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away from those young people …”
    “But you believed they were doing the right thing.”
    “I had a family to worry about. They did not. And I trusted Josef—he had been one of my brightest students. …”
    “You stood up and spoke out against evil. This is what we do—what our faith leads us to do. I only wish that I would have been so brave.”
    Liesl sat up and rubbed her eyes with her fists. “How far is this place?” she asked.
    “Soon,” Ilse assured her.
    “And we can start our new life in America?”
    “For now,
Liebchen
,” Franz said. “But you must remember that—”
    “You must remember that everything will take time,” Ilse interrupted. She was not going to allow her husband to worry their daughter by reminding her of the paper they had all had to sign stating that once the war was over they understood that they would be sent back to wherever they had called home in Europe. She was sure that very few people on this train speeding along to Fort Ontario could imagine they had anything left in Europe to call home. Surely the paper had been a formality. Surely once the Americans understood the realities of their situation, they would not be held to that promise. Surely they would be allowed to stay.

PART 1
    O SWEGO , N EW Y ORK
    A UTUMN 1944
     
    THEY COME TO THE FENCE
    OSWEGO N.Y.—The fence is chain link capped by three taut rows of razor-sharp barbed wire, and it surrounds the entire compound. The Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter is in fact—at least for now—a place where people who have been running for their very lives for the last several months or years are now incarcerated.
    A polite term may be “quarantined,” and it has been going on for a month. They may not leave the fort nor may relatives and friends who may already live here in America visit them inside the fence.
    On one side of the intertwined wire are the “guests” of President Roosevelt—982 men, women and children brought to this small town on the shores of Lake Ontario from war-torn Europe. On the other are a mix of curious townspeople, relatives of someone inside, and do-gooders from agencies that specialize in such work.
    Through the small openings in the wire, townspeople might offer a cigarette or a Royal Crown Cola or a stick of gum as a gesture of welcome. In some cases they practice language skills they learned in school, offering halting words and phrases of Italian, French, even German. The relatives are immediately recognizable, their heads bent close to the fence, close to the face of their loved one. The do-gooders come bearing boxes of clothing, toys and candy for the children, books and magazines, as well as newspapers to tell them what is happening back where they came from—where they must return once the war ends.
    Those in charge have elected to ignore a hole the young people have created to get down to the lake on hot days or to leave the shelter to meet the friends they have made from town, or to shop for soda and treats at the little grocery store just outside the fence. The grocer says nothing about these illegal forays into his business, and often he adds something to the purchase—a piece of fruit, a box of crackers.
    But at the end of the day, those who have escaped the shelter for a few hours return. Amazingly no one has tried to leave for good. No family member on the outside has attempted to orchestrate a permanent getaway. The refugees remain inside and wait. And therein lies the real story. When the war ends, FDR’s guests have agreed to leave America and return to what?

  CHAPTER 1  
    T he first thing Theo noticed when he arrived in Oswego and walked through residential neighborhoods until he reached the fort was the fence. Chain link seemed to run on for miles—certainly it surrounded an area of several acres. Six feet tall. Capped with three rows of barbed wire stretched tight. Behind the fence, rows of whitewashed barracks sat along the cliff that overlooked the lake.