Uckermark, 1945– “The Red Army is a few hundred miles east – they opened Majdanek and Auschwitz and the Yanks burst the Bulge. Marianne says in Ravensbrück they pray to avoid Appell a few weeks more, sniffing freedom like Baltic brine. We yearn: hope is gnawing at terror from the inside out.”

Ange Schmidt is facing euthanasia at Ravensbrück. Her destination is Gropius psychiatric facility, about to be overrun by the Red Army, and she and Sinti Marianne have a fragile plan to escape.

But if fleeing Ange can avoid savage lynchings, rape, starvation and typhus, what awaits a young German girl? Her family was lost in the obliteration of Hamburg and her sweetheart Otto scours the country to find her, with an American journalist in the nascent OSS, who wants Nuremberg testimony in return for help. The last Otto heard of Ange was a raving letter of breakdown. Otto’s brother Günter, imprisoned at Chelyabinsk Plant 183, is trying to get home via the League of German Officers, and in doing so avoid recruitment to the Soviet machine.

Liberation by the Allies should bring jubilation to Europe, especially for German resistance, but as they search for ‘a future’ in the wreckage of Berlin new choices await, enemies reappear, and in the coldest winters the city has known Stalin will starve them again…