Rainer evidences no joy at the prospect of leading another lager. He wakes screaming almost every night. When the doctor prescribes pills to help him sleep, he takes them right after supper and falls immediately into a sluggish, absent state.

So again it falls to Ania to pack up their small family. They are allowed one bag each, just like the Jews. This gives her pause.

In the last year, Ania has heard new horror stories: of KZ inmates worked so hard they drop dead, of women and children shot to death in the woods, of giant ovens where Jews are gassed. She does not believe the worst of these. The Führer who dreamed up Landjahr lagers and one-pot Sunday dinners would never order such unconscionable things. It is one thing to deport the Jews, another to murder them. The stories smack of Allied propaganda—the kind written on the leaflets that the RAF drops.

But, all the same, they are unsettling.

In the future, when Ania tries to explain this to her daughter, words will fail her. She knew of the horrors and she didn’t. She half knew—but there is no word for that. She knew it the way you know something is happening far away in a distant land, something you have no control over: earthquake refugees living in squalid conditions or victims in a foreign war.

But it wasn’t a foreign war, it was your war! her daughter will insist.

True, Ania admits. But it didn’t feel that way.

Until the Warthegau.

For life in this new lager, Ania packs warm clothing, a small book of photos, blankets for the boys, nails, a hammer, a wooden spoon, a potato peeler, and her precious paring knife. This winnowing down to the essentials is good practice for the future, though she doesn’t know that yet. The lager will be furnished, but these are items you can’t count on finding anymore.

The trip east is as spartan as the landscape. The Brandts ride in an army transport train, in a car reserved for “civilian settlers.” Their fellow passengers are a group of young women, members of the BDM, out spreading the “domestic culture and hygiene of Germandom” to the ignorant peasant peoples of the east, and many ex-soldiers like Rainer—injured men or those too old for active duty but still capable of farm and police work. She is the only mother with children. Wolfgang is sick for most of the trip. Anselm, at seven, stares out the window, fascinated by the military transports at the stations they pass. He has never seen so many SS men in their long, swishing coats and black boots.

Anselm is the one to point out the train in Schwerin: a long line of cattle cars stuffed with human beings, their frightened faces visible through the small windows at the top.

“Why are those people riding in the animal cars?” he asks.

“There aren’t enough civilian cars,” Ania suggests. The sight is jarring, though. In Dortmund, the Jewish transports from France and the Netherlands were overcrowded passenger trains; apparently it is not so in the east.