‘And to me,’ Paul said as the telephone rang and Nicholas went to answer it. ‘As an American I can stay on and I’m going to.’

‘We know now, from several sources, that it wasn’t an arbitrary arrest,’ Lotti said, her usually impish face pale and sombre. ‘The forgery ring was busted and under interrogation someone gave her name.’

‘But she wasn’t a part of the inner forgery ring,’ Hugo protested. ‘She only helped people who had been given forged passports and visas know how to behave at passport controls. That isn’t treason. It’s a crime she may be imprisoned for, but it isn’t a crime she could be executed for.’

Nicholas put the telephone receiver back on its rest and turned towards them. ‘I have to go straight back to the Foreign Office. The attack on Poland is scheduled to begin within hours. This is it. This is when we have to say goodbye.’

Vicky turned to Zelda and hugged her tight. ‘This is the second time in our lives this has happened to us,’ she said thickly. ‘Pray God our family isn’t divided for as long as it was in 1914.’

‘I know what you think of my allegiance to the Führer,’ Claus said to Hugo, ‘but I promise you this: I’ll continue to do everything possible to find out where Hester is and to secure her release.’

Hugo nodded, not trusting himself to speak to him.

‘What will you do, darling Hugo?’ Lotti asked, tears brimming on her eyelashes at the terrible division about to rend the family apart.

‘I shall join the air force—especially as I’ve probably shot my bolt with the Foreign Office.’

At the prospect of Hugo in armed attack against German pilots or, even worse, German civilians, everyone, even Zelda, flinched.

‘Let’s kiss each other and say goodbye,’ Vicky said, her heart feeling as if it were breaking. ‘And let’s pray that even now, at the eleventh hour, there may be a miracle and war might be averted.’

All through the long, tension-strung, arduous night-time journey back to England, she prayed fervently that Hitler would come to his senses and that the German troops massing on the Polish border would stay on Germany’s side of it.

They didn’t do so. At daybreak German armies poured across the frontier and German warplanes blasted Polish troop columns and bridges, ammunition dumps and railroads.

Three days later, listening to the wireless hand in hand with Adam in the drawing room at Shuttleworth Hall, Vicky heard the words she had prayed she would never hear.

‘This country,’ Prime Minister Mr Neville Chamberlain said in deeply regretful, sombre tones, ‘is now at war with Germany.’

Chapter Twenty-Three

Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp and Berlin, April 1940

It was 4.30 a.m. and, as always at 4.30 a.m., the guards’ shouts of ‘Raus! Raus!’ catapulted Hester into another unendurable, horrific, hunger-filled day.

She tumbled from the wooden bunk before a blow could fall across her head or her shoulders and hurriedly began to remake it. Remaking a bed comprising only of a hay-filled mattress on wooden boards and a rough, thin blanket was a mockery, but those were the rules. ‘Beds’ had to be made. As the bunks were three foot high and she was on a top one it wasn’t an easy exercise. It did mean, though, that she could at least sit up in her bunk without hitting her head. The lower bunks were only high enough to crawl in and out of.