For a few weeks, Ania has noticed a sympathetic-looking woman among the crowd of fellow travelers. She is of average size with light brown hair that she keeps tucked under a grubby scarf. Her face is kind—not old, but timeworn—and intelligent. She has a son, a boy of about Wolfgang’s age, but smaller, and sickly. Ania has seen them several times sleeping in the abandoned barns and train stations in which they take refuge along the way. She finds solace in the woman’s presence: a reasonable-looking person, someone with whom she might have, in another lifetime, become friends.

Ania does not have warm feelings for the other familiar faces. The Polish grandmother in jarringly shiny men’s riding boots, the Ukrainian mother accompanied by six children and a dim-witted young man she smacks on the head and gives only the smallest portions of food, the bone-thin young woman with the lifeless baby wrapped against her chest, the old man pulling his listless, swollen-legged wife on a wheelbarrow. Her legs look like they’re going to explode, Wolfgang remarked when they first saw her. Ania can barely look at any of them. Instead, she concerns herself entirely with her boys: whether they need to stop, whether they are sick. For two weeks, Anselm suffered from terrible diarrhea and they had to camp in place. She is responsible. It was her choice to flee.

For the most part, people on this journey do not share. They do not establish camaraderie in their misery—their supplies are too meager, the mood too grim. They are fleeing from, not to, and the uncertainty of their destination renders them mute.

Then one night, the eastern front falls and the Russians overtake the village in which Ania and the others are hiding. The ground reverberates with the weight of human footsteps—an entire battalion approaches, accompanied by the rumble of tanks. Panic runs through the crowd sleeping in the nooks and crannies of the village. For the first time Ania can recall, people begin to run, even stampede. Shots are fired. And the road, narrow here in the village between the ancient barns and stables, becomes clogged with human beings.

Ania and her boys remain hidden in the hayloft where they have taken shelter. They are nearly the only ones left. “Shouldn’t we leave, too?” Anselm asks. He looks at her, eyes wide—he is anxious by nature and has developed a tremor on the march.

From the street below they hear screams. “Better to stay,” Ania says with confidence she doesn’t feel. But at least here they will be safe from the human avalanche.

When the Russians finally enter the village, the beams and girders of the barn shake. Several heavy artillery vehicles precede the soldiers and can barely fit down the narrow street. Without speaking, Ania and her boys creep toward the shuttered hay chute to watch. Only then does she realize they are not alone. The woman she’s noticed these last few weeks and her son are at the opening, already peering out. Without speaking, the woman shifts to make space for them, patting the floor beside her as if they are old friends.