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use?”
    “Things from around here, you mean?” I asked. “A piece of mouldy bread, honey.”
    Helmut looked sceptical.
    I smiled. “Often what we need to survive is right at our fingertips.”
    Helmut looked up. “Anything at our fingertips to make Blitz healthy again?”
    “Blitz?”
    “The horse.”
    I had gotten so used to thinking of her as Kulia that I’d forgotten it was only my name for her. “Can’t you get a veterinarian?”
    “They’re all in the army. Their medicines too,” Helmut said.
    “My father showed me a way to treat wheezing in humans,” I said. “It may work for your horse.”
    “No milk washes for my Blitz,” said Helmut.
    “A bit of honey in her drinking water — and it should be warmed up — that will loosen the mucous.”
    “Well, I suppose it won’t hurt,” said Helmut. “And we have lots of honey.”
    After dark, I took a pail of warmed honey water into the barn for Blitz. Then I helped Helmut carry in a laundry tub full of steaming water. I placed a blanket over Blitz’s head to form a sort of steam tent.
    Almost right away, Blitz began to breathe more easily.
    * * *
    Helmut and Margarete didn’t lock me in at night anymore, so I would go out and visit the animals. It felt good just to be there in the barn with them, leaning into their warmth and feeling the rhythm of their breathing. Even with bombs still exploding outside, I felt safe.
    After a few days the weather turned mild, and I took a wheelbarrow out to the fields in the cover of night to dig up turnips for Helmut. My back ached from filling just a single load. How did an old man like him manage this alone?
    As safe as I felt with Helmut and Margarete, though, I was anxious to get going. My foot was fully healed as far as I could tell, and my leg no longer gave me trouble.
    One evening after dinner, Margarete set a small plate of ginger cookies on the table and served each of us a glass of hot tea. I took a sip as I considered how kindly they had treated me. In many ways I would miss them.
    “Helmut, Margarete,” I said, setting down my glass. “Thank you for all that you have done for me, but it is time for me to leave.”
    “You are welcome to stay here,” she said.
    Her words were not a surprise. I had sensed that she enjoyed having a bit more company. “I’m putting you both in danger.”
    “But this is the worst time of year to travel,” said Margarete. “It rains nearly every day. Soon it will be December. To be travelling in the snow is almost as difficult. How can you hide? How can you stay warm?”
    “And where would you go?” asked Helmut.
    “To the mountains.”
    Helmut blinked in surprise. “Do you even know where you are?” he asked.
    “Somewhere in Germany …” I thought of the atlas on the bookshelf in Martin’s bedroom. “Just a minute …”
    I retrieved the atlas from the bedroom and flipped it open to a page I had studied so many times.
    “Can you show me where we are?” I asked.
    Helmut got up from his chair and stood beside me. He rested one hand on my shoulder and frowned as he examined the page. “Where do you think we are?”
    One German city I recognized was München — Munich. I put my finger on it. “Are we close to here?”
    “No.” Helmut placed his finger on a spot that was on the other side of Czechoslovakia. “We are in a rural area close to Breslau.”
    “But the atlas says Wroclaw, and it’s in Poland, not Germany . ”
    “It’s part of the Reich now. The name was changed.”
    “But all the people around here are German, not Polish. And the signs — everything is German.”
    Helmut stared at me in surprise. “I told you — Margarete and I are not from around here.”
    I nodded. But I still didn’t really understand.
    “When Hitler and Stalin were on the same side between 1939 and 1941,” said Helmut, “they carved up Poland between them. Hitler wanted Germans in his part of Poland and Stalin wanted Slavs. People were moved. Hundreds