And so, with this man at the helm, their beloved estate became part of a system that had introduced slaves overnight. Suddenly Roland Zeppel carried a pistol and commanded twenty men from a different part of the continent. Marianne saw it as another piece of Nazi ugliness. Yet in her own day-to-day existence she had accepted it. She sent extra blankets when the weather grew cold and ensured the men had enough soup and potatoes, but still, she benefited from their work.

And now, lying in her cot at Burg Lingenfels with the Russians gathered outside, Marianne realized that she could not remember the faces or names of any of those Polish laborers. Unlike the local boys and men who had toiled in the fields before the war, she knew nothing about where those men had come from. Chelmno camp, yes. But who they were beyond this, whether they had families, what sort of lives they had left behind, she had never bothered to ask.

When the Red Army arrived in Weisslau, she had liberated the laborers. She had given each bread and potatoes and a small handout of what reichsmarks she had left, but she did not find out where they would go after this.

On neighboring estates, there were laborers who killed their landowners and overseers after the Russians arrived. Revenge was their first action upon being freed, and the Russians didn’t care. They had their own agenda of revenge. The Weisslau workers did not come for Marianne. But Roland Zeppel hid in his sister’s attic for days.

Remembering this made Marianne sit bolt upright in her cot. Zeppel had held the pistol, but it was her farm that both he and the laborers worked.

Outside the castle, the Russians began to sing again. This time it was a strange, unearthly song full of heartache and low, atonal notes. Something about the Volga River, the tapestry of time and the bright thread of suffering that ran through it. It was a kind of collective keening—a primal, soldiering sorrow rising from their souls.

Marianne lay on her narrow cot and listened in the dark.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

BURG LINGENFELS, AUGUST 1945

When Benita awoke, she confused the cellar walls with her prison cell. How had she ended up back here? Horror flashed to the roots of her hair, the ends of her toes. To be back in prison meant she had lost Martin.

But no, here he was, his warm body curled beside hers.

She reoriented herself: she was in the west, the countryside, with Marianne, at Burg Lingenfels.

Yesterday a gang of Russian prisoners had descended on them. They were not as terrifying as the dream. She wrapped her arms around her sleeping boy and said a silent, involuntary prayer of thanks for his young life.

Benita had been pregnant with another child when she was sent to prison, although she hadn’t known it at the time. But when she found out, the life growing inside her had been a source of comfort: Connie was dead, and Martin had been taken, but she was not alone. She had passed her days whispering prayers and rosaries and lullabies to the baby: a little sister for Martin. She felt certain it was a girl.