Outside, the scene is one of absurd chaos. After the vehicles, the Russians press down the street on foot. They are in high spirits, shouting back and forth in their rough language, singing, and passing flasks. Scattered through the stream of soldiers are the last of the fleeing civilians, small and gray and terrified, clutching their bundles, pressing back against doorways, crouching, even covering their heads. But the Russians barely see them, and it strikes Ania as perversely funny—here are the troops that sent these masses scurrying ahead for weeks and now they simply march past. After all the panic, their disregard is almost insulting.

“They can’t be bothered,” the other woman says, as if she has read Ania’s thoughts.

“Look at that one.” Wolfgang points to a stocky, bearded soldier, singing, dancing a Russian jig.

“Like a trained bear.” The woman laughs.

The situation is weirdly cozy, with all of them clustered around the window, and they remain for hours, until the last of the Russians have passed. From time to time a soldier or two bangs into the barn below in search of livestock, knocking open the empty stall doors, firing unnecessary shots. In the loft, they hold their breaths. One particularly persistent man starts up the ladder, then is shouted down by someone outside. In the hayloft, relief makes them giddy.

Ania is the other woman’s name too, although she has always been called by her middle name, Gerda. “I knew there was a reason I liked you,” Ania says when she learns this. It is the first time she has made anything resembling a joke in God knows how long. The boy’s name is Olgar. He is sweet with bright eyes and a mischievous sense of humor. His cough is alarming. It sounds like a scraping Tomahawk plane. He doesn’t complain, though, and carries a pack of cards in his breast pocket. He teaches Anselm and Wolfgang to play poker while they wait.

When the last of the battalion finally marches past, Ania, her boys, and their new friends climb down the ladder.

In their wake, the Russians have left massive confusion. A farmer who guarded his pigs with a rifle has been shot; his pigs have been taken and his wife is wailing in the street. Another woman claims she has been beaten, and her two daughters raped. Several people have been trampled in the chaos. And they find three Ukrainians in German uniforms slumped at the bottom of a brick wall—apparent victims of an impromptu firing squad. The Russians show no pity, even for their own soldiers who have been captured and conscripted to fight for the Germans.

On the bright side, they have not bayoneted women through their private parts or cannibalized Germans or hatcheted the children and cooked them on spits as Goebbels forecast. Ania hopes they at least bayoneted a few SS men at the checkpoints. She leaves her boys with her new friend and helps pull the Ukrainians’ bodies off the street. They will be buried in the local graveyard unless someone comes looking for them. Which seems unlikely at best.