‘With all due respect, this is my wife’s life that is at risk!’

‘With all due respect, your wife should not have travelled to Germany at such a time. It was arrant recklessness. Since early today, all radio, telegraph and telephone communication with the outside world has been cut off on orders from the Chancellery. I was informed an hour ago that the German Foreign Ministry has wired their embassies in Britain, France and Poland, requesting German citizens be asked to leave immediately by the quickest route. It is advice this embassy is now giving to British citizens in Germany. I appreciate the difficulty of your position, Mr Remer, and you have my utmost sympathy. However, as the borders could close at any time, my advice to you is to leave the country by tomorrow at the very latest. If—when—war is declared, your wife’s name will no doubt surface on lists of those interned as enemy aliens. There may then be the opportunity of contact with her via the Red Cross. And that, I am afraid, is the only solace I can give you.’

For two days Paul’s close watch on Grunewald and Westhafen station was fruitless. On the evening of the second day he began making his way back to the centre of Berlin, deeply dejected.

It was a warm and sultry evening and he walked for quite a long way, brooding over the impossibility of the situation he and the rest of the family were now in. Vicky and Hugo couldn’t possibly stay for much longer in Berlin, not unless they wanted to spend perhaps years interned as enemy aliens, and drawing attention to the fact that a family member had married a Jewess—and a Jewess arrested by the Gestapo—was not going to do the Berlin side of the family any good.

He continued walking, pessimistically certain that even if they discovered Hester’s whereabouts, securing her release would be impossible—especially if she had been arrested because her involvement with the passport ring had come to light.

Still deep in thought he walked into a station and boarded a Stadtbahn en route for Friedrichstrasse, the most convenient station for Unter den Linden. Had the family as a whole been criminally negligent in allowing Claus—who knew nothing about Hester’s illegal activities—to speak to Göring about her? Nothing was now impossible in Nazi Germany and it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that in openly acknowledging that Hester was related to him by marriage he too, if she had been arrested because of treason to the state, might find himself paying a visit to Gestapo headquarters.

Would the same apply to Ilse and Lotti, even though they were only Hester’s husband’s cousins? His head hurt with the grim thoughts pounding in it and then something happened that had never, in all his thirty-five years, happened to him before.

A young woman boarded the train and, before she could seat herself, she tripped slightly, dropping her handbag and spilling its contents. As he instinctively rose to help her collect her scattered possessions he looked into a heart-shaped face framed by a cloud of soft, light brown hair. Sea-green eyes met his and his heart stopped beating. It was a coup de foudre. A moment in which his entire life changed in an instant. Though he’d had girlfriends over the years, he had never been in love. He had never been close to being in love. At thirty-five, everyone who knew him assumed he was one of life’s natural bachelors—and that, until now, was what he had assumed about himself also.