When he opened them again, it was dark. People were everywhere, young and old, women and children, soldiers still in their Wehrmacht uniforms . . . all sitting on piles of belongings: suitcases and boxes and dirty sacks. He climbed off the wagon after Tante Marianne and Liesel, stepping around an old woman on a stool, cradling an intricately carved wooden clock.

But he and Tante Marianne and Liesel were not joining the masses on this side of the tracks. They crossed to the other side, in hopes of catching a train going east. The wrong way. Martin thought of Frau Vortmuller’s warnings that the Russians were fierce, animal-like brutes who stuck German soldiers on bayonets and did unspeakable things to women (What? the children always asked, at which she would look aghast). They were going to find his mother. They were going to Berlin.

If his mother was alive, though, Martin wondered why she had not come for him. But he didn’t ask.

“How were they killed?” Liesel asked Tante Marianne when they were seated on the platform, leaning against their bags. He knew who she meant: their fathers.

“That is no question for a child,” Tante Marianne said, her tone sharp.

“But I want to know,” Liesel insisted.

“Know that your father was a brave man. And that he did what he thought was right for his country.”

“Was he shot or hanged?” Liesel persisted in a hard and unfamiliar tone.

Tante Marianne sighed, a long, deep breath, almost worse than any answer. “Hanged,” she said. “They were almost all hanged.”

It was the first time Martin had heard it. He squeezed his eyes shut and pretended to have fallen back to sleep. His neck began to hurt, but he did not stir. It was essential to pretend.

When the train finally arrived, it was huge and violently loud, a freight train. Almost before its wheels ground to a halt, people hurled themselves at it, climbing hand over fist up the spindly ladders, scrabbling to the top of the open coal cars. There were only a few guards, all Americans, and they were busy unhooking the last car. One of them fired a few shots that whistled overhead: It was forbidden to climb aboard the freight trains, especially those hauling coal—it wasn’t yet winter but the predictions were already dire. Coal would soon be as precious as gold.

“It’s only the Americans,” Tante Marianne said. “They don’t mean to shoot anyone—if it were the British, we would have to watch our backs.”

Martin liked her optimism. When the train started, it blew her hair every which way. She looked younger and softer now. An old man passed her a flask, which she refused, but the generous spirit of his gesture was contagious. Another woman offered handfuls of raw oats. Marianne distributed a loaf of bread. The mood was jolly, even exuberant. Above them the stars were so bright and three-dimensional they seemed closer than the dark blots of towns and woods the train trundled past. Bombed church steeples, houses, and highways disappeared into an irrelevant jumble.