She stands absolutely still, watching the man lay the body on the ground. He is not particularly gentle, but he is not rough either, and as he straightens, he pauses to nudge the woman’s leg closer to the other with his foot. Then he continues toward the cellar and at once Ania understands. The inhabitants are all dead. Not burned, not crushed, but suffocated. The shelter was so small, the fire too hot, how could it be otherwise?

The realization spills through her like cold water, down to the ends of her fingers, along her scalp. Her friend. Her dear sweet friend and little Pietre. How could she have let them stay?

The cold is followed by hot—sweat forms on her upper lip and forehead—and for a moment, she thinks she will fall. But then the need to run after the man, to go to her friend, to save her—what if she is just sitting there, weakened but alive, waiting—comes over her.

In a moment, she has crossed the rubble and lowered herself through the steel doors into the cellar. She stands in the darkness, fumbling forward, waiting for her eyes to adjust.

The heat is intense.

Her friend is exactly where she left her, Pietre’s head in her lap, her hand on his shoulder. The look on her face is almost as if she was sucking in a breath to relay something significant, the ending of one of her stories maybe, the formation of an idea.

Ania drops to her knees before her. She has no tears: they have been sucked dry by the fire. Instead, a great, choking explosion builds in her chest, a kind of cannonball that threatens to detonate.

With a shaking hand, she reaches forward and closes her friend’s eyes.

As her hand drops, it catches on the string around her friend’s neck, the small cloth bag she wears under her shirt. Ania knows its contents well: a few cracked photographs, her husband’s leather billfold, and their papers—two worn passbooks belonging to Ania and Pietre Grabarek, citizens of Poland. In a moment that she will later try to forget (that in fact she will forget until one day very close to the end of her life) some pragmatic, animal part of herself takes charge and gently but efficiently pulls the bag up and out from her dead friend’s blouse, and slips it over her head. The feel of her hair—so indifferent to death, just as it was yesterday, or the day before—fills Ania with expanding horror.

Beside her now, the prisoner of war bends to lift little Pietre’s body, and Ania scrambles to her feet. She cannot bear to see this small, beloved body laid next to the others on the street. She cannot bear to see his mother laid beside him. Clutching the bag, white-knuckled against her chest, she makes her way out of the shelter and begins to run.

The cannonball of feeling inside her remains though—a great, carefully contained weight that could easily destroy her. She conjures an image of great metal doors, not unlike those of the shelter she has just emerged from, closing over this ball, shutting away these images, this place, and these moments forever. She propels her body forward and makes her way back out of the city, up the hill to the camp, and to her boys. But her self—the self she has been to this point does not follow—Ania Fortzmann Brandt is buried below those doors.