Next to him, Adeline gazed into passing yards, seeing the ghosts of relationships past, of children playing, and parents singing at harvest, their entire way of life tied to and celebrating the seasons.
She remembered a happier time: 1922, being seven, and bouncing in a wagon like this. Adeline had sat in the back by baskets of food her mother had prepared as they rode out to the fields where the men were cutting wheat. It was almost October, but the air was still warm and smelled of everything lovely in her life. She took the basket to her father, the chief of harvest, as he worked on a mechanical threshing machine.
Karl Losing had a soft spot for his younger daughter and grinned when she brought him lunch. They’d sat side by side in the shade of the thresher, looking out over the golden hills of grain, and ate fresh bread with dried sausage and drank cold tea.
She remembered feeling completely safe and totally in love with her surroundings.
“Will we always live here, Papa?” young Adeline had asked.
“Forever and a day, child,” he said. “Unless, of course, the stinking Bolsheviks have their way, and we’re thrown to the wind and the wolves.”
In their wagon, rolling toward the far end of Friedenstal some twenty-two years later, Adeline recalled vividly being upset when her father had said that. For a time, she had walked around looking over both shoulders for fear wolves would burst from the forest and hunt her.
She felt the same way when they left the village, heading west with the rising sun and cannon fire still rumbling behind them, past fields waiting for plowing, and trees budding, and birds whirling and whistling above the bluffs, and dreams destroyed, buried by the realities of famine and war.
More German fighter planes raced across the sky, heading toward the battle lines.
“Where are we going, Papa?” Walt asked, sounding worried.
“West,” Emil said. “As far west as we can go. Across the ocean, maybe; I don’t know.”
“Across the ocean?” Adeline said, surprised and a little frightened by that idea.
“Why not?” her husband said, glancing at her.
She said the first thing that came to mind. “We can’t swim.”
“We’ll learn.”
Will said, “But why are we going west?”
“Because life will be better there,” Emil said.
A horse whinnied and then screamed in the shifting chaos of carts and wagons and tanks and trucks behind them. People began to yell and to shout. Walt scrambled to look back.
“Someone’s wagon got hit by a Wehrmacht truck, a few behind Oma’s wagon,” he said. “A horse, too. It all tipped over, and the horse broke its leg and can’t get up.”
Emil clucked to Oden and Thor, and they hurried to close the gap with the wagon ahead.
Will still seemed upset. He climbed into his mother’s lap, snuggled against her chest, and said, “Tell me what it will look like, Mama.”
“What?” Adeline said, hugging and rocking him.
“West. What will it look like?”
Stroking her son’s face, Adeline gazed into Will’s eyes, smiled, and said, “We’re going to a beautiful green valley surrounded by mountains and forests. And snow up high on the peaks. And below, there will be a winding river and fields of grain for bread, and gardens with vegetables to feed us, and Papa will build us a house where we’ll all live together forever and ever, and we’ll never be apart.”
That seemed to soothe Will. The little boy relaxed.
“I think there will be other boys to play with,” he said.
Adeline smiled at his expression, so innocent and hopeful, it made her heart swell. She tickled him, said, “I imagine there will be many boys to play with, and lots of work to be done, too. But we’ll be happy, and you and your brother will grow up to follow your hearts’ desires.”
“What does that mean?”
Emil said, “That you’ll be who you want to be, not who you’re told to be.”
“I’m going to be just like you, Papa,” Will said as his eyes drifted shut.
Adeline glanced at her husband, who smiled, and then over her shoulder at Walt, who had lain down and was dozing.
She looked back at Emil, whose smile had fallen into something more pained.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
He belched. “There, that should do it. Probably what I was feeling back there.”
After a few moments, she said quietly, “We’ll find it, won’t we, Emil? A valley like that we can call home? A place we’ll never leave?”
Emil’s face tightened further. He wouldn’t look at her when he shrugged and said, “Someone once told me that if you keep praying for something, you can’t help but get it someday.”
“I told you that,” Adeline said, smiling. “And Mrs. Kantor told me.”
“I know.”
“It’s grace, Emil. God’s answers to our prayers. You still believe in grace, don’t you?”
“Adeline, with what you and I have seen with our own eyes, there are days I don’t know if God hears us, much less answers. But I’ll tell you something I do believe in.”
“What’s that?”
“Wherever we end up, it’s going to be better than the hell we’ve already lived through.”
The caravan crested a rise onto a plateau and turned north, giving Adeline one last long look back at their abandoned life. The cold wind had turned blustery. She heard cannons again and saw smoke rising from the ridges beyond the village.
“You’re right,” she said. “Anywhere will be better than that.”
Chapter Two
November 1929
Schoenfeld, Ukraine
The light bulb flickered and died. But fourteen-year-old Adeline Losing had anticipated the cut in electricity at the small school she attended. She had already lit the kerosene lantern above the sink in the school kitchen where she worked after classes were over.
Scrubbing the last big pot of the day, Adeline felt hungry, a common-enough state in her recent life. She glanced at a bag filled
