So the children decorated the kitchen. The girls crafted delicate stars out of straw and bits of yarn from an unraveled sweater and hung them on freshly cut evergreen boughs.

“Dear Lord, we thank you for all that we have when so many people have nothing. We have each other, we have food, we have our health and a roof over our heads,” Marianne had begun saying before dinner each night. This was new. Before—meaning before The End, not before the war, but certainly before she came to the castle—Marianne had not been a religious woman. Elisabeth and Katarina did not like this new piety. But Martin enjoyed the sound of Marianne’s voice listing the things they had to be thankful for, talking about the misery of others. It was always good to know there were people more miserable than you.

“Do you believe in God?” he asked his mother one night as they fell asleep in their little room above the kitchen, his breath puffing out in white clouds.

“I don’t know,” she said, and even in the dark he could sense that his question had brought tears to her eyes.

It made him angry—her readiness to cry. She was always on the verge of tears, trembly, red eyed, and uncertain. It had been worse in the days after the Russians came, but even now it took almost nothing to set her off. Including, apparently, the mention of God.

Martin believed in God, though. How could he not? It was unbearable to imagine there wasn’t something better out there, a divine balm for all the havoc he had seen here on earth. He believed in God not as an explanation, but as a salve—a wise, stern figure on a throne in the clouds, watching out for those below. Nice job he did for the last seven years, Elisabeth said when he admitted his belief. But it wasn’t God who caused the war and all the horror. It was people, he thought. He knew better than to argue with Elisabeth, though. God ruled only in heaven, he would have said. But apparently Elisabeth expected to see more of his hand on earth.

Outside the temperatures reached record lows. Snot and breath and tears froze as soon as you stepped outside. All over Germany people were starving. A taste of their own medicine, the British radio declared. During the war we starved so Germans could eat—let them reap what they sowed. It was the first time Martin thought of enemy children—not just soldiers but boys and girls.

Fair enough, Marianne said, though you could see uncertainty in her eyes. Bastards, Fritz swore, and was sent to his room. In Berlin, people chopped down what was left of the bombed-out Tiergarten for firewood. And in cities all over the country, people were rumored to be eating slugs and rats and other small animals. Every weekend townspeople from Tollingen and Momsen flocked to the land to beg for scraps of food.

Here in the castle, though, they were warm and relatively well fed. They didn’t venture far from the kitchen and their small rooms above it. There was frost on the damp north wall of the great hall and ice at the bottom of the moat, but their lamps burned bright and the giant oven blazed with Herr Muller’s firewood. They took turns sitting against it, warming their backs. And everyone wore clothes on top of clothes.