Late at night, Getmanov writes warrants to ensure his family’s care. He and Galina watch their sleeping children; he feels the conflict between paternal tenderness and iron severity. When the Party car arrives, he bids an emotional farewell.

In Kuibyshev, Yevgenia Nikolaevna Shaposhnikova, Lyudmila’s younger sister, lives in a communal apartment with Jenny Genrikhovna, an elderly German who was once her family’s governess. Jenny is arrested and deported to the Far North. When Yevgenia inquires at the NKVD about sending a coat, she is dismissed. Tenants gossip that Yevgenia informed on Jenny, whose cat is eventually killed.

Yevgenia has no residence permit or ration card. Grishin, an impassive passport official, thwarts her with mind-numbing bureaucracy. Her boss, Rizin, is sympathetic but timid. Becoming increasingly desperate, she begins to lose hope until a writer named Limonov, an old family friend, intervenes by talking to his friend, an important local official. The next morning, Yevgenia’s permit is ready.

Yevgenia befriends her neighbor, Vladimir Andreyevich Shargorodsky. He is from an old noble family and has been exiled multiple times. His love of Russian poetry makes her reflect on her ex-husband, Krymov, who, as an internationalist, was indifferent to such things. Limonov visits, makes a clumsy advance which she deflects. Shargorodsky joins them, and the two men debate pre-revolutionary Russian literature. Yevgenia questions her lingering sorrow for Krymov and dawning realization that she may love Novikov.

Lyudmila is on a steamer to see her wounded son, Tolya. She reflects on past callousness and worries that she is a bad person. Officials had originally been assigned the entire steamer; when military authorities ordered soldiers and civilians on board, legitimate passengers made a scene. Their indifference disgusts her. She finds solace with common soldiers who share food.

The steamer is ordered to Saratov to collect more wounded. At Kuibyshev, high-ranking civilians disembark. Lyudmila feels relief to be among those sharing their grief.

At Saratov, a woman shoves a blind soldier down, shattering Lyudmila’s sense of shared humanity. She reaches the hospital, a converted school. A clerk locates her son’s file card.

Lyudmila learns that Dr. Mayzel’s operation was technically successful but precarious. Tolya briefly regained consciousness, she learns. While Sister Terentyevna was answering a call from Dr. Platonov, Tolya died with a childlike smile on his face. Lyudmila does not arrive to see him in time.

Hospital commissar Shimansky gives a sanitized account of Tolya’s death, omitting that certain doctors advised against the procedure. Lyudmila calmly requests to see her son’s grave, to speak with his doctor and nurse, and asks that her presents be distributed to other wounded.

Sister Terentyevna shows Lyudmila where Tolya died. Dr. Mayzel frankly recounts the operation, sharing his feeling of guilt. She senses that he needs forgiveness and comforts him, realizing everyone feels guilty before her.

At the cemetery, a labor battalion of old soldiers unloads coffins. One observes that thousands are buried in wartime with no one attending; another remarks that people still mourn, though no one sees them.

Lyudmila stands before Tolya’s grave among identical mounds. Overwhelmed, she speaks to him and remembers his childhood until a nosebleed breaks the reminiscence. That night, feeling delirious, she covers the grave with her coat. By dawn, an empty crushing pain remains.

Back in Kazan, Lyudmila has become quiet, gaunt, and mechanical. She recounts the trip, distressing her family with her bloody uniform. Viktor tells her mother that Lyudmila talks in her sleep, suggesting that she lives a separate life at night.

Lieutenant Viktorov, a fighter pilot in reserve, walks the northern forest near the airfield, reflecting on ancient Russia. Emerging into a sunny glade, he feels pure happiness.

Viktorov is haunted by memories of Stalingrad hospital, but the thought of Vera Shaposhnikova brings him happiness. He recalls kissing her, fantasizes flying to be with her, and connects Princess Dolgorukaya’s historical devotion to his own sense of longing.

The squadron redeploys. Major Zakabluka reads his orders. Commissar Berman speaks. When Lieutenant Solomatin makes an antisemitic joke to Jewish pilot Lieutenant Korol about Berdichev, Korol explodes. Berman twists it, publicly accusing Korol of possessing the “mentality of the shtetl” and “abominable nationalism” (169, 170), saying he will re-educate him.

That night, the pilots learn their destination is Stalingrad. They remember fallen comrades and say goodbye to local girls. At dawn, they take off.

At a Soviet camp in the far north, thousands of prisoners are woken by sirens at five and march to mines. Similar scenes unfold across the Soviet Union.

Political prisoner Abarchuk, in the camp tool store, despairs over thoughts of Tolya (his son with his first wife, Lyudmila). Assistant Barkhatov, a criminal, terrifies him. His friend Nyeumolimov says Magar, Abarchuk’s oldest comrade and mentor, has been placed in the camp. Three days later, orderly Abrasha Rubin is murdered with a nail from Abarchuk’s store. Barkhatov threatens Abarchuk, who reports Barkhatov and the killer to the operations officer, seeing it as restoration of his political integrity. Trufelev tells him Magar is dying.

In the infirmary, Magar worries that their revolutionary cause was a mistake, that they wrongly crushed freedom, and their camp faith is merely self-preservation. He insists that they ask a dead peasant’s forgiveness. Horrified, Abarchuk rejects this. The next morning, Magar has hanged himself. Abarchuk clings to Tolya as his only hope.

In late summer 1942, Nazi Germany was at the peak of its military power. Confidence, not wartime pressure, allowed the most inhuman policies. The September 12, 1942 decree transferred jurisdiction over all European Jews to the Gestapo.

A Jewish woman named Sofya Osipovna Levinton travels in a cattle-wagon, reflecting on her sense of lost identity. Passengers cling to the hope of a work camp. She feels deep pity, especially for a silent six-year-old orphan, David, on whom she has taken pity. She devises a method to catch rainwater on a rag and gives her wet rag to the boy.

Accountant Naum Rozenberg was in a Jewish work crew forced to exhume and burn bodies. Though the guards refer to the bodies as items, he refers to them as “people.” After finishing, the crew was made to dig their own grave. Rozenberg escapes, only to be recaptured a week later. On the train, he cries out for his murdered wife, Golda.

Ghetto librarian Musya Borisovna watches from her window as SS, Ukrainian police, and Gestapo silently surround the ghetto for final liquidation, feeling she is taking “the measure of the history of [their] age” (203).