It is half past seven on an evening in January 1945. Anton sits at a table in the back room of his home with his parents and his 17-year-old brother, Peter. The light source in the room is a zinc cylinder with a Y-shaped tube protruding from it. A dull light emanates from flames coming from the tube. Laundry hangs to dry, there is a box to keep food warm, and there is a stack of books used to light the emergency stove that the family uses to cook. Newspapers have not arrived in months. This room, which used to be the dining room, is the one room that houses all of the family’s activities, except for sleeping.

Anton’s mother unravels a dark blue sweater in order to use its yarn. Her blonde hair is “coiled over her ears like two ammonite shells” (10). She is using a clove to soothe the pain of a cavity for which she cannot see a dentist. She drinks a cold tea substitute made from melted snow. Anton’s father sits across the table from her. He is bent over a book. His dark, graying hair grows “in a semicircle like a horseshoe around his bald pate” (10).