According to Papa’s military record, he was at Lublin-Majdanek when the Nazis were defeated. Soviet troops had marched into Poland and were advancing towards Berlin like a steamroller. After that, there’s no mention of him. Did he and his friends go back to Germany to make a last stand? Did they hide out in Austria, go to ground in Poland? Rachel doesn’t know. Nazi troops were deserting in such numbers and the chaos was so great that one guess is as good as another. The only thing we know for sure is that at some point – in Poland or in Germany – Papa made contact with Unit 92 and, with their help, made it to Turkey and from there to Egypt.

I’ve taken some liberties in the way I’ve organised the rest of the chapters, and in the pieces I’ve chosen to include from Rachel’s diary. I’ve moved the section about Istanbul and Cairo to the next chapter and out of all the stuff he wrote about his long journey through the camps of Germany and Poland, I’ve only kept the piece on Auschwitz, which is in a later chapter. If I’d included everything Rachel wrote, our diaries would have been too long, too terrible to read. Some day, I’ll put everything in one book, but I doubt there are many people who could bear to read it to the end.