Frau von Lingenfels moved on to the next subject. Then suddenly she stopped. “What’s this?” They were passing a low building from which people emerged like ghosts, covered in acrid-smelling gray chemical dust: the camp’s delousing hall.

“Decontamination,” Ania answered.

“Horrible!” Frau von Lingenfels exclaimed. “There must be a more humane way!” She was clearly a do-gooder, an advocate. It made Ania wary.

At the gate, a young man in a UNRRA badge waved them past. This was the agency in charge of Europe’s DP camps—the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration: it seemed to Ania a miracle that such an agency could exist. The line of new entries waiting to be processed stretched down the road. Every day more people arrived from the east: ethnic Germans expelled from territories annexed by Russia and Poland, some who had settled there at Hitler’s urging, some whose families had lived there for centuries; Russian Cossacks who had fought alongside the Nazis; Ukrainian nationalists who had fought against the Russians; and anyone else fearing Stalin’s wrath. Last month the camp had run out of beds. Now, new arrivals waited to be assigned local “hosts,” who would provide them a place to sleep under their own roofs. Usually, these hosts were reluctant at best. But not Marianne von Lingenfels. She had volunteered to host the Grabareks. In fact, she had sought them out. They were meant to be grateful, Ania understood. But she wasn’t. She preferred the anonymity of the camp.

“You speak without an accent,” Frau von Lingenfels said as they started in the opposite direction of the waiting people. “Are you originally German?”

Ania nodded.

“Ahhh,” the woman said. “But your husband was Polish?”

Ania nodded again.

“And you speak German, too?” Frau von Lingenfels continued, turning to the boys. “What are your names?”

The boys remained silent. Anselm sent an anxious look in his mother’s direction, Wolfgang glared at the ground.

“This is Anselm and this is Wolfgang,” Ania supplied.

The woman remained oblivious.

“Well, you will meet two other young men about your ages at our castle: my boy, Fritz, who is eight, and his friend Martin, who is six—another child of a resister. I am sure you will become great friends.

“Burg Lingenfels is not a castle as you might imagine,” she continued cheerfully. “It’s not grand. We live in the kitchen, really, because the rest of the place is empty and damp. And there’s no more fine furniture—no one has lived in it for ages. But it has its advantages. A roof, for instance!” She laughed. “And a great big oven we can light when it’s cold. And there were once little princes and princesses living in it. Learning to joust and eating off golden plates and whatnot. Or anyway, my children like this idea . . .”

Ania let the woman’s words roll over her. They were going to a castle, to live with a “widow of the resistance,” as Marianne von Lingenfels referred to herself. Thrushes sang from the grass. Poppies bloomed in the field. There was no checkpoint, no scrape of strafers, no tromp of boots. This was the important thing.