In the countryside around the lager, there aren’t any Jews. There is only the ghost of Otto Smeltz. In Ania’s mind, the boy has fused with the story she told. He has become an uncomfortable hybrid that she would rather not think about.

Ania also accepts Hitler’s statement that Poles and Slavs and easterners belong to a lower race, disproportionately represented in civilization’s criminal elements. In her training as a youth leader she learned the science of this: genetics and brain size and forehead measurements, statistics of their incarceration for stealing and rape and murder. The Völkischer Beobachter runs disturbing stories about their poor hygiene and laziness. They breed like rabbits and live on the best, most arable plots of land, much of which, until the last war, belonged to Germany. They need German order, modernity, and management. And Hitler is just the man to bring this to them—look at what wonders he has done for Germany’s crime rate! It is not just unemployment he has fixed; under his leadership the country has become a much safer, more peaceful, and more orderly place.

Weren’t you alarmed by all the racist talk? Hitler’s rants about the “Jewish virus” and “the noble German” . . . You can’t read more than four sentences by the man without knowing he was a racist fanatic, Ania’s daughter will press.

I didn’t notice is all Ania can say. And it is true, as outlandish as it sounds. She has never been taught that drawing distinctions between races is dangerous. In Germany, there is no great history of equal rights. For thousands of years, the population was divided into an impoverished and disenfranchised peasant class and wealthy, ruling aristocrats. The only teaching that gives her pause is the Christian precept of kindness and tolerance. But the churches themselves are not making much fuss about Hitler’s harsh rhetoric. Christianity is superstition, Hitler says—a palliative against life’s brutal realities.

This is before the war. Before the Jewish star badges, before the roundups and mass deportations and extermination camps.

And, really, Ania is busy with her own life.

This lager is where Ania has her babies: first in 1936, sweet Anselm, an easy infant, content to lie in his cradle while she washes and cleans and cooks. Ania has no mother around to teach her how to swaddle and burp him, how to apply salve to his chapped skin to keep it from splitting, how to add pea soup to his bottles to keep him full. So she has to learn these things herself. But she manages. And she takes pride in this.

In 1937, Ania gives birth to Wolfgang, who is more difficult. In her heart, she blames him for the downgrade in their quality of life. He is jaundiced at birth, and often sick. His stools are thin and endless—she has enough laundry to do without an extra ten diaper cloths a day. And she has Anselm, who is a toddler now, to run after—and all the other boys in the lager. Often she has to let Wolfgang cry himself to sleep.