Someone shoves her from behind and she begins to run, holding on to her children’s hands. Dear God repeats itself in her mind as they make their way into the fire. Dear God. But it is like speaking to a fellow witness, a being as powerless as she is, as culpable, as dumb.

SOMEHOW, IN THE MORNING, Ania and her boys are still alive. She leaves Anselm and Wolfgang at the Red Cross camp on the outskirts of the city that they stumbled into around three A.M. She is going back to find her friend. Don’t go, Mama, Wolfgang pleads, but neither of the boys says the obvious: Ania and Pietre will not be there, even if they are alive.

With her mind steeled against thought, Ania sets off on what proves to be a gruesome reverse trek. Past husks of buildings, jagged facades, chimneys and support columns rising from great mounds of smoking rubble. Some buildings are still burning. How will she find the church?

Work crews (almost all prisoners of war) clear bodies from collapsed buildings and leave them lined up along the street.

As she nears the shelter, it becomes clear that the path she and her boys cut through the Neustadt the previous night was directly into the fire and then out again. The area around the church is not as badly burned as the area closer to the river. This gives her hope.

And then, there is the street sign. The pole still stands, the metal placard blackened and hanging askew, and there is the church! The roof has caved in, but the facade is remarkably intact. The steel bulkhead door to the shelter is wide open and unobscured by debris. Ania sees this and her heart leaps.

“Do you know where I can find the people from this shelter?” she asks a boy wearing a Hitler Youth uniform, digging through a pile of rubble.

“The people?” he says blankly, as if the question is an unusual one.

“Who were in there!” Ania demands, her lips cracking as she opens them—it seems forever since she has spoken. “Where do you send them?”

The boy glances doubtfully at the line of bodies down the block.

“The survivors!” Ania demands, her voice rising.

“We aren’t there yet,” he says inscrutably.

As she looks around for someone else—surely there is a chief of this rescue operation, someone who can illuminate the system for her—she sees a man, a prisoner of war, emerge from the steel doors, carrying a woman in his arms.

Are people still in the cellar? Have the doors only just now been opened? This possibility had not occurred to her. The woman being carried—Ania recognizes with a start—is the young mother with the children, the one who had sat beside her. But where are the children? The woman herself looks unnatural in the prisoner’s arms.

She is dead, Ania realizes with a start.

As she recognizes this, her own legs and arms go limp with dread.