Hilde and Erika visit her old house and she recalls beatings; they then visit the pond where she is reminded of the many loads of laundry she was forced to wash with her mother. She begrudged the freedom of her brothers who were not forced to do work, her oldest sister, Renate, who lived with their grandparents, and her delicate sister, Monika, who was never asked to manage hard labor. They walk down the lane to the old school lined with apple trees; she recalls the rough feeling of cobblestones on her sore feet and the bitter taste of the small apples. She evades a certain barn on the lane and avoids looking out into the distance towards the area which was once the site of Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. Upon returning to their hotel room, Hilde reflects on her daughter. Her inner thoughts display envy toward Erika's privilege of being educated and her ability to choose her career. Hilde reveals that she had always wanted to be a nurse, however her dreams of a nursing career were shattered the day her village was bombed during air raids. She had watched her brother Stephen die as she was swallowed by mounds of earth. The raid had made her weak and incapable of dealing with trauma later in her life. During their stay in the Mühlviertel, Erika is able to extract information about the fateful day in February that Hilde had been pushing from her memory for many years. Hilde relays that in the middle of the night she and her siblings were awakened by the sound of sirens. Her parents and the other tenants of her home were forced to stand for a roll call in which Pesendorfer, the Nazi authority in their house, told the tenants that many Russian convicts had escaped from the nearby concentration camp. He explained that it was their duty to Germany to find and kill each one of these convicts. Hilde, being a young girl, is told to stay at the house. However, she is worried about protecting her brother Hannes, who, like her other brothers, is forced to search for prisoners, and sneaks away to find him. In her search for her brother, Hilde comes across the barn near her schoolhouse. She enters it, only to find Pesendorfer, her neighbor Mrs. Emmerich, and her brother Walter all violently killing prisoners. She runs home and finds Hannes, who informs her that he has hidden a prisoner in his wardrobe and that she must remain silent about it.