Total hogwash, they’re men like any others, just hungry and mistreated, Marianne had said when her daughters returned from town with their heads full of such talk. The people of Ehrenheim know nothing about Russians.

The Russians had arrived in Weisslau in January and made themselves at home. Unlike many of her neighbors, Marianne had not fled. It would take more than a few drunken soldiers to make her leave the home she had been so happy in, the land that connected her to Albrecht. For the most part, the rumors of the horrors the Russians would inflict proved false. Yes, they came banging on doors at night, looking for schnapps and women, but Marianne found them easy enough to dissuade. You had to push back. Show them you were not afraid. Once she had come to the door in her bathrobe brandishing a frying pan, and how the Russians had laughed. But they had not barged past. They were thieves, of course, but who could blame them? The Germans had killed twenty million of their countrymen. So they took everything from bicycles to kitchen kettles to feather pillows, and, most prized of all, any kind of radio. But they were not monsters. Marianne had not fled until it became clear that they would also take her estate.

But now, watching these men climb the hill to the castle, she felt a prickle of fear. They did not look like the Russian soldiers she remembered from Weisslau.

“Will they kill us?!” Elisabeth asked. “There are so many of them.”

Next to her, Katarina began to cry.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Marianne snapped. “They’re just hungry.”

Behind the girls, Benita had gone pale. Marianne thought of the apartment in Berlin where she had found her: the hideous man with the machine gun guarding the door. The poor girl had her own experience of Russians. Marianne felt a pang of guilt. Benita was right to be petrified.

“You go down to the cellar,” Marianne said to her daughters. “I will greet them when they arrive.

“Go on,” she added, more kindly, to Benita. “You take care of the children.”

Wordlessly, Benita followed the girls.

“We will stay,” Frau Grabarek said. Marianne had almost forgotten she was there. In the week since she had arrived, she and her boys had barely spoken. Who knew what traumas they had endured? For the most part, Marianne just let them be.

“That’s all right—” Marianne began to protest, but stopped. It might be useful to have the boys here. And Frau Grabarek herself had a quiet, determined strength to be reckoned with.

“Thank you,” Marianne said, surprised at her own relief.

And so they waited. It was a curiously intimate thing. They did not speak, but there was solidarity in their silence. Until this moment, Marianne had felt only a sense of unease about the Grabarek boys. Their reticence made them seem shifty. They were so unlike the boys she was familiar with—the bright, boisterous children of the German aristocracy. Despite Fritz’s best efforts, Anselm and Wolfgang did not play. Instead, they followed their mother like silent, restive Dobermans.