When evening falls, Ania and Gerda and their boys retreat to the hayloft. Gerda shares a heel of black bread and Ania cuts into the blood sausage she’s been saving. Outside, a layer of frost covers the village rooftops and they glitter in the moonlight. Smoke from a burning house billows toward the sky, and the boys take turns naming the shapes it makes. A mermaid, a leaping deer, a dog’s head. It feels like a celebration—of what, they’re not sure. Certainly nothing is over, and they have a long way to go. A celebration of camaraderie, then. It has been years since Ania felt such a thing.

A family of refugees from distant Galicia lights a fire in the woodstove downstairs with straw and foraged wood. The boys, basking in the rising warmth, fall asleep and the women talk. Mostly they speak of their journey west, sharing only the banalities: the nasty, apple-faced woman who screamed at passersby on the bridge, the family with scarlet fever, the way people flocked to a barrel of rotten chestnuts on the roadside like a swarm of flies. “No, like SS men to a checkpoint,” Ania corrects, and they both laugh. When was the last time she laughed? Anselm startles awake, unfamiliar with the sound.

In the morning, they set out together. When they reach Breslau, they don’t even bother with the train. They have heard that Karl Hanke, the gauleiter of Lower Silesia, has ordered the city evacuated so they can transform it into a military “fortress.” The crowd of people waiting at the station spills so far beyond the platform they can’t even see the tracks.

As they walk in the other direction, a train rumbles into the station: a line of open-goods wagons filled with what appears, at first, to be sacks of food.

“Mary, mother of God,” Gerda says, looking back. “Those are prisoners.” The sacks of food are human beings in striped uniforms, half covered with snow.

But Ania does not look back.

“Which would you rather: sit in an armchair and sew or kneel in a sunny garden and pull carrots?” Ania’s new friend introduces this game and they play often. “Which would you rather: eat Sauerbraten or fresh cream?”

It distracts them from their bleeding feet and grumbling stomachs.

Over the next weeks, they fall into a rhythm. Wake, share what little they have to eat, and play a game like this to still their minds. In the afternoon they submit to the bare necessity of walking, continuing toward the next piece of bread or moldy potato Anselm and Wolfgang manage to dig up, left over from last year’s harvest. Occasionally they come across stations set up by the National Socialist People’s Welfare, where boisterous volunteers hand out soup and propaganda: the Germans are merely waiting for the newest installment of weapons before they turn back the tide; the Russians are so desperate they are conscripting women; the supposedly kindly American troops advancing in the west are only the frontrunners—they are followed by Jewish Einsatzgruppen eager for revenge. That is why it is imperative to continue the fight. The Germans must triumph or be killed. No one believes it. The Germans are losing. This is clear from the flood of humans marching west.