Jacob Evanovich lay in the mud in a small crawl space under the Beis Sholom Synagogue. His father had sent him back to their hut to fetch a blanket for his mother who was six months pregnant. When he got there, people were setting fire to the three-room wooden hut. He recognized several of them, customers of his father’s. Perhaps twenty in all, including children, they were flinging pitch torches onto the thatched roof, the blazes quickly reaching high into the night sky and illuminating the woods behind. Running back, Jacob saw, as he approached the synagogue, a similar group in front gathered around a small bonfire. These were all Christian men, some whose shoes his father repaired in his careful, almost tender way. Some were bearded, some cleanshaven, all were roughly dressed, all drunk, their eyes shining like demons in the firelight. As they lit their torches in the bonfire, Jacob circled to the back, found the crawl space under the outdoor steps where he used to hide when playing with his friends, and slid in, his face inches from the floor joists. Within minutes he smelled smoke, heard men's excited voices and saw boots stamping and the reflection of torches in the watery mud only a few feet from his face.

He heard the rabbi reading from the Torah and pictured him standing at the reading table in his white-and-blue striped tallit, surrounded by flames and smoke, rocking forward and back as he prayed his last prayer. By bracing his knees on the joists, Jacob pushed himself deep into the mud, an instinctive move that saved his life and allowed him to raise his hands to his ears so as to block the screams of the Jews dying inside the synagogue. He turned onto his side, and, through the hot smoke filling what he hoped would not be his tomb, he saw an old russet coat, like the one his father wore, land from above in the mud. Cold, dressed only in the homespun cotton shirt, loose hemp trousers, and woolen boots he had hurriedly put on when his mother had roused the family from their beds to join the crowd rushing to the synagogue, he was about to reach for it when a bayonet flipped the coat open and, a second later, plunged into the stomach of a newborn baby.

He turned away and methodically covered himself with mud, leaving only his nose and mouth open to suck in the hot and smoky air of the crawlspace. The din of gunshots and the shouts of men and women lasted he did not know how long, but when it quieted he remained still, afraid to move. He was young and strong, taller than his father ,and could work, or play, all day, but, exhausted and in shock, knowing that his parents, two sisters and newborn sibling were dead, the terrible smell of burnt human flesh in his nostrils, praying the Shema, taking it seriously for the first time in his young life, he fell asleep.

The chirping of birds and the pattering of rain woke him at dawn. He slid out, slowly, head first, expecting to be shot. On his knees, he saw five or six bodies in the mud, stripped to their underwear. He recognized one of them as Commissar Alexie, an officer stationed with the Red Army garrison that had captured the town from the White Army Cossacks some months before, a dark, handsome young man who wore round steel-rimmed eyeglasses and who occasionally discussed politics with Jacob's father while Jacob shined his boots in his father's shop. The baby had been cut in half, but Jacob could see that it was the brother he had been hoping for. He stuffed the two halves into the wide pockets of his rough peasant's pants and, bringing the coat, went over to check on Alexie, who was sitting up and moaning, bleeding from a large gash running from his left shoulder to his abdomen. On his knees in the mud, Jacob pulled off Alexie's blood-soaked undershirt, crawled to a nearby body, pulled off its undershirt, crawled back to Alexie, and wrapped it around the officer's torso, tying it with a strong knot in front. The smell of burnt human flesh was everywhere. Gagging, he put the russet coat over Alexie's shoulders and stood to take a last look at Tetiev: the caved-in shul, charred and smoldering, the dead bodies in the mud, the blackened skeletons of the shops on the market street silhouetted against the sun edging over the forest to the east, the smoke and steam hissing in the rain from the ruins all around him. I am on the roof of hell, he thought as he turned back to Alexie who was trying to get to his feet.