One day, Ania comes upon a group of boys behind the barn forcing the smallest, youngest ones to swallow live toads. “Stop it!” she yells, despite Rainer’s instructions. “Stop this nonsense! You are not animals!” They turn their astonished faces toward her. Some are transparently relieved, others challenging. Heiner Mohrer, one of the largest and meanest of the group, curls his lip and tips an imaginary cap. “Of course, gnädige Frau,” he says. But she can hear them restart the game as soon as she is out of sight.

Rainer makes Heiner something like an assistant. He is as tall as Rainer and broader, from a family of Hamburg dockworkers, all of whom died in the bombing. He routinely picks on the small boys, knocking the wash they are carrying to the ground, tripping them as they rise from the table. And he speaks rudely to Ania. “You are looking fine today, Frau Brandt,” he says in the insolent manner of a boy who knows a certain kind of women. In another life, before the Warthegau, Rainer would have boxed the ears of anyone who spoke like that to his wife. But the new Rainer pretends he doesn’t hear.

The land around the lager is as bad as the place itself. The fields stretch on and on and, at this time of year, are nothing but kilometers of frozen mud. The village, a cluster of modest, thatch-roofed houses, is mostly empty. The simple country folk who built these homes have been “resettled” farther east or sent to work as laborers in the Reich. Of the original occupants, only a handful are left.

“How did they choose who would stay?” she asks Herr Beinecke, a local man turned member of the Nazi Order Police. He scowls at her. “It was easy,” he says. “We eliminated the partisans.”

The word has become a sort of catchall: Communists and Jews and Polish nationalists and anyone who is not ready to work for the Nazis. “Were there so many?” Ania asks.

“Almost everyone,” Herr Beinecke replies.

Now she hears that the townspeople were not “resettled” but driven into the woods and murdered by local Hilfswillige, or “volunteers,” and a traveling SS Einsatzgruppe. The Hilfswillige are the only locals still alive. To “volunteer” apparently meant not to die. She learns all this from the youngest boy in the lager, Gerald Eisenblatt, a sweet, out-of-place fifteen-year-old from Essen whose mother, a widowed seamstress, sent Ania a letter early on: Thank you for caring for my son. He is a good boy. I promise he will cause you no trouble. And I appreciate in advance all you will do for him. Ania could imagine her, poor woman, small like Gerald, wan with worry, her fingers covered with needle pricks. And in her own loneliness, she felt kinship. In an attempt to protect Gerald from the others, Ania invites him to help her in the kitchen as often as she can. He tells her things the boys see around the countryside and hear from the farmers on whose land they work.