Chapter I: The Endless Sea of Gold

The floor of the Canadian Pacific Railway car vibrated with a relentless, rhythmic clanking that had, over the course of three days, woven itself into the very fabric of Alfreda Hartman’s insomnia. Through the soot-streaked glass, the world had flattened into an impossibility.

It was May 19, 1945. Eleven days earlier, the radio crackled with the news that the Führer was dead and the Reich had collapsed into unconditional surrender. For Alfreda and the forty-seven other German women crammed into the austere passenger car, that news had arrived not as a shock, but as a dull postscript to years of bombs, ash, and the pervasive, sour odor of starvation. They were prisoners of war—former auxiliary nurses, communications specialists, and administrative clerks captured during the chaotic Allied advance across Western Europe.

“Is this still North America?” whispered Gudrun Lindemann, her forehead pressed against the pane. Gudrun had spent the last two years in the subterranean concrete bunkers of Dresden, her ears permanently ringing from the high-explosive percussion of British Lancasters. “Or have they driven us to the edge of the earth to abandon us?”

Alfreda leaned across the aisle to look. She had expected a bleak, barbed-wire compound carved into a frozen wilderness—the Canadian equivalent of the Siberian wastes Nazi propaganda had always promised would be the fate of those who fell to the Allies. Instead, as the train slowed to a grinding crawl near a tiny siding in southern Saskatchewan, the horizon seemed to explode outward.

It was an ocean of gold. Endless, rolling fields of newly sprouted wheat and the rich, dark loam of the Canadian prairies stretched in every direction under a sky so vast it made Alfreda feel weightless and dangerously exposed. There were no craters. No jagged, blackened skeletons of apartment blocks. No smell of burning cordite or decomposing brick dust. The farmhouses they passed were painted a pristine white, their red barns intact and swollen with wealth.

“It’s a lie,” muttered Sigrun Wolf, a former administrative clerk whose fingers still twitched as if sorting the nonexistent ration cards that had governed her life in Berlin. “It’s a theatrical set. A Potemkin village. The Americans and British are starving—the radio said their supply lines were severed by the U-boats. They don’t have this much land.”

“Look at the horses, Sigrun,” Ingaborg Schwarz said quietly. As a former supply coordinator for the Wehrmacht in Hanover, Ingaborg knew the mathematics of logistics. She looked at the sturdy, well-fed draft animals and the massive, gleaming tractors resting in the yards. “You cannot counterfeit the weight of a well-fed horse.”

The train screeched to a final halt. The heavy steel doors rolled back, revealing a crisp, cool afternoon breeze that carried the scent of sweetgrass and damp earth—a fragrance so clean it made Alfreda’s throat ache.

Waiting for them on the gravel siding was a small detachment of Canadian provincial authorities and a woman in a sharp, olive-drab uniform. The officer stepped forward, her posture authoritative but remarkably free of the rigid, menacing theatricality the prisoners had grown accustomed to under their own officers.

“Welcome to Camp 103,” the officer announced. She spoke with a clear, resonant accent, but the words were in flawless, unhurried German. “I am Lieutenant Myrtle Kensington. My parents emigrated from Bavaria to this province before the Great War, before the rise of the National Socialist party. You are now under the custody of the Canadian government.”

A tense, collective murmur rippled through the ranks of the forty-eight women.

“You will be processed, assigned quarters, and fed,” Lieutenant Kensington continued, her eyes sweeping over their hollow cheeks and frayed, oversized military tunics. “You will be treated according to the regulations of the Geneva Convention, and you will be treated with dignity. In return, we expect cooperation. Move forward in pairs.”

Alfreda stepped down from the iron rungs of the train car, her boots sinking into the soft prairie gravel. She looked at the horizon, her mind struggling to reconcile the sheer, unblemished peace of the landscape with the ruin she had left behind. Everything she had been taught to believe about the weakness and imminent collapse of the Allied nations was evaporating with every breath of the clean Saskatchewan air.

Chapter II: The Weight of Bread

The barracks were a revelation of white-painted wood, screened windows, and iron cots made up with crisp, woolen blankets. There were no searchlights cutting through the windows, no air-raid sirens to shatter the evening air. But the true crisis of faith occurred at five o’clock in the evening, in the mess hall.

Alfreda sat at a long pine table between Gudrun and Sigrun. Two young Canadian guards in denim uniforms pushed a heavy wooden cart down the center aisle, setting large platters on each table.

For a long moment, none of the forty-eight women moved. They simply stared.

In the center of the table sat platters of thick, white bread, fresh butter that smelled of sweet cream, roasted beef swimming in rich brown gravy, mounds of steamed potatoes, and a pitcher of hot, aromatic coffee. It was a meal that had ceased to exist in Germany by 1942. For the past two years, Alfreda’s diet had consisted of sawdust-extended black bread, watery turnip soup, and roasted acorn coffee.

“It is a psychological trick,” Sigrun whispered, her hands gripping the edge of the bench until her knuckles turned white. “They want us to soften. They want to extract secrets from us.”

“What secrets, Sigrun?” Ingaborg Schwarz said, her voice cracking with an emotion she was fighting desperately to suppress. “That we have no division left? That our cities are dust? What could they possibly want from us that is worth this much beef?”

Ingaborg reached out a trembling hand and took a slice of the white bread. She brought it to her mouth and took a bite. The softness of it, the unmistakable taste of pure, unadulterated wheat flour, seemed to break something vital inside her. She closed her eyes, and a single, heavy tear tracked through the dust on her cheek.

Within moments, the mess hall was filled with a sound that Alfreda would never forget: the sound of forty-eight grown women weeping over bread.

Some ate with a desperate, animalistic speed, as if the food might vanish if they didn’t hide it in their stomachs. Others sat frozen, staring at their plates with an overwhelming expression of guilt.

“My mother is in Cologne,” Creamhild Noman, a young nurse, whispered, her fork suspended in mid-air. “When I left, she was boiling nettles and potato peelings. How can I eat this? How can they give this to enemies when our children are dying of hunger?”

Alfreda chewed her food slowly, the rich flavors turning to ash in her mouth as the realization settled deep into her bones. The Nazi regime had not just lost the war; they had lied about its very nature. They had told the German people that the entire world was locked in a shared crucible of desperate scarcity, that the sacrifices of the home front were universal. But here, thousands of miles from the front lines, was an abundance so casual it bordered on insulting. The hardships of Germany were not the inevitable results of global conflict; they were the direct consequence of a leadership that had sacrificed its people’s welfare on the altar of total war.

Chapter III: The Human Enemy

The next morning, Lieutenant Kensington called the women to assembly in the camp’s central compound. The sun was rising, casting long, dramatic shadows across the prairie grass.

“I know many of you are experiencing an emotional crisis,” Kensington said, her hands clasped loosely behind her back. She did not carry a riding crop or a pistol in her belt, a fact that Alfreda found profoundly disorienting. “You have seen our resources. You have eaten our food. And you are beginning to realize the extent to which your leadership deceived you.”

Sigrun Wolf stepped forward from the rank, her chin lifted in defiance despite the tremor in her knees. “Why are you doing this, Lieutenant? If your parents were German, how can you serve a government that helped destroy our homeland? Do you hate us?”

The compound fell completely silent. The Canadian guards at the perimeter didn’t raise their rifles; they merely watched.

Myrtle Kensington looked directly at Sigrun, her expression thoughtful rather than angered. “I do not hate Germany, Private Wolf. I hate the ideology that twisted it into a machine of conquest. I hate the crimes committed in its name. But I look at you, and I see women who were caught in a current too strong for you to fight. My parents left Bavaria because they saw the darkness coming long before 1933. They chose a country where a person’s life is governed by law and humanity, not by the whim of a dictator.”

She took a step closer to the ranks of prisoners. “My role here is not to punish you. It is to keep you safe until you can be returned to a peaceful world. But while you are here, you have a choice. You can sit in your barracks and let your bitterness consume you, or you can use your skills. We need nurses in our infirmary. We need mechanics to maintain our farm machinery. We need hands to help with the upkeep of this facility. This is not slave labor; you will be credited for your work. It is an opportunity to do something meaningful.”

Alfreda looked at her own hands. They were stained with the antiseptic solutions of the military hospitals, scarred from the jagged glass of shattered wards. For years, her labor had been a desperate attempt to patch together the broken pieces of a dying empire.

“I am a nurse,” Alfreda said, her voice clear. “I will work.”

Following her lead, one by one, nearly every woman in the compound stepped forward. Only Sigrun remained in line for a moment longer, her face a mask of conflicted pride, before she, too, took a reluctant step forward.

Chapter IV: Shadows on the Prairie

By July, the camp had developed a quiet, predictable routine. Yet, the physical safety of Canada could not keep the psychological ghosts of the European theater at bay.

Late one night, a sudden thunderstorm broke over the Saskatchewan plains. The sky split open with jagged forks of lightning, and a tremendous clap of thunder shook the wooden barracks like an explosion.

Alfreda was jolted awake by a piercing shriek. Across the room, Creamhild Noman had thrown herself from her cot and was scrambling frantically beneath it, her hands over her ears, screaming in terror.

“The roof is coming down! The roof is coming down!” Creamhild wailed, her voice shrill with the panic of someone who had survived the firebombing of Cologne. “Get to the cellar! The blockbusters are dropping!”

Alfreda crawled across the floor, dodging the swinging legs of other startled women. She reached beneath the cot and wrapped her arms around Creamhild’s shaking shoulders. “Creamhild, listen to me. It is just rain. It’s only a thunderstorm. There are no airplanes. Look at me!”

Lieutenant Kensington appeared in the doorway of the barracks, a flashlight in her hand. She didn’t shout for order. She walked calmly to where Alfreda was holding the weeping girl and knelt on the floor beside them.

“Help me lift her,” Myrtle said gently.

Together, they guided Creamhild out of the cramped barracks onto the covered porch, away from the confinement of the crowded room. The rain was falling in great, clean sheets, washing over the dark earth.

Creamhild leaned against the porch railing, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps as she stared out into the pitch-black, empty expanse of the prairie.

“I don’t understand,” Creamhild sobbed, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her nightgown. “We are safe here. No one is trying to kill us. Why am I so afraid? Why does the emptiness out there terrify me more than the bunkers?”

Myrtle leaned against the railing beside her, looking out into the storm. “Because in the city, the ruins gave you a place to hide. You knew where the danger was coming from. Out here, there is nothing but space, and your mind doesn’t know what to do with a world that doesn’t have a roof falling on it. It takes time for the soul to realize the war is over, Creamhild. Your body is still living in the ruins.”

Alfreda watched the older officer’s profile in the lightning flashes. It was the first time she realized that the damage inflicted by the war wasn’t just measured in the rubble of Berlin or the casualty lists of the Eastern Front; it was a invisible rot that had settled deep within their minds. And healing, she understood, would require an environment as vast and patient as the land they were standing on.

Chapter V: The Resurrection of the Soil

As the summer sun baked the prairie, a young Canadian guard named Private Merl Jacobson approached the camp administration with an idea. He was a farm boy from nearby Weyburn, a quiet young man with sun-bleached hair who spent his off-duty hours looking longingly at the uncultivated land behind the barracks.

“Seems a waste to just let that dirt sit there,” Jacobson said to Alfreda one afternoon while she was tending to a guard’s sprained ankle in the clinic. “The women look like they need something to care for that isn’t broken or dying. Why don’t we plant a garden?”

Within days, Jacobson arrived with a horse-drawn plow and turned over a half-acre plot of land behind the camp fence. Nearly every woman in the compound volunteered to help, turning it into a collaborative effort known as the Garden Project.

Alfreda knelt in the rich, dark soil, her fingers crumbling the clods of earth. In Germany, during the final year of the war, she had attempted to plant a small patch of vegetables behind her hospital in Frankfurt. The dirt there had been a toxic mixture of brick dust, lime, ash, and the microscopic shards of shattered glass. Nothing had grown but a few yellowed, bitter weeds.

But here, the soil was fat and fertile.

“Look at this,” Gudrun Lindemann said, holding up a handful of earth that looked like crushed chocolate. “It feels… alive.”

Private Jacobson walked among them, dropping seeds of carrots, beets, and potatoes into their open palms. He didn’t offer orders; he showed them how deep to plant the seeds to protect them from the drying prairie winds.

As the weeks passed, the garden became the emotional heart of the camp. The rigid boundaries between the captors and the captives began to soften over the shared anxiety of a late frost or the arrival of a flock of pests. Alfreda watched Sigrun Wolf—who had spent years registering death and destruction on neat bureaucratic forms—carefully tying tomato vines to wooden stakes with scraps of old linen, her face softened by an expression of intense, protective tenderness.

When the first green shoots broke through the dark soil, it felt like a collective victory. For years, these women had been cogs in a machine designed to inflict death and manage devastation. Now, their hands were responsible for life. The simple act of watering a row of cabbages became a quiet, daily rebellion against the memory of the destruction they had left behind.

Chapter VI: The Granary of the World

In August, the prairie transformed into a blinding, golden furnace. The wheat was ready for harvest, and the local labor supply was desperately depleted by the years of Canadian enlistment overseas. The camp administration began assigning groups of prisoners to assist at local agricultural facilities under light supervision.

Alfreda, Ingaborg, and Gudrun were sent to a small town five miles away to help clean and maintain a local grain elevator—a towering, wooden monolith that rose above the prairie like a cathedral.

When the facility’s manager opened the heavy wooden doors of the storage bins, Ingaborg Schwarz stopped dead in her tracks.

Inside the cavernous structure, a massive conveyor belt was delivering a continuous, roaring river of amber grain into a mountain that rose fifty feet into the air. The air was thick with the sweet, dusty smell of dry wheat.

Ingaborg stepped toward the edge of the pit, her eyes wide, her breath catching in her throat. As a wartime supply coordinator, her mind automatically began to perform the grim arithmetic of survival. She knew precisely how many grams of bread constituted a starvation ration for a civilian worker in the Ruhr valley. She knew how many tons of grain were required to keep a city of one hundred thousand people from rioting.

“Ingaborg, what is it?” Alfreda asked, alarmed by the sudden, deathly pallor of her friend’s face.

“One elevator,” Ingaborg whispered, her voice trembling so violently she could barely articulate the words. “This is just one siding… in one small town… in one province. Alfreda, there is enough food in this single building to feed the entire population of Frankfurt for six months.”

She fell to her knees at the edge of the grain pile, burying her hands deep into the river of moving wheat.

“We were told the whole world was starving,” she cried out, her voice echoing off the high wooden rafters of the elevator. “We were told that we had to fight to the last child because the British and Americans would destroy us and steal our food. They didn’t need our food! They have more than God himself! Our children died in the cellars for nothing! It was all for nothing!”

The local manager, an elderly Canadian man named Mr. Thorenson, stopped the conveyor belt. He walked over to Ingaborg, looked at her tear-stained face, and then looked at Alfreda. He didn’t understand her words, but he understood the agony in her voice.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a clean, cotton handkerchief, and handed it to Ingaborg. Then, he reached into a canvas sack on the wall and handed each of them a large, red apple.

“Eat up, girls,” he said in a gruff but gentle voice. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”

Standing in that temple of abundance, Alfreda realized that the true cruelty of the Nazi regime wasn’t just its violence, but its total commitment to a lie that had turned an entire nation into a collective suicide pact.

Chapter VII: Through Innocent Eyes

The interaction with the local community deepened as the harvest progressed. One afternoon, while Alfreda and Gudrun were clearing brush near the edge of the Thorenson farm property, a shadow fell over them.

A twelve-year-old girl with bright blue eyes and long, blonde braids was sitting on the split-rail fence, watching them with intense curiosity. It was Beatrice Thorenson, the farmer’s daughter.

“Are you the German ladies from the camp?” Beatrice asked, her English slow and distinct.

Alfreda wiped her brow and smiled faintly. “Yes. We are.”

Beatrice hopped down from the fence, a leather-bound schoolbook tucked under her arm. “My teacher said you were our enemies. But you don’t look like the people in the newsreels. You don’t have helmets or skulls on your coats.”

Gudrun looked down, her face reddening. “No. We are just women.”

“Why did your country start the war?” Beatrice asked. The question was entirely devoid of malice; it was the direct, piercing query of a child trying to understand the geography of human madness. “Canada is so far away. We didn’t want to hurt you. Why did your soldiers go into all those other places?”

Alfreda felt a heavy, cold weight settle in her chest. For years, she had accepted the official explanations: that Germany was surrounded by hostile powers, that it needed Lebensraum (living space) to survive, that it was defending European civilization. But looking into the clear, uncomplicated eyes of a Canadian child standing on a peaceful prairie, those grand geopolitical arguments sounded like the delusions of madmen.

“We were told that we were right, Beatrice,” Alfreda said softly, choosing her words with extreme care. “We were told that if we didn’t fight, our country would be destroyed. We believed what we were told because it was easier than thinking for ourselves.”

Beatrice nodded thoughtfully, processing the answer. “My teacher, Mr. Davis, says that people often do terrible things not because they want to be bad, but because they are absolutely certain they are right. He says certainty is a dangerous thing.”

She reached into her book bag and pulled out a small, yellow paper bag. “Do you want a peppermint? My dad gave me a nickel for the mercantile.”

Alfreda accepted the tiny, sugar-dusted candy, her heart aching. The simplicity of the child’s logic had stripped away the final layers of rationalization she had clung to. They had not been heroes defending a homeland; they had been accomplices to a catastrophe born of an unquestioning, prideful certainty.

Chapter VIII: Letters from the Ash

By late autumn, the golden prairie had turned into a cold, silvery gray as the first north winds began to whistle down from the Arctic. The camp routine was interrupted by the arrival of the first significant shipments of Red Cross mail from Germany.

The scene in the barracks was one of frantic, agonizing anticipation. Alfreda sat on her cot, holding a thin, gray envelope postmarked from Berlin. The paper was so fragile it felt as though it might disintegrate in her hands. It was from her sister, Martha.

“My dear Alfreda,” the letter read. “We are doing well. The winter is coming, but we are managing fine. The neighbors are very kind, and we have a small garden in the courtyard that gives us adequate food. Do not worry about us. Focus on your health.”

Alfreda read the words three times, her eyes filling with tears. She looked across the room at Gudrun, who was sobbing silently into her pillow, holding a letter that conveyed similar platitudes.

They had access to the Canadian newspapers now; they saw the photographs in the Winnipeg Free Press. They knew Berlin was an apocalyptic landscape of pulverized concrete where people lived like rats in the sewers. They knew the “small garden in the courtyard” was likely a patch of soil over a mass grave, and that “managing fine” meant her sister was likely bartering her remaining possessions for a cup of moldy flour on the black market.

The letters were an act of desperate, protective love. Their families, starving and shivering in the ruins of a destroyed civilization, were lying to protect the prisoners from guilt.

The emotional paradox was almost unbearable. Here they were, prisoners of war in an enemy nation, getting fat on beef and fresh butter, sleeping under warm wool blankets, while their innocent families paid the price for the madness of the war their nation had unleashed.

“I cannot bear it,” Sigrun Wolf said, throwing her letter onto the floor. “It is a mockery. We are treated like queens here while our mothers are dying in the cold. I wish they would beat us. It would be easier to endure than this.”

Chapter IX: The Great Divide

In November, the first heavy snow fell, transforming the Saskatchewan prairie into a blank, blinding white sheet that met an equally pale sky. With the winter came the announcement they had all anticipated and feared: the camp was to be deactivated, and the repatriation process would begin.

Each woman was given a choice. Under the postwar resettlement provisions, they could apply for administrative permission to remain in Canada as agricultural or domestic laborers, eventually seeking citizenship, or they could return to Germany on the first transport ships leaving Halifax.

The barracks became a forum of intense, emotional debate.

“How can anyone choose to stay?” Gudrun demanded one night, her voice echoing in the heated room. “Germany is our home! It is our blood! If we do not go back to rebuild it, who will? If we stay here, we are traitors to our own people.”

“Rebuild what, Gudrun?” Ingaborg Schwarz countered, her voice low and steady. “A graveyard? My husband is dead. My apartment block is a crater. My brother is missing on the Eastern Front. There is nothing for me there but the ghost of a life that was a lie.”

“But your family—”

“My family is gone!” Ingaborg shouted, her composure cracking. “Here, there is a future. Here, there is soil that isn’t poisoned by hatred. I am staying because I want to live in a place where words mean what they are supposed to mean.”

Alfreda sat quietly, looking at a small map of Canada she had clipped from a newspaper. The decision tore at her soul. Her sister Martha was still alive in Berlin, facing a grim, uncertain future under Allied occupation. If she returned, she could offer her hands as a nurse to help heal the broken population. But she also knew the weight of the German past; she knew that the ground there was saturated with a darkness that would take generations to clear.

For three days, the women walked the perimeter fence in the biting cold, individually wrestling with their consciences. There was no single correct answer. Each choice required its own form of immense courage. To return was to embrace a landscape of physical suffering and historical guilt in order to help rebuild a shattered homeland. To stay was to abandon everything familiar, to live with the permanent status of an immigrant who had once worn the uniform of an enemy, and to build a life from nothing but hope.

On the day of registration, the forty-eight women lined up before Lieutenant Kensington’s desk.

When it was over, the division was stark: sixteen women, led by Gudrun and Creamhild, chose to return to Germany. Thirty-two women, including Alfreda, Ingaborg, and Sigrun, chose to remain in Canada.

Chapter X: The Sowing of New Seeds

December 15, 1945, was a day of bitter, crystal-clear cold. A heavy military transport truck sat at the camp siding, its exhaust plume rising white against the blue sky. The sixteen women who were returning to Germany stood on the platform, bundled in heavy surplus overcoats.

The farewell was remarkably free of animosity. The months of shared grief, of eating the same bread, and tending the same garden had forged a bond that transcended political ideology or personal choices.

Alfreda embraced Gudrun, holding her tight against the freezing wind. “Find your family, Gudrun. Rebuild the hospitals. Make something beautiful out of the stones.”

“And you, Alfreda,” Gudrun whispered, her eyes wet with tears that froze on her eyelashes. “Grow old in the sunshine. Do not forget us.”

The truck engine roared to life. The sixteen women climbed into the back, waving until the vehicle disappeared into the endless, snowy distance of the prairie highway, leaving nothing behind but the faint smell of diesel and the silence of the plains.

The thirty-two who remained were not left to drift. The local community, through the advocacy of Lieutenant Kensington, local church leaders, and employers who had witnessed their work during the harvest, stepped forward to sponsor them.

The transition was not without friction. There were residents in the nearby towns who protested, who had lost sons at Dieppe and in the skies over Europe, and who could not look at the German women without seeing the faces of those who had killed their boys. But the quiet, industrious dignity of the women gradually eroded the anger.

Alfreda received an official sponsorship from the Thorenson family. She moved into a small, warm room above their summer kitchen, working during the day to assist with the livestock and helping Mrs. Thorenson with the household chores, while spending her evenings studying English by the light of a kerosene lamp.

Gudrun’s prediction did not come true; they were not traitors. They were simply people who had been broken by history and had chosen to graft themselves onto a younger, healthier tree.

Epilogue: 1968

The summer sun of 1968 beat down upon the veranda of the Thorenson farmhouse, casting long shadows across a yard filled with the laughter of children.

Alfreda Hartman Thorenson—now forty-eight years old, her hair touched with silver at the temples—sat in a wicker chair, a glass of cold lemonade in her hand. She looked out across the vast, undulating ocean of gold that surrounded the property. The endless prairie that had once terrified her with its emptiness had long since become her home, its rhythm as familiar to her as her own heartbeat.

Her husband, an older, gentle Canadian man who had taken over the property after his father’s passing, was in the machine shed, his tools clanking pleasantly. Her twenty-year-old daughter, Martha—named after the sister who had survived the ruins of Berlin and was now a schoolteacher in a democratic West Germany—sat on the steps beside her, a bundle of old letters in her lap.

“Mom,” Martha asked, looking up from a faded photograph of forty-eight young women standing in front of a wooden barracks. “Was it hard? To decide to stay here after the war ended? To choose this over your own country?”

Alfreda looked out toward the horizon, where a modern silver grain elevator glinted in the distance, a monument to the abundance that had once shattered her illusions.

“It was the hardest decision of my life, Martha,” Alfreda said, her English now flawless, though seasoned with a soft, melodic accent. “And it was also the easiest.”

“How could it be both?”

“It was hard because it required me to bury the girl I used to be,” Alfreda explained softly. “It meant admitting that everything I had been taught to believe about my country, about our glory, about our enemies, was a terrible lie. It meant leaving my sister behind to face the consequences of a war I had helped support, even if only with my silence. It was an admission of complete defeat.”

She reached down and took her daughter’s hand, her fingers rough from decades of prairie labor. “But it was easy because this land offered me the truth. It offered me an enemy that gave me bread instead of a stone. It offered me a soil that didn’t care about my past, that only asked if I was willing to work to make things grow.”

Alfreda looked down at the flowerbeds that lined the veranda, where rich, dark earth supported rows of vibrant petunias and deep green vines—the direct descendants of the seeds she had planted with Private Jacobson twenty-three years before.

“Some of us planted our seeds here in Canada,” Alfreda said, her voice filled with a profound, unshakeable peace. “And some, like Gudrun, went back to plant theirs in the ashes of Germany. What mattered wasn’t the country we chose, Martha. What mattered was that we finally stopped tearing down the world and chose to build something new instead.”