One day, after nearly a year in Dortmund, Ania passes the local Winterhilfswerk—Winter Help—headquarters and notices a sign for blankets, coats, warm clothing, and other necessities. She hesitates—she and her boys are no charity case, after all—until several well-dressed women precede her. Inside, the canteen has been remade into a shop with piles of goods arranged for perusal, carefully sorted by size and type: warm wool coats and sweaters, feather beds, pillows and leather boots. Volunteers distribute tickets to those waiting: two coats per family, two pieces of bedding, shoes for everyone. What a windfall! Thank goodness she has arrived early enough for the best picks. She selects a lovely camel-colored wool coat with silver buttons for Anselm (much finer than any he has ever owned), a thick green wool cape for Gudrun, two feather beds, and a practical pair of shoes for each. The question of where all this has come from does not even occur to her until she checks out. Redistributed, the volunteer stamps on a paper listing the items Ania has selected.

“Redistributed from where?” Ania asks.

“From deportees,” the volunteer says curtly.

So these are belongings Jews sent east have left behind. The thought is dismaying. Some little boy had to leave this handsome coat. But then it confirms what the Führer has been saying—the Jews of Germany have made themselves unreasonably rich. Who would leave behind such a coat unless they owned an even better one they could bring along?

Bring where is an increasingly uncomfortable concept, though it is still outside the realm of Ania’s immediate concern.

In the beginning of the war, Ania imagined the resettlement camps to be humble, organized places like her lager, focused on reeducation and run with German efficiency. Early in her Landjahr training, she received a glowing booklet about a camp for Jews in Poland, a clean, orderly place, with a hospital and vocational training programs. The word resettlement conjured an image of a village emptied of its inhabitants, who had been resettled to another village, emptied of its inhabitants, who had also been resettled, and so on—with each population pushing farther into the wide and roomy east. A continent of people shifting to make Lebensraum, living space, for their bursting population. There is an easy logic to it. After all, there are eighty million people living on five hundred thousand square kilometers in Germany; Ania has memorized Hitler’s facts. They need more space, more resources.

But now, everyone knows the “settlements” are really just camps, and the camps are no better than the squalid “Jew houses” where the few remaining Jews in German cities have been confined. Last month when they “cleaned up” Dortmund, the citizens were told to cover their mouths with cloth or stay indoors while the soldiers marched the last Jews to the trains.

Many years later, in another lifetime, Ania will enter an American secondhand store with her daughter and be overcome with instinctive horror. Do you know where all these clothes come from? she will ask.