“And what about the women and children of the partisans?” she asks Gerald, though in her heart she already knows. He glances at her as if to assess what she can handle. “Eliminated,” he answers. Ania does not doubt that he is telling the truth. She can feel the steady crackle of cruelty in the air.

It makes her frightened of the locals who still live in the town, and of all the members of the Wehrmacht and SS who pass through. At night she dreams about the dead townspeople whose simple houses and belongings are left: the bucket hanging on the edge of a gate, the single sunflower growing in a small garden, the laundry line stretched between a tree and a windowsill.

The Brandts have lived at the lager for a year when the orphans come. Little ones. Two- and three-year-olds, and one infant. They arrive in the back of an SS transport truck, supervised by a young officer who finds it funny to give them swigs of whiskey from his flask. The babies look surprised and spit it out. One of them cannot walk—he is a big, handsome boy who pulls himself around on his bottom, taking everything in with his wide, imperturbable eyes. They are staying only one night. The lager, it turns out, serves as a rendezvous point. Members of the Brown Sisters, a female division of the SS, will come for the babies.

Ania is aghast.

“Where will they take them?” she asks. “Orphanages? Foster families?”

The SS man shrugs. “The Brown Sisters will decide.”

“Decide what?”

“Where they will take them.”

“Stop with the questions, Ania,” Rainer barks.

While she waits, cold spreads up from her gut. Ania hopes that the Brown Sisters, as women, will be sympathetic. But she is not optimistic. The BDM girls she has met in the east have been a hard lot, tough or lonely enough to want to come here and instruct the recalcitrant locals in “proper cooking” and hand-washing and God knows what else. These BDM women are suspicious of her as the wife of a lager leader, which is unheard of here in the east. And the Brown Sisters are a level up from the BDM women she has met.

Ania throws herself into caring for the babies, who are hungry, cold, and wet. The boys of the lager are out assisting a local Wehrbauer as he slaughters his pigs. Anselm and Wolfgang act as her assistants, tearing an old sheet into diaper cloths, mixing a thin gruel to feed the orphans, playing peekaboo. Ania rocks the ornery ones to sleep, swaying gently, humming as she once did with her own sons. The SS men drink vodka and watch. At one point, the youngest soldier stands over a baby lying on a blanket and nudges it with his boot.

“For God’s sake!” Ania says, snatching it up, and the man laughs.

Her favorite is a roly-poly one who looks to be almost two but still can’t walk. When she lifts him, he reaches his little hand up from time to time to fondle her ear. When Ania turns to smile at him, he looks surprised, as if he thought her ear belonged to someone else.