s dusty boots and grubby puttees. The barrel of his rifle pointed down but he moved on, not bothering.

That night it was Waltraud, Greta’s sister.

She screamed as the Ivan yanked at her arm, shrill as a wounded raven. Bette had never heard a human cry like that. Waltraud was digging in her heels, struggling. Her mother, Frau Weber, tugged at her daughter’s sleeve, nein, nein. Another Ivan slapped Frau Weber’s face with the butt of his rifle and she staggered back, blood pumping from her mouth. Bette smelled its iron.

Waltraud wasn’t as pretty as Lieselotte, but she was plumper.

Bette was forbidden to go out, but that morning Greta had climbed the stairs to the Fischers’ apartment and they had stood on the landing outside their door, opposite the Baumanns’. The paint in the stairwell had peeled and in places the plaster had fallen off. The building shook every time the tanks rolled through the street, a slab of brick here, a chunk of masonry there. The stone steps had cracked, the treads become chipped and uneven, the bannisters taken for firewood. The apartment on the ground floor was empty, the windows broken and gaping where the artillery had fired through.