“Are there bathrooms in the cars?” Anselm persists. “Where are they going?”

“Maybe chamber pots,” Ania answers. “To camps in the east.”

“Enough questions,” Rainer barks. It is one of the few times he speaks.

“Look.” Anselm nudges her. He points his chin toward the first car, behind the engine, an open-goods wagon with no roof. In this one, Ania can see the people clearly. They are standing because it is too crowded to sit. Along the side, a row of faces stare out at hip height—children. With wide eyes, they watch as their train pulls ahead. When the two cars are side by side, Ania finds herself staring into one particular woman’s face. She is not old, not young, a mother holding a baby in her arms. For an instant, their eyes connect. And the woman’s gaze is so full of despair it takes Ania’s breath.

Beside her, Wolfgang throws up.

In that moment, Ania understands that they are headed to a terrible place.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE WARTHEGAU, 1943

The lager in the Warthegau is in a converted slaughterhouse. No matter how many times Ania scrubs the floors, the walls, the wide kitchen table, it stinks of blood.

And the boys here are tougher than those at the previous lagers. Some are orphaned. Most are from big industrial cities. They have been sent here to escape the bombing, but also because they exhibit a certain kind of physical and mental promise. They are here to provide labor for the local farms and to seed the east with good German citizens, and also to be hardened into future SS men. This is a new development. “If this is the task, what is my role? And what about Anselm and Wolfgang?” Ania demands during one of her early arguments with Rainer.

“You begged me to come along,” he says coldly. “It was your choice.”

“But I didn’t know what I was choosing!”

“I told you it would be different” is Rainer’s response. And Ania is blindsided by the truth of this. Her desperation to leave Gudrun’s apartment and bomb-besieged Dortmund made her stupid. She should have asked more questions. She will rue her lack of curiosity, her ability to see things only as she wanted to, for the rest of her life.

Rainer has been given a handful of new materials, and he shares them with Ania for the first time once they are installed. They are full of fiery quotes from Hitler and the handsome Reich’s youth leader, Baldur von Schirach.

“Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.”

“He alone who owns the youth owns the future.”

“I want brutal, domineering, fearless, and cruel youth. . . . The free, magnificent beast of prey must again flash from their eyes.”

All the friendly rhetoric of togetherness is gone, along with any celebration of a wholesome, simple way of life.

“ ‘Cruel’?” Ania asks Rainer. “Are these boys really supposed to be cruel?”