In bits, the women learn more intimate details about each other. Gerda is an ethnic German, born outside Warsaw to parents who were both chemists. She studied music in the university, where she met her husband, a gifted trumpet player. He is now dead. Killed by the Nazis.

She shares funny, romantic stories about her husband—the time he serenaded her from outside her dormitory window at midnight and woke the matron, who ran outside brandishing a stick. How they honeymooned aboard a barge on the Danube. About the kitten he gave her when they first met. And while the children sleep, the women exchange darker, more painful stories about the families and homes they have lost. This way they fall asleep.

Gerda is heading to Dresden with her son, where she hopes to stay with her cousins. “Come with us,” she urges Ania. “I’m sure they will put you up, too.” It seems a promising destination. Florence on the Elbe, as it is known, a beautiful city still largely intact. Everyone says it is safe from Allied bombing on account of its lack of heavy industry, the International Red Cross station, and its cultural significance. There are also rumors that Winston Churchill has a favorite aunt who lives there, and that the Allies are preserving it so it might become the capital when the war is over. Ania is happy to go along.

It is January 1945.

Their journey to Dresden takes three weeks. They are not happy weeks: misery is the prevailing sentiment. But somehow, in Ania’s mind, they are lighter than the rest of the time around them—the years before and those that follow. They are like the last odd burst of energy from a dying man. The weather becomes kinder—it is cold but suddenly sunny. They are hungry, but they have their combined food and the little fat left on their bones—and they have their precious boys, while so many other women do not.

Every night, they fall asleep curled together—an economical row of bodies: Ania on one end, her friend on the other, and the boys in between. Sometimes Ania falls asleep midsentence. Somehow she is capable of this. She doesn’t battle the usual what ifs and hows and what thens that tend to dominate her thoughts at night.

And so despite everything that follows, this is the improbable oasis Ania returns to in her dreams.

CHAPTER TEN

BURG LINGENFELS, AUGUST 1945

A week after the Grabareks came to Burg Lingenfels, the Russians arrived.

Their approach was eerily silent, a collection of dark figures climbing the hillside. Three of them fanned out like scouts in front of a platoon—but they were not a platoon. Though maybe they once had been. Now they were a kind of human wreckage: gaunt, tattered, hungry eyed.

For weeks in Ehrenheim, there had been talk of roving bands of ex-prisoners, released from one of the Nazi stalags. Nearly seventy thousand prisoners of war had been held by the Nazis in the camp at Moosburg alone: some French, some British, Dutch, and even American, but most were from the Red Army. Not only Russians, also Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, and other Baltic peoples, first conscripted by the Russians, then captured by the Germans. Many of these men were afraid to return home to lands now subsumed by Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Hausfraus of Ehrenheim were convinced they were all rapists, murderers, and degenerates—and that they were after revenge. No one talked about why.