“You can stay here with Frau Vortmuller, who obviously cannot do anything to help you find your mother, or come with me and I can promise nothing, but at least I will try.”

Liesel scowled, and then finally she nodded.

“It is settled then,” the woman said, clapping her hands to her sides. “And”—she turned to Frau Vortmuller—“you can do your explaining to the Americans.”

The journey from the Children’s Home to Berlin was, for Martin, like a voyage to a foreign land. He had been nowhere and seen nothing in the year that he’d lived in the home. Herr Stulper’s Sunday wanders were infrequent at best and always led the children away from civilization, up into the hills. And like most of the children, Martin had arrived at night by car and never even seen the village.

So the morning they left with Marianne von Lingenfels, Martin and Liesel followed her with wide eyes. Bedraggled white sheets and handkerchiefs hung from windows of homes—left over from the capitulation, Marianne explained. Have you not been to town since the Americans arrived? Martin was suddenly embarrassed. How had they allowed themselves to be so thoroughly locked up?

Other than the sheets on the windows, the village seemed untouched by war. The half-timbered houses stood intact, geraniums growing from their window boxes. An old stone church stood in the small square and beside this a water pump fed into a stone trough. Two American soldiers sat in a jeep, handing out chewing gum. “Would you like to ask for some?” Frau von Lingenfels asked. The idea of asking the soldiers for candy struck Martin as preposterous. The dangers of America had been a great theme for Frau Vortmuller. In America, she warned the children, Germans had to wear swastikas on their lapels. Just like the Jews had to wear stars here. She did not have to elaborate. Obviously this was not a good thing.

The day was warm, and the satchel that held Martin’s belongings (three shirts, an extra pair of trousers, a well-worn Loden jacket Frau Vortmuller had dug up from God knows where) bumped hotly against his back. It was beautiful out, though. Dandelions and morning glories blossomed along the roadside, and the flowering rapeseed fields were a sea of yellow. Frau von Lingenfels, or “Tante Marianne,” as she wished to be called, led the children in silence. Martin listened to the wind whistle in his ears and through the stands of trees between fields.

The next town over, which was bigger, had been bombed, and a church steeple jutted from a massive pile of rubble like a decapitated head. American soldiers and German women worked together scraping up the remains, pushing wheelbarrows, shoveling rocks onto an army transport truck.

When night fell, the moon was huge. Tante Marianne hired a farmer with an empty hay wagon to drive them to a town where she had heard there might still somehow be train service. And on the back of this bumping, clattering vehicle, Martin allowed himself, for the first time, to close his eyes and fall asleep.