The following week, Rainer must escort the lager’s boys to the train station, and from there he is to report for duty. On the morning he is scheduled to depart, he rolls over and climbs out of bed without even pausing to look at her. He has never exhibited affection for his wife and young sons in front of his charges, and he doesn’t change this. “Take care of yourself,” he says, nodding. So Ania is left to pack their belongings and find them a new home. Soon, she and the boys are on a train heading toward Dortmund, where her aunt Gudrun has agreed to take them in.

The trip is long. The RAF has bombed the tracks, and they sit in the September heat for hours awaiting repairs. Four-year-old Wolfgang is sick with scarlet fever. His body is as hot as a fireplace brick.

“The boy should drink much water,” an older man says kindly as he passes them on the platform in Frankfurt. He is followed by his wife, who wears a heavy winter coat and clutches a number of suitcases. They are Jews, Ania realizes when she sees their gold stars. The stars are a new requirement, and it is the first time she has seen one. For that matter, it is the first time she has seen a Jew in a long time. She is taken aback by the man’s kindness. In the absence of contact, her idea of Jews has unified with the images on the Nazi posters: beak nosed and nefarious. But this man and his wife look ordinary and sad. She thanks him and thinks suddenly of Otto Smeltz, her onetime friend and partner. Where has he ended up?

In Dortmund, life is not as easy as it was on the land. Aunt Gudrun sets her jaw when Wolfgang cries and beats Anselm’s knuckles with a ruler when he scuffs his feet, or forgets to say thank you, or accidentally breaks a dish. The bombings come in spates, sometimes every night for a week, then nothing for a month. They become accustomed to the routine of tramping up and down the cellar stairs half-asleep.

Anselm starts school and Ania and Wolfgang remain at home with Aunt Gudrun’s sharp tongue and demonstrative, beleaguered sighs. They eat boiled cabbage and potatoes and sleep under the thin blankets they brought with them from the lager, huddling together for warmth. On Gudrun’s crummy People’s Radio, Goebbels and Hitler proclaim their successes on the Russian front, but on the streets, other stories circulate. The German army is freezing and the battles are bloody. For every Russian they kill, two more spring up in his place. And there are even darker rumors: in the ghettos where the Polish Jews have been sent, people are dying of disease and hunger; the SS and local Poles are killing whole villages of Jews; and the Wehrmacht is shooting Russian prisoners of war, or worse, locking them up in starvation camps. Ania would like to tune in to foreign broadcasts, but she has no radio of her own, and anyway, if she tried, Gudrun would report her. Rainer sends back short, opaque letters: his boots are worn out, they are stuck in some small Russian town or another awaiting orders, a man in his unit comes from nearby Aplerbeck. What he is doing, how he feels—she can only guess.