Skeletons at the Feast

Prologue

THE GIRL-A YOUNG WOMAN, REALLY, EIGHTEEN, HAIR the color of corn silk-had been hearing the murmur of artillery fire for two days now. Everyone had. A rare and peculiar winter thunderstorm in the far distance. Little more. The sconces in the living room hadn't twitched, the chandelier in the ballroom (a modest ballroom, but a ballroom nonetheless) barely had trembled. The horses, while she was harnessing them and helping to load the wagons-short trips with bags full of oats (because, after all, so much would depend on the horses) and longer ones with some of the clothes and the silver and the jewelry they were going to take with them-had looked up. But the animals hadn't expressed particular interest. If, Anna surmised, they had thought of anything they had thought of the cold: It was one of those frigid weeks when the days would alternate between whiteout-like snowstorms and periods so still that the smoke from the chimneys would rise up into a slate gray sky in lines that were perfectly straight.

These shells, however, the ones that were falling this afternoon, were great concussive blasts that had the people and the horses-a seemingly endless caravan of strangers that clogged the road and crushed the snow and ice along the sides, and had come almost to a complete stall now before the river-fretting and fidgeting in place. At each explosion the animals whinnied and the babies, hungry and chilled despite the blankets and furs in which they were swaddled, cried out. If they managed to free one of their little hands, the blue fist would lash out, a small, spring-loaded paddle. Clearly, however, the artillery had leapfrogged over them. Passed them. Hours earlier it had been many kilometers to the east. Now it was ahead of them to the west. Some of the shells were falling so nearby that they heard the screech-a strange foreign animal, something that might exist in a tree in Africa or South America, the girl thought-before the reverberant burst left them crouching, anxious, in their places in line. At first she presumed the Russians were trying to hit them, this long line of families trying desperately to flee to the west, to take out the carts and the wagons and the walkers piecemeal, but then she understood their real intent: It was the river itself. They were trying to smash the buttress-thick ice that coated this stretch of the Vistula from shore to shore like a skating rink and was serving as a bridge, because the nearest stone and cement overpass was twenty-five kilometers to the north. Along the shore she saw soldiers and Volkssturm teenagers-boys who were easily two and three years younger than her twin brother and her-funneling the refugees across what they believed was the safest part of the ice, but she had the sense that any moment now people were going to start leaving the queue and fanning out into the woods, where they would cross the river wherever they could.

Or, at least, believed that they could. The girl had heard stories of wagons and families disappearing yesterday and the day before through the ice to the north and the south. She wasn't sure if they were true, but so much of the last month had been a study in how things she had once thought were inconceivable were actually happening. They'd all heard what had occurred three months earlier in Nemmersdorf. The Russians had captured the East Prussian village in October and held it for five days. When their own soldiers recaptured the small town, almost all of the civilians were dead. She had heard tales of girls her age (and younger) nailed naked to the sides of barns and farm carts, their arms spread wide as if they were being crucified but their legs splayed open so that even in death the men could violate them. There were the stories of small children flattened into the main roads of the village by the treads of tanks. Of live babies held by their ankles and swung like scythes into stone walls while their mothers were forced to watch, their children's own blood and brains splattered like so much butcher's waste onto their overcoats. Of the French prisoners of war-some people claimed as many as forty of them-who had been executed by the Russians for reasons that no one could fathom.

And then there were the stories of what her own people had done. BBC propaganda, maybe. But probably not. She knew people who knew people. Her older brother, whom she hadn't seen now since October, told her of an SS officer he had met who-supposedly-had served inside Treblinka in 1943. When her twin, Helmut, was on a hike with his Jungvolk friends last summer, the last they would take before the drills grew serious, he told her there were rumors (implausible and offensive, in his opinion) that some of the less committed boys would share when they thought no one was listening. Rumors of what really went on in some of the camps. And, of course, there was what their English POWs had claimed was occurring, stories that Helmut would dispute as half-truths and cant spread by the Allies to further demonize the Germans. It got to the point where he threatened to tell his father on them if they uttered so much as one more syllable.

She tensed when she heard the high-pitched whistle of another shell, and saw her mother once again pull little Theo, the youngest of her children, against her. Then there was the blast. Ahead of her there was shouting, screaming. She couldn't tell whether the explosive had landed on the road or the river, whether people were wounded or merely panicked. More panicked, actually. Because certainly numbness had not completely subsumed the animal panic that coursed just below the skin and behind the bloodshot eyes of this long and plodding throng of parents and children and very old people. Only as Anna watched the nearest soldiers and Volkssturm recruits trying to prevent the line from spreading north and south into the woods-here is that panic, she thought, we are like desperate beetles scurrying from a giant's boots-did she understand. The bomb had created a great spider's web of cracks in the ice.

For a moment her father and Helmut conferred, the two of them murmuring softly into each other's ears. Their army uniforms were still crisp. Then each of them walked to the front of a wagon-they were traveling with two-and her brother ordered her to come help him with the horses. After all, he muttered, they were more her horses than his. She thought he was being needlessly bossy, but she also knew that she didn't dare question him now. It seemed that their family, too, was going to leave the caravan and trek into the woods, and he was going to run ahead and find a spot along the river that looked suitable for a crossing.

Beside her, beneath the blanket in the wagon filled with oats, their sole remaining POW cleared his throat.

THE PRISONER, a twenty-year-old Scotsman named Callum Finella-a name that initially had made both Anna and her younger brother giggle, but struck her now as infinitely more lyric than the suddenly wolfish-sounding names of most of the males in her family-had been with them since September. He was one of seven British POWs who had been sent to the Emmerich family estate from the prison camp just outside of Thorn to help with the harvest. When the other six men-older by four and five and six years than Callum, but still he had called them his mates-had been returned to the stalag in mid-October, the family had used their party clout and simply kept Finella since their Polish servants had fled or been put to work in the coal mines in Silesia, the oldest of their three boys was fighting somewhere far to the south on the outskirts of Budapest, the middle one had been pressed into service in the Volkssturm, and Theo, at ten, was barely beyond short pants.

Now Anna removed her glove and snaked her hand between two of the burlap sacks, searching for Callum's fingers. She found one of his thumbs and the fleshy pad of his palm just beside it and thought, much to her surprise, of his penis. The sudden way it would grow in her hand, a dangerous but irresistible animal wholly independent of him. Then he whispered her name. At least it sounded to Anna like a whisper. But, perhaps, it was actually more like a stage whisper. Beckoned by her hand, his head emerged from beneath the bags of feed like a chick from a shell, his sunset red hair only partly smothered by one of Helmut's knit caps. From atop the driver's box her mother glared at them both. Anna didn't believe that her mother could possibly think that anyone other than their own family could either hear or see the young soldier-not with the clamor all around them from this distraught and pathetic parade of refugees; rather, she guessed, Mutti simply didn't want to be reminded of the reality that they had the (his term for himself, not theirs) lad with them. When the war had been far to the east and the west in the autumn, Callum had been a harmless, albeit brawny and tall, exotic animal: He knew how to play the accordion that her father's brother, Uncle Felix, had left behind when he'd been transferred-to everyone's relief-to the western front. And he hadn't even fired a shot before he'd been captured. He and Helmut were never going to be friends, but Anna was confident that her mother appreciated the time the Scot spent entertaining her and her little brother (though, of course, Mutti hadn't an inkling of either the details or the depth of the way he had entertained her one and only daughter). Quickly Callum retreated back beneath the grain and Anna withdrew her hand, moving forward to help her father steer the horses into the copse of pine to their right. As she was grasping the reins, she heard once more the shriek of a Russian shell. She looked deep into the creature's eyes, hoping to keep the animal calm when it exploded.

THIS TIME THE shell landed beside them. One moment she was gazing into the face of a velvety bay stallion she had named after a castle-Balga, a fortress that was nearly seven hundred years old-and the next she was on the ground, awash in snow and pine boughs and small frozen clods of dirt. She looked up and saw Helmut was talking to her, saying something-perhaps even yelling-but she couldn't hear a thing. It was as if he were mouthing the words. He was standing over her, then squatting beside her, staring at her with those hazel eyes and girlishly long eyelashes that sometimes she couldn't believe he had gotten instead of her. Her father and Callum were kneeling, too. They were sitting her up, each holding an arm and appraising her, dusting the debris off her cape. Slowly her hearing returned, and the first sound she was aware of was the wailing of women not more than fifteen or twenty meters behind them, their cries for help. Someone swearing at the Soviets. Apparently, a shell had exploded just behind them, too.

She opened her mouth to tell Helmut and Callum and her father that she was fine, she wasn't hurt-at least she didn't believe that she was-but suddenly the simple act of speaking seemed like too much work. Something was pinching her stomach, and she realized it was the earrings and the necklace she had bandaged against her flesh when she had been unable to fit another piece of jewelry into the secret pouch she had sewn into her skirt. She saw there was a trail of blood now on one of the sleeves and shoulders of her father's usually immaculate uniform coat-the stain was shaped, she thought, like monkshood-and she reached out her arm to him. He seemed to notice the wet blotch for the first time and remarked casually, “It's not mine.” His head jerked reflexively toward the line behind them and so she turned. Men were pushing an overturned cart into the snowbank beside the road, trying either to move it out of the way or to reach whoever was underneath it, or both.

Finally she uttered a word, a two-syllable question: “Mutti?”

“Mother is fine. Theo is fine. We're all fine,” Helmut told her.

“Callum? Are you-”

“I said we're all fine,” Helmut hissed. Then to the Scotsman he ordered, “You. Back beneath the feed.”

She glanced at the wagon that had been upended by the explosion and understood now why someone was howling: There in the snow were a man's unattached legs, the limbs still in their wool trousers, and a steaming, Medusa-like nest of tendon and muscle emerging from the pants where there should have been an abdomen or a waist.

Her father chastened her brother for being short with her and for snarling at Callum. She looked around now for Mutti and Theo and saw that her mother had pulled Theo ever deeper against her chest, shielding his face from the debacle just behind them. Then, with the awkward jerks of a marionette-Mutti was shaking, this woman who in 1939 had single-handedly buried the Luftwaffe pilot whose plane had been shot down by the Poles and would crash in their hunting park, was actually trembling-she turned her eyes to the sky. There was another plane. A Russian plane now, because that was about all that filled the skies these days. It was approaching from the south, perhaps paralleling the path the Vistula had carved through this section of the country. Some of the trekkers stood frozen in their spots in the queue, but others scurried, despite the knee-deep snow, like frightened mice into the comparative safety of the forest. But the plane, for whatever the reason, didn't bother to strafe them. Neither did it drop a single bomb on the ice. It simply continued on its course toward the north.

An elegant old woman beside a sled with four large suitcases balanced upon it pulled her hands from a fur muff and shook her fist at the sky. She said something dismissive about Göring. Wanted to know where the German planes were.

Slowly Anna climbed to her feet and smiled for her mother and young Theo.

“I'm okay, Mutti,” she said. “Really. Just a little shaken.”

And then, no longer hushed by the burlap bags of oats beneath which he had been hiding for hours, came the voice that spoke a German that was lighthearted, enthusiastic, and still, on occasion, inept. “It takes more than a little bomb to slow Anna Emmerich,” Callum said. Despite the characteristic irreverence in his tone, however, his smile was forced and his eyes were wide ovals of dread.

WHERE TWO YEARS before there had been a yellow Star of David, there was now a small Nuremberg eagle made of bronze. The star, by law, had been sewn onto his overcoat with the stitches so tight that a pencil point couldn't be pressed between them. The police or some Brownshirt bully would check. This eagle, dangling from his uniform beside an Iron Cross, was merely attached with a pin. He stood now on the east bank of the Vistula with his hand on the grip of his pistol, though the gun was still holstered and the safety was on, wondering if it all wouldn't be easier if he were just decapitated by a fragment from one of the Soviet shells that clearly were inching closer. Just get it over with. Unfortunately, by even the most liberal definition this wasn't a bombardment: He had endured Red Army bombardments, and this was nothing like them. But these civilian Prussians in the lines before him now? These once proud Aryans and anti-Semites who had literally leapt for joy when Hitler's tanks had rolled into Poland in 1939 and made them Germans once more? They seemed to think it was the end of the world. Oh, please. It was as if they had never seen a limb-a leg, an arm, a fist-fly through the air like a falcon.

The irony of the exodus approaching the river wasn't lost on him. On his own, he had read, he had studied. The difference between this flight and the others? These souls were fleeing a retribution they had asked for. They had brought these shells down upon themselves.

Now, of course, he was on this nightmarish sinking ship with them, though if he had to wager he would bet he would figure a way off. Find yet one more lifeboat. He was, apparently, unkillable. But how much would it really help him to become a Jew again now? It wasn't as if the Russians had such great love for his people either. The Lithuanians were stringing the Jews up back in '41 while the Nazis were still en route; the Ukrainians and the Latvians had been all too happy to handle the heavy lifting when it came to machine-gunning the Jews in the early days. They had practically volunteered for the opportunity!

No, he should have started to work his way west months ago, as soon as it was clear that the western Allies had no intention of being pushed back into the English Channel.

“Manfred?”

In the midst of the turmoil and the noise, for a moment Uri had forgotten that he had renamed himself Manfred. It was the most Teutonic alias he had been able to come up with when he'd realized what was expected of him as reservist Henrik Schreiner with Police Battalion 101, and so in the chaos of the retreat from Auków he had commandeered this uniform from a Wehrmacht soldier who had been shot cleanly in the back of the head. Before that, since jumping off the train almost two years ago now, he had been Hartmut, Adler, Jurgen, and Franz. Sometimes he had found the dead soldier's name in the papers in the uniform pocket. Other times, there hadn't been any papers at all and he'd come up with a moniker such as Manfred (which, he'd realized in hindsight, was both Teutonic and the name of the doctrinaire Nazi pedant who'd lived in the town house beside his family back in Schweinfurt, before they had been forced to move).

He turned now to the one-armed captain beside him, a fellow roughly three or four years older than he was. Twenty-nine or thirty, Uri guessed. The officer had served in Poland and France and North Africa and Italy and Russia, a virtual travelogue of Nazi victories and defeats, with little more than the scratches and bruises that are inevitable with a life in the field. But no serious wounds. Then in October, while home on leave in Dortmund, his left arm was crushed when he was helping his grandmother down the stairs of her home during an air raid, and the house had sustained a direct hit. His grandmother had died pretty near instantly, he'd told Uri, but he'd thought his arm might have a chance. It hadn't. The good news to losing the wing? It meant that he had been relegated, for the moment anyway, to this sort of police action many kilometers behind the front.

Though, the captain had rued, those kilometers had collapsed exponentially since the Russians had begun this most recent offensive.

Uri wondered if years from now, if somehow they both survived, he and this captain might actually be friends. The fellow was unflappable, a trait Uri respected, and he seemed to see the misery that was marking the end of their world as more Chaplinesque than Wagnerian-which, most days, Uri did, too. But then he decided a postwar friendship was unlikely. Not because this Captain Hanke was anti-Semitic, though Uri supposed on some level he was. Rather, he had the sense that the two of them had been too lucky for too long, and it was absolutely inconceivable that they would both be alive when this steamroller was done lumbering over them. And if he, Uri, was indestructible, then the odds could not be especially good for this poor fellow beside him.

“The engineers are coming to destroy the ice now,” the captain was saying. Then he motioned toward the teenage boys in their Jungvolk uniforms who were helping to keep order. “Send the children across the Vistula.”

Uri nodded and approached the oldest of the group, one of the few who actually wasn't dwarfed by the rifle in his arms. “Son,” he said, “take your squad to safety on the other side of the river. They're going to blow up the ice.”

The boy saluted, and Uri had to restrain the reflexive urge to shake his head in bemusement.

“And then, sir?” the boy asked. He had almost periwinkle blue eyes and a movie star's aquiline nose. Perfect skin. Fifteen or sixteen years old now, Uri surmised. He could have modeled for those idiotic propaganda posters that so disturbed his mother and father when they were alive-he didn't know for a fact they were dead, but he had to presume that they were-and as early as the Olympics in '36 had made them scared for their son and their daughter.

“Wait for orders.”

The boy seemed to want to say something more, and so Uri told him, “Go, go. The captain and I will handle the people here.” We'll probably be run over, he thought, crushed in the last-ditch stampede that would occur the moment the engineers appeared with their satchels.

But still the boy stood there, his lips slightly parted. Little puffs of smoke with each exhalation.

“Yes?”

“My family, sir. They're in the line. Back there.”

He nodded. He was fairly confident that he knew what the boy was driving at, but he wanted to be sure. “You want to join them?” he asked. A lesser boy, he knew, or most of the middle-aged Nazis he had dealt with lately, would have been hinting about some scheme to get his family across the Vistula before it became nothing more than a river of ice shavings and splinters. But not this one.

“May I, sir?”

“Yes. But do yourself-and them-a favor. Find another place to cross. Under no circumstances stop moving west.”

Above them they heard the shriek of another approaching Soviet shell, and-as was frequently the case-it reminded Uri of the sound of a train whistle.

AND URI SINGER knew the sound of train whistles well. He had heard them often as a boy, when he and his parents and his little sister would travel from Schweinfurt to Dresden to visit his aunt and uncle, or to the Alps to go hiking. But it was only in March of 1943, when he was finally deported and spent nearly three days in a cattle car, that he began to appreciate (and loathe) the subtle differences in ululation. He'd been at work at the ball-bearing factory, wondering in a vague sort of way how he and his family would be degraded next, when the SA came for him. He was twenty-four years old, and his life could not have been more different from the one he had anticipated a decade earlier. At fourteen, even in the first months after Hitler had come to power, he had still assumed he would start and finish at the university, and he would be a journalist by now. Perhaps he might even be writing a book. He ended up getting to spend a single year at the college before it was closed to the Jews.

It was midmorning when the SA had arrived at the factory. The two thugs in their greatcoats told him he would meet his parents and his sister at the train station. He didn't. He never saw them again, though God knew he had tried to find his sister. Nor had he ever been back to Schweinfurt. He had heard that first the RAF and then the Americans had started pummeling the city four months after he was taken away, and most of the place now was rubble.

Except, of course, for the factory where he had worked. It was damaged, people said, but still operating. That, he guessed, was pretty typical. The apartments and town houses and butcher shops that had been laid waste were rarely rebuilt, but the Nazis would try to find the resources to repair the factories. And so the war effort went on. Even the killing in the concentration camps. And the evacuations from the concentration camps. The Russians, last he'd heard, were approaching Auschwitz. And while there were rumors that most of the prisoners were being walked to the west, he understood that some were being wedged back into the boxcars. Imagine: While the enemies of the (and he heard these two words mordantly in his mind) Greater Reich were at the Rhine and the Vistula, someone somehow was still finding the rolling stock to expend upon the plan to exterminate the Jews. Rather than move troops or tanks or boxcars full of panzerfausts, they were moving the Jews. Just so they could kill them in Germany instead of Poland.

Maybe, he concluded, it was because they didn't have any troops or tanks or panzerfausts left to move. They only had Jews.

He watched this frightened but enthusiastic boy run back to his family and considered for a moment if the teen would be naive enough to try to stop a Soviet tank with that rifle of his. Probably. He shook his head: They didn't have a panzerfaust to give him.

Uri wondered, as he did often, whether he would be alive now if he hadn't jumped from that train nearly two years ago. Initially he'd presumed he would have died at Auschwitz, because even his youth and his strength would have bought him only so much time. But as he'd survived one normally fatal indignity after another in and out of the Wehrmacht, he'd begun to question this. It was as if he were being spared, his negligible soul cradled time after time by providence. For all he knew, if he'd stayed on that train going east two years ago, he'd be on another one right now going west.

No. Not likely. He'd have died. No one lived nearly two years at Auschwitz. It was why he'd hurled himself along with the slop bucket out the cattle car door that unusually balmy night when the opportunity had presented itself. He had, inevitably, just heard another of those stultifying train whistle blasts.

By 1943, the vast majority of the Schweinfurt Jews were gone, and Uri and his parents and their few remaining friends had a pretty good idea about what was going on at the concentration camps. At least the ones in the east. In his opinion, anyone with eyes in Schweinfurt, Jew or Catholic or Lutheran, had to have figured it out. How could they not have had serious suspicions about the deportations? One afternoon he'd passed the train station and seen the Jews who were being transported that month. They had been rounded up from a different part of the city and so he hadn't known anyone who had been taken that particular day. He'd only wound up near the station because a friend from the factory lived in the neighborhood, and this buddy had an antenna he could attach to their pathetic Volksempfänger radio (“All Nazi, All the Time,” his father would joke cryptically) that would allow them, when the weather was right, to receive the BBC. Still, he was wearing his star and so he didn't dare get too close: He could just imagine himself being accidentally herded onto the train by some Nazi moron, even though he clearly hadn't packed a suitcase and had brought none of his clothing or his valuables with him.

But even from the distance he saw something that caused him to stand perfectly still for a long moment, watching, as the cacophonic sounds of the city around him seemed to vanish. He could hear himself breathing, but nothing more. The Jews were being herded into the first three cars-far too many for each one, it was clear; dozens and dozens were going to be forced to stand-and their luggage was being loaded onto the fourth car. A freight car. And then, as Uri watched, that fourth car was uncoupled, and the first three pulled away. The luggage, he saw, wasn't going with them. Luggage, he realized, never went with them.

When his hearing returned he ran as fast as he could back to the ball-bearing factory. It would be three days before he would have the courage to venture once more to his friend's neighborhood for the special antenna.

Over the following months, more and more of the city's Jews were deported, including Uri's acquaintance who had helped him with the radio, and every evening he and his sister and his parents would crowd around the Volksempfänger in their cramped and dingy apartment-a single room in a shabby hotel that had been converted to Jewish housing-and wait for the four tones that signaled the start of a BBC broadcast. When the broadcast was in German, everyone listened; when it was in English, either Uri or his father would translate it, invariably missing some of the subtleties but usually understanding its gist.

Before the war, the family had lived in an elegant, three-bedroom town house with a yard that looked out upon the gazebo in the city's small park. Now? A dark room in a ramshackle hotel with a squalid bathroom at the end of the corridor that they shared with at least two dozen other evicted Jews crammed onto their floor. And they only had that because his father was a decorated veteran of the earlier world war, and now both he and his father were, more or less, slave labor in a factory the Nazis deemed critical to the war effort. Prior to that, his father had owned a not-insubstantial trucking company. Seven vehicles and twelve employees. The fascists had just drooled when they had forced him to sell it to them for next to nothing. No longer did anyone try to face this stoically or philosophically, to murmur how one didn't blame the ocean for tidal waves. Because, in fact, it wasn't a random act of nature behind this nightmare; it was their neighbors.

Slowly his parents' health began to fail. Somehow his father soldiered on at the factory, but both of his parents were weakened by their steadily diminished rations and the cold and the daily struggle to make do in their squalor. Their Shabbat dinner at sunset on Friday night-already shrunken because of curfews and the reality that as Jews they had almost no food to eat-grew even more intimate, because Uri's aunt and his uncle and his cousins were taken away. And then his grandmother. And, soon, another aunt who never had married. When this last woman-a nurse until the fact she was Jewish had cost her her job, a woman who even as a teenager had been an angel of mercy to wounded soldiers in the previous world war-was deported to the east, his own mother took him and his sister aside and with completely uncharacteristic melodrama told them that they had to live through this nightmare. No matter what, they had to survive. Someone had to let the world know what was going on. What the Nazis were doing.

When they came for him at the factory, he actually asked if he had time to run home to pack a suitcase, even though he knew it would never go with him to the camp. His escort, those two heavy-set men from the SA with eyebrows that reminded him of cater-pillars and oddly similar wattles of flesh dangling under their chins, told him that his mother had packed one for him. Two, as a matter of fact. Uri had considered informing them that he only owned a single valise, but knew there wasn't a point. He tried to find his family at the station but they didn't seem to be there. Someone told him one train already had left for the east, and in all likelihood they were on it. Still, he searched for them in the mob, moving as best as he could among the throng and twice being struck in the back by different guards when inadvertently he had strayed too near to one of the exits.

Most of the time, the Nazis weren't even bothering with passenger cars by then, and so he was herded into an unheated cattle car that still had giant twinelike balls of straw in the corners and along one of the long walls. Though he recognized a half-dozen people in the car with him, it was mostly a surreal and kaleidoscopic pastiche of shapes and faces he might see on any given day on the street or in the park: surreal because the people were crowded-though not, as he would hear often occurred, packed so tightly that the victims could neither sit nor move, and some would actually asphyxiate-and were constantly fidgeting and shuffling as they struggled to get comfortable, and so one moment he would spy a pretty young woman named Rivka in a spot across the car, and in the next he would see standing there a very old woman named Sarah; kaleidoscopic because in the variegated light from the slats high on the walls, light that changed as the day wore on and the train chugged its way (dear God, no) east, their eyes and lips and kerchiefs seemed constantly to be changing color. They were, he guessed, the very last Jews left in Schweinfurt: the labor, the technical help-Jews with some rare expertise-and their elderly parents and children.

He asked virtually everyone in the car whether his parents or his sister might be somewhere on the train and he might be reunited with them at their destination, but no one could say. Everyone agreed that there had been plenty of couples roughly his parents' age and a great many girls who looked fourteen at the station-even some who, roughly, matched his description of Rebekah. Still, he hadn't seen any of them there and it didn't appear that anyone else had, either. At least not for sure. And Rebekah was a hard girl to miss. She was tall for her age, womanly, and-partly because they were practically being starved to death and partly because the Singers were naturally slender-thin. She had gorgeous, creosote black hair that reflected the sun like glass. If she were anywhere on this train, the men, at least, would have noticed.

It was evident to Uri after the first day that they were not going to be released from the cars until they arrived at the camp. Periodically the train stopped and a pair of soldiers would slide open the doors to see if anyone inside had died (no one did, at least that first day, not even any of the older people), and to allow one of the passengers to empty the buckets of excrement over the side. The soldiers certainly had no plans to do it. There wasn't room to lie down in the car, but Uri could sit if he curled his knees against his chest-though this, too, posed a certain hazard: It meant that his nose was close to the level of the arses and the pant legs of the people around him, and his own face and hair would brush up against the pee that had sopped into their wool trousers and the crap that had turned their underwear into unsalvageable diapers. Some of the people who had been brought to the train directly from their homes had a little food with them, and some were kind enough to share their crusts of pumpernickel or rye. But that was gone within hours. From then on, everyone grew more hungry and thirsty and frightened. And the smell from the buckets and, yes, from the people around him-the oldest people around him, he realized, were unable to squat to use the containers; others were simply too modest-grew unbearable. It wasn't merely the stench of sweat and fear, the acrid smell of the urine, or the feces that filled the pails, the pants, and the corners of the cattle car. It was the vomit. Increasingly, the stink alone was making people sick, and that was creating a vicious, malodorous circle.

During the second day, when the threshold of his own gag reflex had become downright heroic and he had grown inured to the touch of someone else's shit-soddened fabric, he would encourage the old people and the children to lean against him. Or sit against him. Or use his shoulders as a pillow or his knees as a hassock. And they did. No one, not even the children, had the energy to sing, but he would tell anyone who was interested stories about… anything. He would make up anecdotes about the ball-bearing factory, he would recall whatever he could about his aunt's service on the western front a quarter of a century earlier. Or his father's. There was an older fellow in the car who, it would turn out, had served in the same stretch of trenches as Uri's father, though the two men had never met. Sometimes people listened to Uri and he thought it might have helped a little bit. But he also knew he was merely throwing a glass of water on a house fire.

By the third day, he and some of the others were sure they were going to Auschwitz. Much to Uri's astonishment, there were actually grown-ups in the car who hadn't heard of the place. Oh, they knew of the concentration camps and the deportations. But they honestly believed-had, almost inconceivably, managed to reassure themselves-that this was all about resettlement. Not extermination.

It was this, he decided later, the fact that there were Jews-Jews, for God's sake!-who didn't believe what was happening that finally propelled him with his bucket of shit through the opened cattle car doors. It wasn't the reality that a wonderful old man who had consoled his wife with the sighs and murmurs of an angel had expired beside him, it wasn't the death of one of the car's two babies-he honestly missed the infant's howls because it meant the little one had died-and it wasn't even his own fear about what awaited him at the train's eventual destination. It was, in essence, what his mother had said: Someone had to survive this inferno and, indeed, it might as well be him.

And so when the train was starting to move once more (and, yes, there was that whistle), as a soldier was jogging beside the car and sliding the door shut-just as this middle-aged corporal of the Reich was using his own gimpy legs to jump back onto the train-Uri acted as if he were merely tossing one more pail of waste into the woods and weeds that lined the tracks. But this time he allowed his body to follow his arms. He landed on his side, drenching his shirt and his face in diarrheic muck, and rolled into the brush. He heard the guard screaming at him, the train accelerating. Almost simultaneously he was aware of the crackle of gunfire and felt something stinging his arm. But he knew they weren't about to stop the train for one shit-covered Jew, and the guard wasn't about to remain behind and miss the trip east. And so he kept pinwheeling, spinning like a rolling pin amid shrubs and high grass and spring weeds and then, much to his relief, among actual trees. There he stood and he started to run, and he didn't stop until the sound of the train (and its infernal whistle) had receded far into the distance.

He had no idea where he was, but he was nowhere near a railway station or a town and that was probably a pretty good sign. He leaned against what he thought, in the dusk, was an oak tree, and looked at his arm. His shirtsleeve was sliced open and his upper arm was bleeding, but the bullet had just grazed him. It was actually his right hip that hurt like hell. And his knees. Clearly he had banged up his hip and his knees when he'd fallen. Well, he thought, that's what you get when you dive from a rolling, accelerating train.

But, initially, he was still very glad that he had.

It was only after he had caught his breath and begun to concentrate on the sounds of the odd and unfamiliar animals he heard all around him-owls and bats and somewhere not terribly far away, a wolf-that he began to fear that he just might have deserted his family. Rebekah. Yes, she was tall and pretty, but she was only fourteen. And perhaps because there had been a child, another girl, born between him and his sister who had died within days of her birth, he and his parents had always doted on Rebekah to the point that she was really rather helpless. And what if she was on that train, in one of the other cars? His parents, too? The thought left him a little sickened, and he wasn't sure now what he would do next. He was, he realized, worse than a stranger in a strange land. He was a Jew in the east. And so the very first thing he did was to rip his star from his shirt. He'd figure out the rest-clothes, a name, a ration card for food-after he'd gotten some sleep.

AS THE EMMERICH FAMILY was preparing to leave the estate-Kaminheim was their name for their home, because the house had so many fireplaces, some of them the height and width of a pony-much to Anna's astonishment, Mutti was actually dusting. And, with the cook-the lone servant who remained-mopping the floor. And then beating throw rugs outside on the terrace in the icy January air. Apparently she believed that someday they might return, and then they would whisk the crisp white sheets off the couches and chairs-a magician's reveal-and their life would resume as if they had only been away on a holiday.

Anna presumed that her mother had been disabused of this notion by now, as they trekked through the snow in the woods and away from the caravan of refugees, trying to catch up to Helmut. But perhaps not. This was a woman, after all, who had always maintained a completely illogic faith in her führer and a naive ability to compartmentalize what she deemed his good and his bad attributes. Back in 1940, Anna recalled, the very summer when Jewish friends of her parents from Danzig would appear, homeless, on their door-step, Mutti had insisted on hanging in the parlor the signed, framed photo she owned of Hitler. They had taken the Jewish family in without a moment's hesitation, and Mutti had seen no inconsistency in celebrating the führer and offering shelter to her friends. Even now, after Soviet shells had pummeled her brother's estate a mere twenty-five kilometers farther east, she could still sound like a star-struck little girl when she talked of Hitler's blue eyes, or the entire afternoon she had spent on the Schlossplatz in 1940 because the man was staying at the Hotel Bellevue and she was hoping to steal a glance of him. She hadn't been alone. There had been very big crowds that day-including Mutti and her sister-in-law and some other women from the corner of Poland that, thanks to Hitler, recently had been returned to Germany-and they hadn't been disappointed. They had gotten to stand within yards of their leader when he had walked from the hotel to the Café Weber; they had, as one, thanked him for reuniting them with their country.

This was why Mutti still seemed to expect a miracle from her führer. The estate, Kaminheim, on which she had grown up as a little girl had always been a part of Germany and she had viewed herself as a German. Then, in 1919, it was on land ceded to Poland and she was supposed to become a Pole. All the Germans there were. Or they could relocate. But her family wasn't about to leave Kaminheim. There was no place else for them to go, nothing else for them to do. They grew sugar beets. It was what they did. And so, with the signing of a treaty in a palace outside of Paris, she went from being the daughter of Prussian farming gentry to a disliked little foreigner. A minority. An alien. A part of a discredited nobility. Initially, like most Prussians, Mutti's parents-Anna's grandparents-had thought this Hitler character was decidedly low-rent. There were rumors that he'd once been a paperhanger, that he'd painted bad still lifes and tried to sell them on the street. The man might not even have been completely sane. But then he got people working again and he built those highways. Gave Germans back their pride. And then, best of all, he gave them back Prussia. All of Prussia. Not just a kidney-shaped patch of earth surrounding Danzig, separated from the rest of Germany by a vast tract of Poland. Sadly, Mutti's parents died before the reunification in 1939. For most of the war, Mutti had lamented that her mother and father hadn't lived to see the return of their precious Kaminheim to Germany; now, however, Anna wondered if Mutti wasn't relieved on some level that neither had they been forced to witness their treasured land occupied by what her mother considered the savages from the east.

Finally, between the explosions and the pathetic cries of a little boy calling out not for food but for a lost dog named after food (“I want Spaetzle, Mommy! Please, please, we can't go on without Spaetzle!”), over the sound of the birdsong-still, somehow, there were birds-she heard Helmut yelling their names and high-stepping his way toward them through the snow. It sounded as if he had found another spot on the river where the ice seemed thick enough for their horses and wagons.

“Are there other people there?” their father asked him.

“Yes, but not many. Not yet.”

He said the spot was no more than fifteen minutes farther. There was a steep hill just ahead and it might be difficult for the horses to pull the wagons through some drifts of thigh-deep snow, but assuming they could make the knoll, it was no more than fifty or sixty meters from there to the edge of the river.

BENEATH THE OATS, Callum listened carefully. His right arm and leg had, once more, gone to sleep. Unfortunately, it was hard to breathe if he tried to lie on his back or his stomach. In a moment, he guessed, he would roll over and spend a few seconds gasping for air so he could allow a semblance of circulation to return to those limbs. He was a big man-powerfully built, with shoulders that flattened out like a mesa and a back that was as straight and solid as granite quarry walls-and in his opinion he was, pure and simple, too large for these quarters.

He and Anna were hoping that once they were west of the Vistula, periodically he would be allowed to walk beside the wagons. Her father had said he thought this was extremely unlikely. Though he was dressed in her older brother's winter clothes instead of his ragged British paratrooper's uniform-Werner wasn't nearly as muscular as Callum, but he was almost as tall, and Mutti had been able to doctor some pants and a jacket-if he was seen by anyone in authority he might be hanged on the spot as a German deserter.

Unless, of course, he opened his mouth first.

Then he would simply be shot on the spot as an escaped POW.

Still, he couldn't spend forever curled like a hermit crab beneath their food and the horses' feed in this wagon. And while Anna's father had surmised that he would have to remain in the cart until they reached either Mutti's cousin in Stettin or, eventually, the British and American lines somewhere far to the west, her mother was firmly convinced that he would be up and about within days. Why? Any day now, she said, certainly inside of two or three weeks, they would all be allies together: the Brits and the Yanks and the Germans. The civilized nations of the world would band together to repel the Russians. Prevent them from barbarizing all of Europe. It was, she had said, inevitable.

Callum wasn't quite so sure. In point of fact, he thought Mutti was absolutely loopy. A sweet lady with fortitude and courage. But also, alas, bloody bonkers.

Nevertheless, ever since he had jumped from an airplane seven months ago now-almost eight, if he was going to be precise-his entire life had been bonkers. The whole world, it seemed, had gone mad. And, of course, jumping from an airplane-and jumping in the dark while people below you were firing machine guns into the night sky-was hardly an indication that the world was especially sane to begin with.

The drop, at least his portion, had been a disaster almost from the moment he had first hurled himself from the plane. First there had been all that gunfire from the hedgerows and the woods. He hadn't been hit, but he had heard the agonized screams of the men drifting-sometimes minus an arm or a leg or towing their entrails like kite tails-to the earth all around him. And then, instead of landing in a meadow just east of the Orne, he had landed in quick-sand. At least it had struck him as quicksand in the dark. In reality it was a mere swamp, but clutching a rifle and weighed down by his harness, the risers, and the pack with his reserve chute, it might just as well have been quicksand. And, again, the cries, though this time they were punctuated by the choking hacks of men who were drowning as they pleaded for help. Yes, indeed, they were drowning in a few feet of water and a little Norman muck. He was on his side, disoriented in the bog, but he found if he arched his back and his neck he could keep his nose above the water and slime. Finally he was able to right himself and half-crawl, half-dog-paddle his way out of the marsh.

When he was free, when he was actually emerging onto turf that was solid, the world around him was abruptly lit as if it were noon: A troop plane had exploded, hit by a shell as it approached his corner of the drop zone. It slammed like a comet-blue and yellow flames streaming behind it, its descent marked by a screech far louder than any noise he had ever heard in his life-into the ground within a stone's throw of where he was standing, dumbstruck. Instantly it set fire to the understory and the brush all around him. Inside his pack were ammunition and a land mine, and so he actually ran back into the swamp, the only ground he could see now that wasn't ablaze.

There he helped a trooper named Bingham and a radioman named Lane save themselves from drowning, literally grabbing Bingham by his harness as if he were a big dog he had by the collar and raising him up and out of the slime. There they watched the flames in the plane and the woods burn themselves out. And the fires really didn't last all that long, despite whatever fuel the aircraft had left in its tanks, because the air was moist and the ground was a bog. When they staggered from the marsh onto dry land, a half-dozen wet and scared and lost paratroopers, it was still dark. But not for long. Almost the moment their boots touched ground that didn't squash beneath their feet for the first time in hours, the world once more went bright as midday, and the men squinted as one and shielded their eyes against searchlights. The Germans took them prisoner rather than machine-gunning them dead on the spot because they didn't know if this was the actual invasion or a mere feint, and they wanted to interrogate the Brits.

Callum was thus taken into custody without ever firing a single shot at a German. This would only endear him further to Mutti and her lone daughter, though it also led Helmut and even Theo to think a little less of him than they already did.

Nevertheless, he had become yet one more pet in the Emmerichs' extensive menagerie. And their anticipated goodwill offering when they reached the British or American lines. And, though neither Mutti nor Rolf-her husband-nor their sons had a clue, Anna Emmerich's lover.

THE HORSES DID make it up the small knoll with the thigh-deep drifts of snow, despite the weight in the wagons, and they made it with relative ease. But Anna had never had any doubts. Helmut was right, they were more her horses than anyone's, and she knew what they were capable of. Balga especially, the animal that she rode most often. Balga was a massive, powerful stallion that wanted only to run. He had been chafing all morning at the very idea that these humans expected him to walk at their pace, even as-along with a second horse-he pulled a cart full of feed.

All of the horses were named after castles. Not just Balga. The others? Labiau, Ragnit, and Waldau. Though it had been the child Helmut who had been obsessed with the knights of East Prussia, Anna as well had appreciated the medieval romance of the stories that surrounded the citadels. And the first of the horses that she suggested be christened with the name of a castle, Balga, was regal and proud and seemed to lack completely the skittishness that marked so many of the estate's other horses. Altogether they had twelve, but only these four were coming with them on the trek west.

Now it was their turn to join the queue crossing the ice on the river. Still, Anna understood the river wouldn't keep the Russians at bay for long. Already they had a bridgehead at Kulm.

There were explosions echoing to their south and-farther away-to the north, but at the moment no shells were falling here. Gingerly she stepped onto the ice, found her footing, and then she started to lead Balga and Waldau onto the glassy plane with her. The horses were actually better off than she was because yesterday the Emmerichs' farrier had drilled ice nails into the bottom of their shoes. Helmut was behind the family on the ridge, scanning the far side of the river with his binoculars. As far as she could tell, all that was over there were the lucky refugees who had preceded them, but her father and brother feared the front was so fluid that it was possible they might cross a stretch of river where the Russians already were encamped.

Her mother and Theo had climbed off the wagon and were walking beside her, because her parents wanted everyone in the family off the carts in the event one plunged through the ice. That had happened, they knew, to other trekkers. One moment the wagons were atop the ice, and the next-after a groan and a snap-the horses and people were drowning in the frigid current of the Vistula. Only Callum was still in a cart, and Anna wasn't sure how seriously devastated anyone other than she would be if he drowned. Certainly Helmut wouldn't care, and he didn't even know how she and Callum had been spending their secret, private moments together since the winter had started to set in.

Helmut placed his field glasses back into their case and started across the ice, leading Labiau and Ragnit and the wagon they were pulling. Her father marched beside Mutti, taking her hand as they walked, occasionally whispering something into her ear, but Anna and Theo and Helmut remained silent, listening largely to the breathing of the horses and the periodic curses and whimpers from the trekkers around them who had discovered this section of river about the same time that her brother had. There were no Volkssturm or Wehrmacht soldiers here to prevent more than a family or two from starting across the river at a time, and slowly the refugees were fanning out: Instead of a single line, it was fast becoming a wave, and Anna worried that the ice would go and they would all flop into the frigid water at once.

But that didn't happen. It was all, in a way, stunningly anticlimactic. One moment they were on the eastern bank, and now, ten minutes later, they were on the west. Apparently, the road to Schwetz, the nearest village, was no more than two or three kilometers distant, and most of the trek there would be across flat meadows and fields. No more woods, at least not today, or inching forward in the midst of an endless line of equally pathetic-no, far more pathetic-refugees. She felt an almost debilitating surge of relief, an outpouring of exhaustion that made her long to sit where she was in the snow, because they were on the far shore and they were alive. And, despite the rumble of gunfire in the distance, they were safe. At least for the moment. Her father and Helmut had gotten them across the Vistula, and now they would bring them safely from this frontier of the Reich to the cocoon of its interior. She wanted, she realized, to do more than sit: She wanted to lie down, and she didn't care whether it was in her bed or the autumn-scented fields of Kaminheim or here in the cold and the ice on the western (Western. Had there ever been a more lovely word?) bank of the Vistula and daydream. But she saw that her father and her mother were approaching her. Helmut was approaching her. Theo looked up apprehensively.

“Anna,” her father was saying, pulling her from the lovely, enervating stupor into which she was descending. He placed his hands squarely on her shoulders. “My Anna.”

“Yes, Father?”

He reached over with one arm and seemed about to pull both Theo and her against him. Into him. Then he remembered the blood, a frozen swath of burgundy-colored ice crystals that clung to his wool sleeve like honey, and instead simply rested his fingers on the scarf that swaddled her neck.

“My children,” he murmured. “Here is where you must be as strong as your mother. As strong as Helmut and Werner.”

“We have been strong, haven't we?” Theo asked. The boy wanted desperately to be as respected as his two older-in his mind, venerated-brothers. He wanted to be a soldier, too. To be needed. To not be a burden, a child who had to be watched over and managed.

Their father nodded at Theo, but he didn't smile. And instantly Anna understood. She glanced over at Helmut, the instinctive, yearning reflex of a twin for a twin. Her brother wouldn't look at her. Or he couldn't. He folded his arms against his chest and gazed at the caravan of wagons and wheelbarrows and carts that was inching its way over the ice. When she turned toward her mother, Mutti looked away. Her lips were thin and flat, and she had that stoic, gritty gaze she got whenever she did something that took enormous resolve: when she had buried the Luftwaffe pilot; when she had learned that her oldest son, Werner, had been wounded and she had had to share the news with the rest of the children; and when, only yesterday, she had been draping the chalk-white sheets on the divan and the chairs in the parlor.

And so Anna was only half-listening when her father told Theo and her that he and Helmut were leaving them here. They were returning east across the Vistula. Something about a counterattack on the Russians' bridgehead at Kulm. The need to defend Germany. Theo burrowed his face in his father's uniform jacket, oblivious of the cold and the wet and the frozen blood, his head bobbing either because he was trying hard not to cry or because he was trying to nod obediently or, perhaps, both.

And then Helmut was beside her, or-she realized after a moment-beside the wagon with Callum. Because it was to Callum he wanted to speak.

“You,” he barked at the oats. “Take care of my mother and Anna and Theo. No surrendering this time. Do you hear?”

With a grunt Callum pushed his head and his arms free, a turtlehead emerging from its shell. “You know, I can't do a whole hell of a lot in here, Helmut,” he said.

“No, but-” her brother started to snarl at the Scot, but before he could say more their father was silencing him. Reminding him that it was in no one's interest for Callum to make his presence known until they had reached the British or American lines-or until they were overtaken by the Brits or the Americans. He reassured both Helmut and Callum that the rest of the Emmerichs were more than strong enough-physically, emotionally-to get to the west on their own.

And then Callum was back beneath the feed and Helmut was checking his pistol and her father was saying something more to her. “I know it is an awful responsibility I am giving you, Anna. Awful. But you know the horses. And I know you can do this. Just keep moving. You are never to look back or turn back until we are all together again as a family. Do you understand?”

She had the sense that Helmut was too young and brash to understand for certain that he was going to die if he left them now to join in the fight against the Russians. But he probably suspected how badly the odds were stacked against him. He wasn't stupid. And, clearly, their father knew. She could tell by the way he was gently saying good-bye to Mutti, and the way he was lying-her father, lying!-about their return to Kaminheim. Joking now about the scavenger hunt they would have when they started to dig up the silver and crystal and china they had buried in their hunting park. Anna knew the truth: After a month in the deep freeze of January, the soil had become solid as granite. They had buried nothing. She and her father had simply thrown up their arms and left the serving trays and decanters and whole place settings upright in the snow like tombstones in a cemetery. If servants from the neighboring estates hadn't stolen the pieces by now, the Russians had. Or would any moment.

His message when he told her not to look back until they were together again as a family? Never look back, period. She wanted to throw herself against him just the way Theo had, beg him to come with them. Tell him how little sense it made to get killed by the Russians at this point in the war. But, clearly, he understood there wasn't a point. Everyone except Mutti seemed to realize it was over. Even Helmut: He had talked with the British POWs in the autumn. With Callum when he was home in the winter. Until yesterday, he had been the one who was putting the markers in the map in the parlor that showed the locations, as far as they could tell, of the different armies and the boundaries of the Reich.

Yet despite what they knew, now her father was going to join a bunch of other old men and boys and counterattack the Russian bridgehead at Kulm.

He took off one of his gloves and stroked the side of her cheek, his fingers coarse, but still gentle and warm. His eyes were milky in the cold and he-a man who she knew loved her but was never going to verbalize such a notion-actually pulled her into him, and so he had both her and Theo wrapped in his arms. They stayed that way for a long, quiet moment, and then he pushed them away. He embraced Mutti once more, as Helmut awkwardly, almost tentatively, hugged their brother and her. Then, without another word, he took Helmut and the two of them started back across the Vistula, this time moving against the long procession of sleighs and wagons traveling west.

She told her mother that they should probably continue if they wanted to reach Klinger by nightfall, but Mutti said that she wanted to be sure that her husband and her son made it safely across the ice. And so they waited and watched. Thus they saw the men, one in so many ways still a boy, reach the east bank and start back into the woods. And then, seconds later, they heard the screech of shells-not a single one this time, this was no solo diving raptor-approaching and instinctively they curled themselves against the carts, but they continued to stare to the east. Instantly, in a series of blasts that reduced the ice on the river to slivers and sent shards and spray raining down upon them like hail-shards and spray, the grips and leather sides of valises, wood splinters from crates, wheels from wagons and the runners from sleighs, the flesh of horses and people, hooves and feet (bare somehow, as if their boots had been blown off them by the blasts)-the natural bridge was gone. Where seconds before there had been perhaps a dozen families working their way gingerly across the ice, now there was only the once more violently churning waters of the Vistula, the brief, choking screams of the living as they disappeared beneath the current, and the more prolonged wails of the German families on the eastern shore, still alive. Anna couldn't tell if they were despairing over what they had just witnessed, or because they knew what awaited them now that they had failed to escape the Russians.

Beside her, without saying a single word, her mother and Theo started leading Labiau and Ragnit west across the snowy meadow. And so Anna looped the reins of the other two animals around her wrists, stroked Balga once along his forehead and poll, and followed.