People who don’t need them anymore, her daughter will say with a shrug. Why do you ask?

When Rainer returns home on leave, he is distant, harder, and more aloof. This is to be expected, of course. How can you fight a war and come back cheerful? Ania knows this. But still, she misses his old jokes, even the ones at which she used to roll her eyes. And she wishes he would offer some affection to his sons. He addresses them with curt formality, sometimes even disdain. One day, when Anselm comes home from school in tears because an older boy has stolen his new pencil, Rainer boxes his ears. “Don’t let yourself be beaten again, you understand?” he says roughly. “The future is not for boys who don’t know how to fight.” Ania tries not to mourn the old Rainer, the one who knew how to inspire and instruct with humor, and to bring out the best in young men.

They make love, if it can be called that, only a few times. Rainer is rougher and less cautious physically. More than once, Ania bleeds afterward. But this too is to be expected, isn’t it, from a soldier on leave? She stifles her revulsion. It will only make her pity herself.

In the spring of 1943, Rainer is discharged from service. He has been wounded, and after three months in a Danish military hospital, shrapnel is still embedded in his knee. He cannot return to combat duty. So he is given a new assignment: to lead a lager in the Warthegau, a German district of conquered Poland. The boys will be older this time—ages thirteen to seventeen. And the lager will be part of the Wehrbauer “soldier farmer” movement used to hold the eastern territories. They are meant to bring modern farming practices to the backward Polish countryside and produce much-needed grain to feed the Reich. They will be at the forefront of Hitler’s Blut und Boden plan—members of a superior race united with superior soil (rich, black stuff that slides between your fingers like silk) and ready to defend it if attacked.

The assignment has a frightening, warlike ring to it, but then again so does living in Dortmund. The Ruhr is under constant siege now, and British and American bombs wreak havoc every night. Those people remaining in the city have become mean and desperate: they report one another to the Gestapo for not offering the proper Heil Hitler, or listening to foreign broadcasts, or for “defeatist” talk. “Our poor soldiers,” Ania says while reading the newspaper one night, and Gudrun gives her a harsh look. “Our brave soldiers,” Gudrun corrects. “You could go to prison for such talk.”

The presence of slave laborers has become ubiquitous—mostly Russian POWs working in the city’s coal and munitions plants. Tramping through the streets, they look thin and haunted—a hungry, miserable lot. But in Russia, German POWs receive the same treatment or worse, according to Rainer, Hitler, Goebbels, and every Nazi Kreisleiter. Ania is growing sick of men and their talk, though. In the last year, she has seen groups of female prisoners, too. Pretty and young Polish and Ukrainian girls are hawked at the train station for use as nannies and household help. And a group of malnourished-looking women in striped uniforms walk through the city to the munitions plant each morning. Jews from a temporary labor camp. Their presence has no German analog in Russia.