‘Juden,’ he said, using a word that even an Englishwoman would understand to indicate why he wasn’t going to the street she had asked for. And then, to make quite sure she understood, he leaned his head out of the cab window and spat.

Slamming the taxi’s door behind her, Hester began to run. If her father had had a heart attack, he had had it twelve hours or more ago. With her heart in her mouth, not knowing what she was going to find, she raced into the cobbled street that had once been generally working class and was now virtually a ghetto.

Even though the air was still claustrophobically warm, dusk was fast approaching. It gave a curious light to everything, and as she breathlessly entered the dingy apartment block she was aware of a curious stillness. There was no one on the stairs talking and passing the time of day. There were no children playing. No sounds coming from behind the doors she passed.

As she reached her parents’ landing she saw that the door to their apartment was ajar. There was one brief second when she was aware that something was terribly, terribly wrong and then it was too late.

Calling out, ‘Mutti! Vati!‘ she flung herself into the apartment and came to a dead stop.

Even though it was not yet dark, there was a light on in the corridor that led from the front door into the sitting room. Pictures were askew on the walls as if there had been a struggle. There were smears of blood on the carpet.

And standing in the doorway of the sitting room were men in long, grey leather coats and felt hats.

Behind them, sitting on a chair, was a terrified, elderly lady.

She knew, even before Frau Debuss cried out waveringly, ‘I had to do it! They told me I’d never see my husband again if I didn’t do it!’ that they were from the Gestapo and that her parents were no longer in the apartment. She knew the reason she’d had no problems at the border was because the border police had been expecting her. She knew that the American behind her in the queue had not been having a hard time, that the phone call being made had not been a query about him but was a call to Berlin alerting the authorities that she had entered the country.

And she knew why such lengths had been taken to lure her back to Berlin. The forgery ring had been busted. Like a fly into a spider’s web she had been drawn back for the sole purpose of being arrested.

She didn’t even turn towards the door and try to run for it. She knew that by now there would be another Gestapo agent standing only yards behind her.

Against a background of Frau Debuss’s pitiful sobbing, she said in a voice she scarcely recognized as hers: ‘Where are my parents? What have you done with them?’