“Last chance,” Rainer says, pulling himself off the low wall he has been sitting on. “Instead of joining those religious zealots, you can run away with me.”

“And go where?” Ania asks, trying to keep her voice light, though actually she feels as though she might collapse. She has said good-bye to no one—not her father, who would forbid her from leaving, or Frau Richter, who would cry and wring her hands. She is no longer a child, but she is still, effectively, running away.

Rainer takes her suitcase from her hands. “Why go to Africa when there are so many Germans who could use your help? Seriously.”

They have debated this often. Rainer is a recent convert to the Nazi Party. He plans to be on the front lines of Hitler’s wonderful new empire. He has already signed up to become a leader of a Landjahr Lager, or camp—part of a national service program in which young people spend a year on the land, developing the necessary skills they will need if Germany is to return, under Hitler, to a great agrarian society. Soon it will be compulsory for all the country’s youths. Rainer will be poised to rise in the program’s ranks.

Ania sees the beauty in his dream, but all the same, she would like to go abroad. She would like to travel farther than the German countryside. Africa beckons with its promise of lush jungles and primitive tribes.

“Just think of what you will miss here,” Rainer continues. “The beginning of a whole new Germany!”

“Oh, Rainer.” Ania sighs, unable to think of anything but her father sleeping like an old man on his narrow bed. She peeked in through his door on her way out and was surprised by how rumpled he looked, mouth open, snoring—his shirt loosened at the collar, his stockinged feet on the bedspread. “I’ve already chosen my path.”

Rainer lifts his eyebrows. He has always been a quiet boy, cowed by his family’s poverty, his father’s poor health, and his mother’s rough Swabian German. But now that he is a Nazi, he glows with an appealing, newfound confidence. Girls have begun to take note. He is not handsome—his face is too angular and long, and there is something truculent about his chin—but he is compellingly intense. And he has eyes for no one but Ania, his childhood friend.

“I give you three weeks in the convent,” he says, kicking a stone down the street. “You’ll come around.”

As it turns out, Ania lasts only two. The nuns in the cloister are realists. “You will be sick most of the time,” Sister Catherine tells her. “The people don’t speak German, so you must learn French. There are no potatoes. Everyone will want to touch your hair.”

Ania could not care less. She is familiar with discomfort and sickness. She is genuinely curious about the natives. The problem for her is God. “You must keep him close to your heart always,” says Sister Anne Marie. “If you don’t, he will forsake you.”