Ania and her children have only the clothes they wear, the coats on their backs, and a few extras: a good pot, a tin cup to share, a paring knife. She also has a small book of photographs and a sack of pilfered food: a blood sausage, a scrap of butter, one dry loaf of bread, a precious jar of last summer’s plums. Anselm has his favorite book, Wolfgang his precious pocketknife. Unfortunately, they have no papers. This is a problem. All along the road SS men are stamping, sorting, and turning people back. It is not only the sad-sack German soldiers at the front who are supposed to hold their ground against the enemy. The German civilians are supposed to stay too—a kind of human obstacle to the Russian advance. And so the SS devote their efforts to preventing flight. What cowards these supposed über-Nazis are, avoiding the front and hiding behind bureaucratic responsibilities! As if placing all these poor, terrified souls in the path of the Russians will change anything. The war is already lost in everything but name. At the front, only the last members of the Home Guard remain.

Whenever they hear word of a checkpoint, Ania and her boys are forced to tromp into the forest with every other paperless refugee. Their progress is painfully slow. They are not the only ones frustrated by this. The woods are full of anger and panic. Everyone talks about the Russians: they will eat German children, rape German women, burn German houses to the ground. At least these fantasies distract them from the cold. What is frostbite when compared to the threat of being eaten by a hungry Russian? They are suggestible masses, used to basing their beliefs and actions on ideology rather than experience.

As it is, the cold causes enough trouble: chilblains and frostbite, sores on the fingers and lips and eyelids that won’t heal. People strip clothing from the corpses of less fortunate refugees and huddle together in woodsheds and haylofts, pressing their bodies against those of strangers to survive. In the north, where the refugees are forced to cross the frozen Haff, there are rumors of horses stuck in the ice, and whole wagons of families who have disappeared into the freezing lagoon.

Ania is less afraid of the cold or the Russians than she is of being sent back. The Russians are not individuals but an army. And in her experience, armies are less interested in individuals than the individuals think they are. The stream of refugees is like blood from a severed arm—a troubling side effect, not a root cause. The Russian army is after the German army, not this human by-product of their fighting.

She and her boys move south as well as west, and the front grows closer. At night, they can hear the shelling and drumroll of the big guns. The more frightened travelers scramble to their feet at one, two, three A.M. and resume their march in the dark, clutching their sacks, pushing their handcarts. No one has wagons here. The horses are all gone. If the Nazis didn’t whisk them off to the front, the Russians have stolen them.