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To be near him she takes a nursing post at the Titovka prison camp on the Arctic coast, where Soviet prisoners are held and brutalized. When Finland signs the September 1944 armistice with the Soviet Union and must expel the Germans, the lovers are caught between former allies now at war in the Lapland War.
A political agreement signed far away can turn neighbors into enemies overnight. The Moscow Armistice required Finland to drive out the German troops who had lived among Lapland's villagers as comrades and lovers. The withdrawing Germans then burned much of the province. The personal bonds formed under the old alliance do not dissolve when the alliance does; they become liabilities and betrayals.
The war is narrated through births, wounds, blood, sex and bodily fluids, in a dense northern dialect, rather than through strategy or politics. Because the midwife's job is to handle bodies, history reaches the reader as flesh being born, used and destroyed. This makes atrocity physically present instead of abstract, and it places a marginal rural woman at the center of events that official accounts leave her out of.
Wild-Eye never adopts Nazi ideology. Yet her devotion to one man carries her physically inside a camp and makes her part of its machinery. Johannes, for his part, is hollowed out by guilt over atrocities he witnessed on the Eastern Front. The novel shows private desire and moral compromise as one act rather than separate ones: loving the perpetrator means living at the site of the crime.