When the man reaches for the baby, he clings to Ania, wailing louder. But this makes no difference to the man, who peels him from her arms.

On Ania’s other side, Rainer holds her fast.

In the years to come, Ania will remember this as the end of Ania Fortzmann. Not at the moment when she took her sons and stole out into the predawn to disappear into the west. Not in the ruined bomb cellar under the Dresden Hauptbahnhof when she took the papers from her dead friend’s dress.

For years, she will sift through this memory of the babies, through the racket of her own tears and the screaming and Rainer’s voice telling her to shush—looking for some lost grain of action. She will try to remember running after the SS man, prying the baby from his arms, or at least attempting this. It doesn’t matter that the outcome would have been the same. It would have made a difference to her.

But it isn’t there.

She simply stood and watched and wept. And she let them go.

Shortly after the Brown Sisters’ visit, Rainer receives orders requesting two of his best boys to report for duty at a nearby labor camp. They are shutting it down and moving its prisoners farther west into the Reich. The boys are to assist with the prisoner transport. Rainer selects Heiner, the bully, and Gerald Eisenblatt.

But on the morning of their departure, Rainer doesn’t come out of his room.

“You’ll have to do it,” he says when Ania knocks on his door. He is lying in bed, one arm thrown across his face, still in his nightclothes.

Ania stares at him, appalled. “I won’t,” she says.

Rainer turns and faces the wall.

So Ania, creature of duty and slave to her own fear of punishment, takes them herself. Arthur Greiser, the leader of the Warthegau, is known for his harsh response to insubordination, and she has her own sons to think about.

She kisses her sons and tells them to stay in their room, pretend they are sick.

And as dawn is breaking, Ania and the two boys set off. A weak gray light illuminates the road through the winter haze. There is always haze here, a dulling white cloud of steam that rises from the manure in the fields and hovers in the air.

Heiner sees the journey as an opportunity for unfettered bullying, which he begins by tossing pebbles at Gerald’s narrow back. “Stop it!” Ania commands. “Stop it this instant.”

But Heiner just laughs. “What will you do—send me back?”

“I will tell whoever is to oversee you.”

“What, that your ‘best and brightest’ don’t follow your orders?” He hoots with delight at his own cleverness and begins flinging even larger stones at the smaller boy. Gerald yelps and turns to hit Heiner with his own stealthily palmed rock. In an instant they have fallen into a flailing heap.

“Stop! Stop it!” Ania shouts, slapping at Heiner’s back. They are on a long stretch of uninhabited road and her voice sounds like the chirping of an irrelevant bird. She can only stand and stare at them. Gerald is beyond her help. By what sleight of hand did her enthusiasm for national service, for shaping young men and building community, turn into this?