“Carry the water,” Ania ordered her boys after Marianne filled the first pails.

“I’ll take one,” Marianne began.

“It’s better if you wait,” Ania said with an authority Marianne had not heard before. “Let them see you have help.”

Marianne stopped short. She was not accustomed to being told what to do, but the woman was right.

So the boys made their way to the stable, shouldering the heavy buckets, stepping carefully along the uneven ground. As they neared, the Russians started forward, but the tall man held up his hand, gave an order, and they fell into a neat, practiced line.

Through the window, Marianne and Ania watched.

Some of the men wore the striped garb of KZ prisoners. So they were not all prisoners of war, but also prisoners from concentration camps who had been driven to the local stalags as the Russians advanced. Marianne had seen these wretched marchers on her own journey west: ghostlike lines of people stumbling through the fields, driven by black-clad SS guards, kept apart from the other refugees. Untermenschen, an SS man at one of the checkpoints had snarled when she had asked who they were, why they did not march with everyone else.

“God help us,” she murmured.

Beside her, Ania remained silent.

And in front of the stable, the Grabarek boys stood back.

When the potato-and-barley gruel was ready, Marianne carried down one pot herself, with the boys following her.

As she approached, the men rose from where they had been sitting and lying, their hunger rising off them like a smell, and the smell itself was pungent: one of unwashed bodies, sickness, and human waste.

“Put the food down here,” the tall man instructed, and behind him the men began to fall into line. Marianne and the boys did as he said and stood back.

The tall man gave a signal, and the first in line stepped forward and dipped the ladle.

“My husband was murdered by the Nazis,” Marianne said in Russian. It was what she had planned: it was important to draw connection between them, to make the men understand she was on their side. To her surprise, her voice shook. And the words felt strange and shocking on her tongue.

“He wanted to stop the war”—she paused, steeling herself—“to stop the camps, and the killing, and the madness.”

Her voice rang in her ears. The next in line took the ladle and drank hungrily, the soup catching in his beard. The tall man remained silent.

“They hanged him,” she continued. “They hanged him and all his fellow resisters. From meat hooks.” She had never said this out loud before. Instead she had closed her mind around it, divorced it from its physical reality. Suddenly, saying it here rendered it vivid: Albrecht, her tall, dignified husband, swinging, his legs kicking, the worn shoes and black socks he always wore—the line of white skin between his socks and trouser cuffs. She had never allowed herself to imagine this.