During the second, third, and fourth times Benita came to really know revulsion. And pain—such bloody, cramping, screaming pain as she had not imagined possible outside of childbirth.

This was still the beginning of The End, when there was fighting in the streets—blasts of machine-gun fire, skirmishes between the last terrified Wehrmacht holdouts and the Allies who had them surrounded. They fought for control of the city, block by block. But the Russians on Meerstein Strasse knew they had won. They tramped up and down the building’s staircase bedecked with stolen watches, drinking looted whiskey, searching for girls. The grandmothers on the sixth and third floors of her building hid their granddaughters in the bomb cellar and treated Benita and the other women who went outside during daylight as lepers. But Benita couldn’t remain in hiding. How would she find Martin if she was hiding in the cellar? And she didn’t have a mother or grandmother to slip her drinks of water and scraps of bread. Frau Gruber, bless her poor, stolid heart, had been dead for five years.

You too? Four times? Six times? The Mongolians are the worst. No, the Cossacks. They broke her leg. She cannot pee. She lost her mind. Everyone talked of it. Talk, talk, talk . . . and the questions. Not from the victims, but from the old women and the men. The men, the few who remained, were the worst. They feigned sympathy and anger but really only wanted to listen, to imagine. It made her sick.

And still there was no Martin, and no one to ask for help. Every passing day Benita felt her will to live fading. The Nazis who had taken her son had now vanished into the night. The Russians knew nothing of the stolen children and had no interest. What was another lost child in this war that had already killed so many?

There was a soldier who “loved” Benita: a tall, skinny boy from Georgia with a wide grin. He brought her chocolate and sardines and canned peaches—delicacies his unit had raided from some local Nazi lair. He wanted her to be his wife. This she deduced from his mix of broken German and pantomime. He was a naive boy when it came to anything but killing people. He had grown up with nine siblings in an apple orchard.

It was with his help that Benita gained access to the “captain” of the district, the only man who seemed to have any contact with the world beyond this measly corner of Berlin.

The captain was a large, stern man from St. Petersburg—a real Red Army official, not a ragtag conscript from some country that had become a province of the Soviet Union. As a teenager, he had taken part in the October Revolution. His men were awed by this fact. He was a real Bolshevik. And the Bolsheviks, Benita understood, wanted to annihilate the Germans.

The captain had set up shop in what had once been Mulman’s Bakery, on the ground floor of an intact building around the corner from 27 Meerstein Strasse. When Benita was presented, he rose from behind the flour-clouded counter like a general rising from behind a great desk. He had a shrewd, intelligent face. Standing before him, she felt naked and unnerved.